In 2003, Atlas Holdings of Greenwich, Connecticut, purchased Wood Resources LLC and with it Olympic Panel Products, formerly Simpson Timber – the largest overlaid plywood manufacturing facility operating under one roof in the world.

We began our survey last year by saying that 2009 was the year when “dire economic conditions finally caught up with capacity development in the MDF industry”.

Developing economies in Asia and Latin America have out-performed the developed world, particularly Europe and the US. However, there have been exceptions; resource-rich economies such as Canada and Australia have done far better as they helped to supply the booming developing world economies with basic materials.

When news came some months later that the owners would rebuild after the fire damage, the response was amazing. While the decision was taken not to reinstall the peeling lines, the owners instead opting to source green veneer from nearby mills, a plan was implemented to salvage as much of the drying and lay-up as possible to make reopening the mill financially viable.

To hear Bill Powell tell it, States Industries was built on innovation and entrepreneurship. Seated alongside president and coo Mike Taylor, the marketing veteran and Berkley University graduate spoke of founder Harold Jones’ uncanny ability to extract high value from low cost wood.

It was 1956 – Elvis hit the charts and the Dow Index closed above 500 for the first time. And in Vancouver, Canada, 300 men pooled their resources to realise their dream of self-sufficiency; a dream that became Richmond Plywood.

Like all mills built along the Fraser River at that time, the mill’s logs were brought downstream from the bountiful forests of BC’s Interior. Today they arrive the same way, although there are now far fewer mills than existed 50 years ago. Unlike those that have closed because of the high costs associated with operating in a major urban centre, Richply has survived and, at times, thrived. General manager Joe Andrews believes he knows why.

The HPVA was formed when the Hardwood Plywood Manufacturers Association merged with the Fine Hardwood Veneer Association in 1992. Its roots, however, lie with the Plywood Manufacturers Institute, established in 1921.

Mill Machinery’s site in rural Oregon could be mistaken for the bone yard of a defunct panel mill, such is the assortment of used equipment accumulated in tidy rows within its confines.

The relative calm in the North American OSB market during the past year has brought welcome respite after the roller-coaster ride of the preceding five or so years, which saw mill after mill shut down – some for good – and removed billions of square feet of capacity.

The aim of Jon McAmis, Roseburg Forest Product’s (RFP) director of human resources and corporate LEAN champion, is that eventually it will be simply thought of as “the way we do business – as natural an activity as filling out a time card or observing safety regulations”.

President of APA-The engineered wood association, Dennis Hardman, is a marketing man. When he joined APA in 1981 it was as advertising and PR manager.

Sitting in Timber Products’ head office in Springfield, Oregon, vice president of sales and  marketing Roger Rutan appears the epitome of American marketing savvy. Energetic and knowledgeable, with long experience in product branding and placement, he also appears content. Odd, considering the current business climate.

In his 25 years with Raute’s Canadian division, Martin Murphy has participated in two major relocations. In both cases, the decision to relocate has been based on the management’s  assessment of changing market conditions and the relevance of their existing business model.

The British Columbia  (BC) Interior’s timber harvest and sawmill production is expected to undergo a long-awaited  downsizing as the effects of the mountain pine beetle (MPB) infestation  take their toll on the timber supply.

