LP Corp. is trading its Texas and Louisiana plywood and MDF plants for Georgia-Pacific Corp.’s OSB mill in Maine and “additional considerations.” In May, LP officials announced a plan to divest some assets to reduce debt and focus on its main businesses (engineered wood products). In return for G-P’s Woodland, Me. OSB plant and possible other compensation, LP is transferring ownership of plywood plants in Bon Wier and Cleveland, Tex. and Logansport, La., and an MDF plant in Urania, La.

Breathing new life into an older sawmill facility that dates to the early 1960s, and rejuvenating small communities throughout the Cowlitz River valley in southwest Washington, Hampton Lumber has made investments big and small at its all-hemlock stud mill here, one of three facilities acquired from Pacific Lumber Sales (PLS) in 1999.

Jasper Lumber Co., a privately owned softwood mill, lies on the western outskirts of the city which has a population of 13,600. The mill has been a landmark for area since the ’70s and directly and indirectly provides jobs for many of the county’s residents. While timber plays a major economic role in this area, Walker and surrounding counties are historically renowned for coal production, which attracted many early settlers.

When I was a kid, about a zillion years ago, we had a game called Pick-Up-Sticks. A cylindrical container about 6-8 in. long contained several dozen, toothpick shaped, colored sticks of the same length. The object was to dump these sticks out onto a table, or the floor, and then pick them up without disturbing any stick except the one you were picking up.

Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows that it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa a lion wakes up. It knows that it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle (or a sawmill), when the sun comes up in the morning, you’d better be running.—PC Magazine, June 28, 1994

Seventy-five years. 1927-2002. For Taylor Machine Works it has been more than a passage of years. It has been a period when the Mississippi company has grown from a small machine shop to a worldwide industrial manufacturer. In 1927, in the red hills of east central Mississippi, W. A. Taylor, Sr. established a small machine shop and called it Taylor’s Machine Works.

Wagner Electronics has released the new Stat-Pak for Windows software. This software replaces the previous DOS version of Stat-Pak and is a powerful quality control tool that stores and allows analysis of moisture readings collected by Wagner’s L612 digital recording moisture meter.