Rayonier has selected Jacksonville, Fla. to be the site of its new corporate headquarters and will relocate from Stamford, Conn. early next year. The company had announced in August its intention to relocate to the Southeast to reduce costs and be nearer to most of its operations. Rayonier says Jacksonville should provide cost savings along with administrative and operational synergies. Rayonier also considered moving to Savannah, Ga.

Production at Crown Pacific’s new sawmill here has taken off following a smooth startup in November ’98, signalling a rebirth for the former DAW Forest Products sawmill that was closed in ’96, then emerged two years later as a high technology lumber production facility. The proof is in the sawing: Projected to produce 90MMBF annually, the mill has already moved into the 125MMBF annual production range.

Think of almost any application that uses hardwood lumber and it’s likely Weaber, Inc. produces it. Owner Galen Weaber reports there are more than 20,000 SKU (product) numbers assigned to the different sizes, species and products ranging from hardwood lumber to value-added items such as door jams, molding, glued up panels, flooring, blanks and parts, and veneer faced lumber products, to name a few.

At just about any North American lumber marketing conference, you’ll hear about the striking increase in lumber coming out of Eastern Canada, and most notice­ably, Quebec. In fact, the province has been adding an average of 400MMBF a year to the market since 1993, with lumber production climbing from just over 5 billion BF in 1993 to just over 7 billion BF in 1998, a 40% increase in five years. Since 1996, production has increased almost 12%.

The log bucking line often is the last area in a sawmill where computer optimization is installed. But some industry experts suggest it should be given a higher priority. “Bucking optimization tends to be the last thing a mill puts in,” says Perceptron General Manager Chris Blomquist, whose company is a leading supplier of such systems. “It should probably be somewhere more like the second or third thing put in.”

Where there’s a need, there’s an entrepreneur who will sooner or later fill it. This town is one of those that tended to have more pallets coming in than going out and the wooden platforms, as useful as they may be, became piles of junk behind buildings and on vacant lots. Pallet Solutions was created to, obviously enough, find solutions.

Flare International Sawmill Systems introduces its Log Merchandising System to process treelength logs at high speed. The system can scan and cut 10 or more stems per miinute into accurate block lengths. Saw carriages have infinite positioning along the length of the log. Logs are dropped into cradles that are mounted on the saw carriages. After cutting, the cradles drop the blocks while the carriages are positioning for the next log.