Hueck Engraving LLC was established in York, South Carolina, in September 1999. With this facility, Hueck Engraving, headquartered in Viersen, Germany, is able to offer press plates for the laminating industries in North America without the need for importing them. The York plant is located in the centre of the woodworking industries in the south east of the US.
To serve the worldwide high pressure laminate (HPL) market as well as the North American low pressure laminate (LPL) industry, Hueck’s machinery and technology is designed to produce double- sided as well as single-sided plates.
The company’s production technology consists of the following main processes: printing with etch resist by calender, which has the texture of the natural wood, for example; chemical etching with ferrous chloride to the requested depth of the texture; electro-polishing to match the perfect smoothness of a wood tick; sand blasting to the specified gloss; and chromium plating for high wear resistance and better release characteristics.
Working with the same concept as the mother company in Viersen, the ongoing visual comparison with a socalled master plate, as well as the use of topography measuring instruments and a gloss meter during all production steps ensures the quality of each plate produced, says Hueck LLC.
The York plant is capable of producing plates in the full range from 4ft x 8ft to 5ft x 12ft for the HPL market and from 4ft x 8ft up to 6ft x 18ft for the LPL market. Hueck says this gives it the capability to produce most of the plate sizes required for the flooring business. Plates for HPL production are produced according to the demands of the customer in a broad variety of designs, chromium plated as well as uncoated in stainless steel AISI 410 or AISI 630.
LPL plates or plates for short-cycle presses are delivered hard chromium plated to customer specification. For the flooring market it is of special interest that Hueck Engraving offers not only new plates but also refinishing and refurbishing in York.
As press cycle times of short-cycle presses are reduced more and more, and the number of pressings per day increases, the plates need to be serviced more often to maintain the high quality standard of the market. Hueck is calling these special services ‘Refinishing’ and ‘Refurbishing’.
Refinishing needs to be done if the plate does not have even gloss over the whole surface. The process involves removing the chromium layer, electro-polishing the texture, sand-blasting it to the right gloss level and chromium plating once more.
After this process the plate can be reintroduced into production like a new plate, the only difference being a slightly flatter texture. This can be done two to three times before a plate has to be refurbished.
Refurbishing needs to be done when the depth of the texture is not deep enough for refinishing. The process contains all the major steps involved in producing a new plate, but instead of using a new steel plate the steel from the old plate is used after the texture has been sanded off. This process can be carried out until the plate thickness is reduced to an amount where its stiffness is affected.
By offering this kind of service locally, says Hueck, its customers don’t need to send their plates out of the country to Europe any more. The number of plates per design that a customer needs can be reduced by the fact that the service cycle time is shorter, with obvious savings in time and money.
Together with the technical support from the mother company in Viersen, especially when it comes to new designs which have to be developed together with its customers, Hueck Engraving USA LLC claims it can be a strong partner for the laminating industry now and in the future.

