J. P. Price Lumber Co., a subsidiary of The Price Companies, Inc., is investing approximately $20 million in a new southern pine sawmill at the Monticello, Ark. site where the company was founded via a hardwood sawmill by industry visionary John Porter Price 40 years ago.

When Timber Processing last visited Varn Wood Products’ southern pine sawmill here—a mere 26 years ago—the operation had installed a chipping canter that had the flexibility to process small to fairly large stems, but with the emphasis on “small.”

At age 84 George Varn Sr. can still climb over catwalks like, well, a cat. I witnessed him doing so this summer when I visited the Varn Wood Products sawmill in Hoboken, Ga. He was proudly showing me the operation’s new Cone Machinery small log machine.

A major change in sawing philosophy since the late 1990s has led Evergreen Forest to revamp its breakdown scheme, enabling the sawmill to make the transition from mostly large ponderosa pine timber to higher piece counts and more overall log defects in the central Idaho timber basket where Evergreen procures its raw materials.

Comact’s new OLI-CS3 optimized length infeed is the latest way to get more out of optimization. A rotation tracking infeed system assures ultra precision log rotation, confirmation and continuous correction of log position.

Grezenski Forest Products, a mixed wood mill in Stevens Mill, Wis., purchased Inovec’s 150th StereoScan 3-D log scanner along with an Inovec YieldMaster headrig carriage optimizer. According to Inovec, the industry leading YieldMaster StereoScan optimization system replaces a 2-D light curtain system on the mill’s Cleereman L/P carriage.

Armstrong’s AutoSwage, available as a right or left handed model, is a versatile and accurate swage and shaper for 19 to 11 gauge band saws. It is usually set up as a stand-alone swaging and shaping center to keep up with as many as 4 band saw sharpeners.