Industry Says Goodbye To Walter Jarck

Walter Jarck, whose career in the forest products industry spanned 65 years and ranged from logging machinery to engineered wood products, died January 3, surrounded by his children, in North Wilkesboro, NC. He was 92.

Jarck spent the last two decades of his life trying build a high scale, commercial production TimTek (formerly Scrimber) composite lumber and beam manufacturing facility, and nearly pulled it off; but long before then as a forest engineer he was a pioneer innovator of pulpwood loading and forwarding machinery, and log harvesting and processing machinery.

Jarck was born on May 7, 1931 in Queens, New York, and inherited a hard work ethic from his immigrant parents. It was when he moved with his mother to the Catskill Mountains of New York that he fell in love with the woodlands.

He graduated in 1953 from the New York College of Forestry at Syracuse with a B.S. in Forestry and entered Naval Officer Candidate School. He became a destroyer officer and ultimately retired from the Naval Reserves as a Captain. He recalled while in the Navy working with ships and mechanical, propulsion, steam and hydraulic systems.

Upon leaving the Navy he went to work for Caterpillar Tractor Co. as a logging engineer and spent a year in their sales training program and experienced the welding, mechanical and engine shops and was involved in the development of root rakes. “By the time I left I knew how a scraper was built, how a bulldozer was built, so I was really turned on by that,” Jarck said.

In 1958 he moved to the South and went to work as a forest engineer for Bowater, which was building a paper mill in Catawba, SC. “My boss said, ‘We have a six hundred million dollar paper mill being built and we’re going to be relying on the sweat of a few laborers to hand load and to bring wood in. There’s got to be a better way.’”

While Jarck was supervising the construction of buildings and wood yards for the new mill, he started looking at ways to mechanize logging equipment, which would alleviate the traditional practice of mills having to stockpile six months of logs in their wood yards to overcome the winter weather.

In the early 1960s Jarck led the development of the Go Getter pulpwood forwarder and in the mid 1970s working with Charles Allen on the Allen Jarck Harvester for felling pulpwood and processing it into sticks, an early version of today’s cut-to-length machinery.

In 1982 Jarck joined Georgia-Pacific as assistant vice president and senior forester. He was directly involved in policy making and in several successful acquisitions. He retired in 1996 from Georgia-Pacific as corporate director of forest resources and then taught industrial forestry courses at the University of Georgia for several years.

Jarck was far from retired. He pursued and acquired the world rights to the Scrimber technology from Australia along with partner Geoff Sanderson.

In 1975, a researcher in Australia, John Coleman, working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), an Australian governmental group, invented Scrimber. Scrimber was made from small plantation trees to form a reconsolidated wood product with uniform properties comparable to sawn timber. Jarck recalled that millions of Australian tax dollars were spent on developing this process, only for it to be caught in a political quagmire and abruptly ended. Georgia-Pacific entered the scene and spent additional monies to make the production process economically feasible but eventually withdrew.

In 2001 Jarck and Sanderson formed TimTek, which was assigned the world rights for Scrimber research and technology, though it didn’t purchase the Scrimber name. Their newly formed company purchased the Scrimber pilot plant in Australia and relocated it on the campus of Mississippi State University in Starkville, Miss. With the help of several MSU professors, TimTek spent five years in further developing the process.

They wanted to build a true scale plant that would produce the product up to 48 in. in width, up to 6 in. in thickness and almost any length, though 40 ft. in length would satisfy most of the market requirements. They felt TimTek beams would compete favorably in the large sizes for trusses, garage door headers, joists, rafters, rimboards and any other long-span structural timbers.

Jarck wrote: “Our process can best be summarized by crushing the debarked small diameter stems in a scrimming mill, then drying the scrim or mat of fibers, adding adhesives, collating the mats, steam pressing, then cutting to size and finishing. The resource can be softwood or hardwood in the 4-8 in. diameter classes. This resource is usually available from thinnings, short-rotation forestry, or other site work. Resources of this nature are available at delivered prices that are one-fourth or one-fifth the cost of resources purchased in the sawtimber or veneer log categories.”

He pointed to a study at the time by the National Home Builders Research Center that found most builders were dissatisfied with the high costs of engineered products and were likely to switch back to sawn dimension lumber if prices were to fall. “I think that in a quality for quality race for sales, the TimTek product will win out because of its potential price advantage,” Jarck said.

He also believed the TimTek products would satisfactorily counter the non-wood and steel framing increases in residential construction. “The steel stud manufacturers have somehow convinced the environmental home buyer that their steel product has lower impact on the environment than that of using wood,” Jarck said. “While we know this is false, a new product such as TimTek not only uses fast grown plantation trees, renewable every 10 to 12 years in the South, it is a lower user of energy and is a great carbon sequester.”

Finally Jarck said their tests showed that the TimTek beams competed very favorably for strength and stiffness against wood I-beams, laminated veneer lumber (LVL), glulam, Parallam, Timberstrand, and select sawn lumber.

Jarck referred to a speech delivered by Jacques Nasser, the Australian CEO of Ford Motor Co., in which Nasser stated his criteria for making sound business investments:

1. You must have the latest technology. 2. You must demonstrate the beneficial economics.
 3. You must be certain it is environmentally correct.

“We have the technology. We have the economics. And using plantation grown fiber or thinnings in a low-energy using plant is environmentally correct,” Jarck said.

Jarck was a regular speaker at the Portland machinery show. Fittingly, the title of one of his talks was: “It Is 2012: Do We Know Where Our Wide Dimension Is?”

Jarck sub-licensed his product and technology to a company in Mississippi that publicly announced it was building a plant, but it never materialized. He thought he was close to another project in the Western U.S. and one in Canada, but they went away as well.

In addition to his early patent for processing and harvesting trees, Jarck later on held numerous patents for steam pressing and wood enhancement agents for treating engineered wood products.

Jarck had married his high school sweetheart, Marilyn Matthews, on September 26, 1954, and they were happily married for 66 years. She passed away in 2020. They had five children, Lisa Arney, Nancy Clontz (Ted), Paul Jarck (Vicki), Laura Dennis and Chris Cunningham (Lance). They also had 12 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

The family wrote upon Jarck’s death: “The words that best describe Walter are strong, determined, talented, and devoted. Walter was a strong leader and role model for his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Walter was very talented in many areas, especially woodworking. All his children own beautiful pieces of furniture hand-crafted by their dad. Most of all, Walter was devoted to God and his family. He was a great man, loved by many, and will be truly missed.”

The family asked that in in lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to Wounded Warriors Project.