Flakeboard’s Eugene MDF mill is cresting the wave of production improvement with a new resin process created in the firm’s St Stephens mill in Brunswick, Ontario, Canada.
Dieffenbacher’s Sunds MDF Technologies, Sundsvall, Sweden, produces the equipment.   
It is known as EVOjet and is a dry blending system that introduces resin after the dryer. It not only saves expensive resin (some 30% at Eugene), but also provides better distribution, according to Sean Coffey, Flakeboard’s Eugene plant manager.
The mill was originally a Bohemia Lumber Co particleboard operation which Willamette Industries bought and converted to recycled wood based MDF before Weyerhaeuser Company bought Willamette and converted the mill to fresh sawdust and shavings as the wood supply.
Later, Flakeboard bought it, among five Weyerhaeuser mills, making Flakeboard North America’s largest MDF producer.
The present wood supply, 200 to 220 tons per day, is sawdust and shavings, all from within a 100-mile radius of Eugene – mostly closer. It’s all green and primarily Douglas fir, although a very small amount of hardwood goes into the mix. “The plant has been good at adapting to what comes our way,” said Mr Coffey.
“At times we have run 90% sawdust,” he said. “You have to know how to move with the market. As an example, during a recent holiday period, sawmills were down and we swung to chips.”
The mill has one truck dump, which accommodates 51ft trucks.
A front-end loader mixes on the floor of the furnish area and feeds three silos which meter out to pre-steam bins. An ‘Andritz Sprout-Bauer 150’ 60-in refiner is coupled to an 8,000hp synchronous motor. Retention time in the digesters is 21⁄2 to 3 minutes.
A short blowline goes to a Westec primary flash tube dryer, heated with a Coen Energy system which can burn natural gas, dust, or a combination of the two. The system uses 95% dust and switches automatically to gas if there is a dust supply problem.
A flash tube dryer goes to two primary cyclones. The moisture content target is 17%. Dryer exhaust gas goes through an electrostatic precipitator (ESP). Paraffin wax is the only additive ahead of the dryer.
Conveyors can act as a fire dump or convey forward to a Sunds weigh belt which weighs the material to automatically determine resin addition in the EVOjet, the star of the system. Fibre is in the bin for not more than 10 minutes.
“Two high-speed rotating spike rolls are the heart of process,” Mr Coffey explained. “The material comes in on the main infeed fan and a flow splitter just above the resinator. This divides it into two equal streams. A gate assures that the torque on the two spike rolls is even, to disintegrate the material. This produces a nice, fluffed-up fibre.”
“Two high-speed rotating spike rolls are the heart of process,” Mr Coffey explained. “The material comes in on the main infeed fan and a flow splitter just above the resinator. This divides it into two equal streams. A gate assures that the torque on the two spike rolls is even, to disintegrate the material. This produces a nice, fluffed-up fibre.” where the streams join.
The nozzles are installed on moveable bars so they can be automatically cleaned while operating.
Pre-resinated fibre recirculates back around the system. This protection fibre sandwiches the resinated fibre and protection fibre to keep fresh resin off the walls to prevent sticking. It’s all air driven.
Warm air is forced around the nozzles to maintain a 50º to 60ºC temperature.
The fibre then goes up through a tower around into the main cyclone where warm air is recycled into the system. Western Pneumatics installed that system as well as much of the other new machinery.
A main feeder serves an 8x50x8ft retention bin, where the amount of retention fibre is determined.
Fibre proceeding to the line is relayed to a bin feeding two Washington Iron Works vacuum formers. This is a 4ft homogeneous line, but could be converted to 5ft width.
The mat goes through a 125 to 200psi roller pre-press and is cross-cut to panel size ahead of the loader to the Washington Iron Works 4x16ft, 13-opening press; two platens were pulled out of an existing 15-opening press to provide room for the MDF. The press is totally enclosed for air protection.
The line can use higher moisture content raw material because the resin does not cause blisters. It can run at 19 tons per hour, using both MDI and UF resins.
The line produces thicknesses from 1⁄4in up to 11⁄4in and a density as low as 34lb/cu ft, North America’s lowest-density MDF. The Premier product is 45lb/cu ft, but the line can make up to 60lb/cu ft density.
“We engineer products to what our customers want. We do all we can to serve those customers,” Mr Coffey declared.
Pressed panels go through two board coolers, then a standard star cooler.
The Globe saws are in-line. A Kimwood sander installation has a two-head sizing head into a six-head unit, followed by a cross-belt going into one of two grade bins. A CTC feeder system is installed.
The mill is compliant with all air standard regulations and has a biofilter installation.
Mill capacity is 85 million ft2 running four shifts, but with the present poor market situation it is running three shifts for 10 days and then goes down for five days. There are 50 hourly-paid employees.
Flakeboard is quite safety and employee oriented. The mill is unusually clean and Mr Coffey believes this is one of the factors for good employee morale. “We have a very good workforce, very empowered,” he said, “We have an outstanding resin system, combined with an outstanding workforce.
California is the primary market, but Oregon and Washington are important too. Most of the output is trucked, but there is space for five rail cars on the railroad spur.
Flakeboard broke ground on the resin project in July and the system was ready to run on December 31, with 8 days of commissioning before they were ready to run around the clock.
Flakeboard, with its eight mills in US and Canada, makes a variety of particleboard, MDF and thin, high density MDF.
The company’s 2006 purchase of three MDF and three particleboard plants from Weyerhaeuser added 1.1 billion ft2 of capacity.
A new product is eLITE light-weight MDF from the Eugene mill. It is 30% lighter than standard MDF, resulting in freight savings, shorter lead time, labour benefits and extended tool life.
Looking at the past, Flakeboard was the first to continuous-press particleboard and apply melamine faces continuously, among many other firsts for this innovative company.

One of Oregon’s older plywood mills is emerging into another life under new owners, the Swanson Group of Glendale, Oregon. After buying the mill two year ago, they started converting it into a virtually new operation through refurbishments and some new equipment – and they haven’t shut down operations to accomplish the job.
Thorough detailed planning and job execution have been the secrets of Swanson’s success.
Mill manager Joe Andrews worked for the previous operators, McKenzie Forest Products, when Swanson took it over in July 2007 and improvement work started immediately.
The mill was on the century-old Booth-Kelly site which had gone through several ownerships when McKenzie picked it up. Their course of action was a common solution at the time – get away from commodity production and go with speciality niche products. McKenzie was 90% speciality, but that wasn’t 100% successful.
Swanson has taken a slightly different approach – roll with the market. The company is producing sheathing as something of a niche product when feasible, and also working with speciality products, including HDO and MDO in 8, 9, and 10ft lengths.
Ahead of the mill, Swanson replaced a Nicholson 22in debarker with a Nicholson 27in debarker and added controls, allowing one operator to control two log lines and sort for block diameters. In addition to a long-term agreement, they buy timber on the open market.
The mill had four dryers. Swanson pulled one out and Westmill Industries rebuilt two Coe dryers to make a 23-section, four-deck, jet tube unit and a 25-section, five-deck, longitudinal dryer. New insulated steel dryer floors were among the additions, including Sweed automatic feeders. The dryers offbear through a Ventek grade scanner, moisture meter, and Metriguard to a 12-bin Coe stacker rebuilt by ISN.
All this work has doubled the mill’s drying capacity with one less line.
Mr Andrews said the Sequoia moisture system from Ventek has been very good for the plant in optimising the dryers.
They started the lathe project even before the dryer work was completed. Swanson’s mill services group coordinated the project, which included log scanning and block laser pre-centring ahead of the Raute XY+ scanner. This is computer-controlled for the best recovery. A Raute pendulum charger feeds the lathe, which also has a new drive. Premier upgraded the lathe to ball screw drive. Central controls cue the system.
After the rebuild, the lathe can now peel six to 40in blocks so the mill can handle larger logs, which are less common these days, along with the more common small and medium sized blocks.
Veneer offbears through a Raute clipper and Ventek moisture meter to a Raute six-bin stacker.
Next, they tore out the lay-up line which Georgia-Pacific, owner at the time, installed in 1967. Swanson replaced it with a SparTek nine-station spray glue line. It includes hydraulic end-trim. The automatic line can handle double four-ply panels. An added station allows seven-ply panels. The control room is midway along the long line.
Mr Andrews commented, “Swanson laid out how they wanted the line to look and flow before they started. That is important when you’re putting brand new life in an old mill like this.”
Stackers and automatic feeders have minimised labour. The vision scanning increased accuracy.
The green-end work increased recovery, while employees in the dry end have been reduced from 40 to 13.
Meanwhile, the accident rate has been cut by more than 75%, mainly through less veneer handling.
Flow changes included product shipping. They took the rail spur out of the building and installed the lay-up line in its place. Two glue spreaders were retained for high-end products.
During all this, not a single production day was lost, nor did they mar their 290-day accident-free record.
Before stopping the lathe, Swanson had veneer stockpiled, augmented by veneer from Swanson’s original plywood plant in Glendale, Oregon, as well as veneer purchases. This supply kept them rolling while the lathe was revamped.
The mill has four vintage presses for the lay-up line and two for overlay, all of which have been rebuilt. These include three 24-opening Williams-White, Baldwin 30-opening, and Fjellman 12-opening presses. The latter pair handles the overlay side.
A roll-case line picks up panels from the lay-up line and glue spreaders and takes them to the pre-presses and on to the presses. With the existing 4x8ft and 5x10ft presses the plant can produce 4x8ft to 5x10ft panels after a 10-foot sander is installed.
Production is in panels from 1⁄4 to 1-1⁄2in thick, and up to 11 plies.
This is Douglas fir sanded, Douglas fir siding and speciality industrial plywood, as well as a full line of overlay plywood, MDO (medium density overlay) concrete form, HDO (high density overlay) concrete form and marine grade. Cut-to-size is available in 1⁄4in increments between 8 and 10ft.
The mill also produces some high-grade hardwood-faced panels for siding and industrial use.
Maximum production for the revamped mill could be 180 million ft2, 3⁄8in basis, annually. It is now 2.4 million ft2 per month, with 123 employees including production, maintenance and office staff.
“Even during tough times, it’s exciting for me to be part of the continuous improvement of this facility. I have to hand it to the company, how dedicated they are to the people and to this whole process,” Mr Andrews concluded,
Swanson is a family owned company with five Oregon mills—the original Glendale plywood plant, Eugene
plywood and three stud mills. It
produces plywood, dimension lumber and studs and also has a helicopter
company involved in logging and
forest firefighting.
The firm’s output is certified by SFI, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative,
which promotes and monitors sustainable management.
Steve Swanson is company president and ceo; Chuck Wert is chief operating officer; and John Stembridge is vice president for sales and distribution.

The Eugene, Oregon mill of States Industries has mastered hardwood plywood production. Bill Keil visited and recounts how it is done

Chairman Jim Reeb of the sponsoring College of Forestry group welcomed the attendees and set them off on two days of instruction by a dozen US and Canadian university professors and industry suppliers.
Steve Zylkowski, quality services director of APA – The Engineered Wood Association, Tacoma,Washington led off by announcing record North American panel production last year. He declared, “All engineered wood products are doing very well in North America, and LVL [laminated veneer lumber] is probably the most robust. North America is the target for LVL exporters.”
He noted that skyrocketing oil prices are forcing resin prices upward, but other factors such as US housing starts are very positive for the panel market. After the record 2004, he expects housing starts to decline slightly until gaining over a two-year period, beginning in 2008.
China is much in the news, but Mr Zylkowski said Brazil has a much larger impact on softwood plywood. Chile is also important.When US prices rise, imports increase. Brazil is the main OSB exporter.
He said the new flood of OSB production will impact all sheathing prices, but he predicted that one-third of the announced mills “will not happen”. OSB’s share of the residential sheathing market is now 72% and is predicted to continue rising.
“The industrial market for plywood is the big one,” he declared. “We have significant needs that can’t be met with OSB.”
Moving to marketing, he strongly advised producers to learn what customers want and to educate the end-users.
Jyrki Pesonen, vision systems manager, Raute Group, New Westminster, BC, explained electronic vision veneer defect detectors and sorting methods employing linescan and matrix/area cameras.
“The higher the resolution, the better the results,” said Mr Pesonen. “And colour is much more helpful.”
Systems enable veneer clipping and grading simultaneously where green end laserbased sensors clip material based on the camera. In patching, a camera defines defects and determines how and where to patch. “The camera is consistent. There is always minor variation on the human side,” Mr Pesonen concluded.
Linear programming is the speciality of Steve Griffith, Optware Solutions, Beaverton, Oregon. He said: “You can quickly get into thousands of variables making it difficult to handle with spreadsheets and other methods.”
Typical of the many variables are log procurement, transporting logs to alternate mills, primary or secondary conversion, sawn lumber or making veneer.
Linear programming helps business product mix – assembling veneer in different ways, allocation/transportation, multiple mills blending multiple raw materials, and minimising manufacturing cost. On the timber side, scheduling timber harvest during the year, according to weather and environmental conditions, can be eased. Investment decisions such as maximising present value and cash flow are an important part.
Mr Griffith explained: “Once your business is modelled it can be optimised to reveal the best potential operating pattern.”
He said the Martco plywood mill in Chopin, Louisiana, has full plant detail. Each process and the entire plant are modelled. The company looks at it for product mixes, the single most important factor on the bottom line. Georgia-Pacific Corp, he said, optimises its orders to plan production for its 18 mills.
“Everything is tied to the price of oil,” warned Jim Wilson, professor emeritus, OSU, “and environmental policy is mandating emission control which can substantially increase use of natural gas and electricity,” [Editor’s note: oil prices passed US$60 per barrel at mid-year.]
He said the price range is enormous for fuel, depending on such factors as location and negotiations. It all boils down to the fact that energy plays an increasingly important role in production costs.
Emission controls can increase gas consumption by 150% and electricity costs by 30%, all without producing any more products. In plywood production, this additional load is principally in controlling emissions from dryers and boilers.
Professor Wilson had some tips to conserve energy:

Columbia Forest Products, with headquarters in Portland, Oregon, is the largest hardwood plywood and hardwood veneer producer in the US and the firm keeps ‘hopping’ to produce new products and processes to hold its commanding lead of 40% of that segment of the nation’s business.
Columbia, formed in 1957, and its subsidiaries, has 18 mills in the US and Canada employing 4,000 people. One of the more interesting and one of the older is at Klamath Falls in southern Oregon. It peels and dries its own softwood white fir inner plies from local timber. Columbia’s well-known hardwood faces come not only from its own and other mills in the eastern half of the US and Canada, but also from tropical dry veneer suppliers overseas. The mill uses some 50 different species of decorative overlays.
Columbia is the first to transition to soy-based exterior formaldehyde-free resins in a partnership with Hercules and Oregon State University which researched the product.
Kaichang Li, an OSU researcher, was intrigued with organic-based adhesives after studying the tenacity of mussels in sticking to rocks in sea shallows. Their secret is an adhesive protein containing a high amount of polymeric amino acids. He said it is one of the strongest and the most water-resistant natural adhesives and concluded that formaldehyde-free wood adhesive systems could be developed.
The soy resin start-up has been gradual, using a portable mixer on limited shifts; the company will install a new glue loft dedicated to the soy product. Product testing has been performed at several institutions throughout the US and boil and wet shear tests have proved to be much better than UF bonds.
Columbia has begun to switch to the soy based adhesive for three of its allveneer-core panel plants and plans to have all the other mills converted by next year.
Softwood logs to be peeled for inner plies are trucked to the log dump. A cherry picker supplies the deck feeding the Kochums 30in ring debarker, which offbears to the chains feeding the five 50in Kochums chop-saw installation which saws them to peeler lengths.
Next stop is the hot water vats for eight to 12 hours. The block core temperature goal is 120oF (49oC). Winter temperatures are cold and frozen logs are quite common and may require a longer vat schedule.
Next is the Coe 8ft lathe installation, which includes a Coe 790 charger, 1380 core drive and 33⁄4in roller bar and a McDiarmid six-sensor laser unit.
The line can peel 13 blocks per minute down to 33⁄4in. Average block diameter approaches 10in. The line produces 30,000fpm, 3⁄8in basis, using 3,000 blocks per shift,  operating two 10-hour shifts daily. There are five semi-close-coupled trays with a maximum speed of 1,200fpm followed by an automatic Durand Raute clipper and a three-bin automatic stacker for heart, sap, and mix.
The mill uses only the 50in material. The strip is sorted manually and sold.
The green veneer is then fork-lifted to the dry-end building where it is married to the hardwood faces which are Columbia’s stock-in-trade. This building houses drying, upgrading, lay-up, pressing, sawing, sanding, bundling and shipping.
The mill’s venerable hand-fed steam dryer was shut down last August after 40 years of service.
The other two Keller high-velocity gasfired dryers have been recently upgraded, including an AKI extension on one. Scanners, a Raute VDA defect analyzer and a stacker are soon to be added. Sweed feeders serve both units.
Seven of the nine Raimann patchers are mounted in a production line and two Hashimoto and one Precision Energy Services string composers assemble solid sheets.
Two Globe and one Dieffenbacher spreaders serve the 5 x 10ft, 24-opening SparTek, and Baldwin 4 x 8ft 30-opening steam-heated presses. One has an automatic stacker and the others are manual. A Rockwell automatic control serves the Globe pre-press.
The computerised Schwabedissen saws are fully enclosed, as is the operator, to protect against noise.
The Timesavers sander has floating heads, three on top and four on the bottom. An add-on was end- and edge-sanders. A Signode automatic strapping line serves the automatic stacker and corrugated cardboard covers the loads and the top cover has a company logo.
Plant operations manager Mark Slezak said: “We have a total employment here of 415, of which 10% are salaried or management. This is an ESOP (employee stock ownership plan) company and we’re quite safety conscious.” The 2004 OSA incident rate was just 1.0 compared with the industry average low of 5.0.
Mr Slezak said: “Our biggest objective is to run the plant five days a week. If we can do that with an occasional Saturday, everything else will fall into place. The market is strong enough. It’s a matter of imports that are causing something resembling a soft market. We run four days or five, and occasionally six. If we could run a consistent five days and add that sixth day it would be ideal.
“We’ve always been a speciality operation. We’re trying to carve out a niche within the niche. One of the things we have added is to be FSC certified and using no added-formaldehyde resins, along with smaller sizes and quantities.”
Mr Slezak concluded: “We have lots of plans for this year and next year. This was probably the biggest year we have ever had for processes and new products. We expect next year to be very busy, too.”
Another unusual aspect of the Columbia operation is its partial use of wheat straw fibreboard for core. This is through a partnership agreement with Dow BioProducts to use the firm’s WOODSTALK product. It is made with pMDI resin, which produces a strong, moisture resistant, lightweight product with limited VOC emissions.
Medium density overlay (MDO) plywood is an important product for Columbia, particularly for painted signs. The overlay is fused with the wood fibres. With 28% resin content the surface has high resistance to weathering, wear and water. It takes paint well for signage.
Interestingly, a popular Columbia product is Pacific Northwest alder-faced plywood. Once considered a weed species, the veneer provides a consistent light grain pattern with no heartwood-sapwood grain boundary.

Boise Cascade Company, now known simply as Boise, and formerly Boise Cascade Corporation, continues to advance its wood panel manufacturing operations in the Pacific  Northwest of the US. The company was reorganised last year.
The firm’s LaGrande, Oregon, particleboard plant has accomplished such projects as  continued press upgrades, sander upgrades, new grading systems, new regenerative  thermal oxidiser (RTO) air quality control, improved process control, computerised  maintenance management, and an innovative new product.
These measures have all helped to maintain efficient saleable productivity, even during slack markets. For example, before the upgrading there were separate former operators,  but now it is all controlled from the press station.
Maintenance superintendent Steve Schlegel said: “The press work consisted of hydraulic closing arms, four-corner platen levelling, new trays and loaders and newdesign pusher bars. Higher pump volume increased closing speeds; pressing to position instead of stops saves much time when changing runs and the old shims took time to change.”
They also replaced one press base.
An Argos grading system from Kongsberg, Norway, brought more quality control using high intensity xenon lamps and cameras. Lateral light illuminates the panels on both sides and the shadows cast feed the computer with information.
Air density separators were installed on one of the two lines.
Craig Zollman, manufacturing superintendent, said: “We pay great attention to our environment and environmental controls. Probably the biggest challenge in particleboard right now is environmental standards.”
Boise installed an RTO two years ago to treat emissions, while dust is filtered through 28 bag houses throughout the mill.
Mr Zollman continued: “We have put a really high focus on establishing data collection so we can be a lot more consistent with our pressing strategies.We’ve implemented at least a dozen quality in-process checks, reducing defect which potentially could slip through by at least 85%. Most of these are manual checks, from every half-hour to every hour. Technical director Morgan Olson and his crew help audit that process once a month when they evaluate all the checks. This benefits our customers and makes us better.”
Regarding production, Mr Zollman’s comments were simple: “We make good board and make as much as we can.”
Boise calls its new product Boise Select, used principally for moulding and cabinetry. At 491⁄2lb, it’s of a heavier density, has no voids in the core and no noticeable transition from face to core. It will accept some fairly severe profiles, according to Mr Zollman, and can be foil or laminate covered.
Mr Schlegel continued: “In 2000 we instituted a computerised maintenance management system. It automatically prints out work orders. It really helped us to find our problem spots and reduce our unscheduled down time.We take about six hours on Wednesdays on line 2. And we do our line 1 maintenance on Sundays. The main maintenance crew works Sunday to Thursday.
Mr Zollman said: “One of the reasons we’ve been successful, particularly in tough market conditions, is our ability to continue to run and experience minimal down time.” Raw material comes from throughout the Pacific Northwest, but the company’s nearby plywood and sawmills furnish a good share. Most is shavings and sawdust and some plywood trims.
The mill has a Phelps truck dump with an operator who controls in which of the three buildings the furnish is placed. Each line has a separate building and green furnish goes to the third from local suppliers who dump their own trucks.
The furnish is separated by species, introduced into the process at different ratios. The furnish bins hold three 24-hour capacities of material. One front-end loader feeds the hoppers in all three buildings.
A conveyor takes material from two of the storage buildings to the dryers, while the green material from the third building goes to a silo serving the MEC pre-dryer. Separate milling and drying buildings serve each line.
On line 1 the material goes through an air density separator to a screen separating out fines and overs. The heavy material is handled in a 36in Jeffrey hog. Fines go straight to the dryer while intermediates go to Bauer double disc refiners. With two dryers on each line – Heil on 1, and MEC triple-pass 60ft long, 13ft diameter on 2 – the material goes to the appropriate core or face dryer.
An 8ft x 10ft x 15ft dry storage bin holds material on line 1 while on line 2 the material goes to Rotex shaker screens; two for face and another pair for core. Overs are hogged, intermediates go to Bauer refiners, and fines go right to the dryers.
GreCon and Pyroguard systems protect blowpipes with spark detectors and deluge systems. The maintenance team, headed by Steve Schlegel, works closely with Factory Mutual Global to ensure that fire systems are inspected frequently to provide continuous protection for employees and property.
Next is a Crossfield weigh-scale and two Littleford blenders using Hexion (formerly Borden) UF resin. A Hexion plant is located beside the mill and resin is piped  underground to the Boise mill. They also use Hexion wax and catalyst.
The blended furnish goes into Sunds Classiformers for metering on to a continuous belt which carries the mat up through the Washington Iron Works pre-press for 21⁄2 seconds to the WPS saws just ahead of the press where the belt rolls under, returning under the line.
On line 1, panels go to a 14-panel loader, which transfers them to the Washington Iron Works 5ft x 18ft, 14-opening press. It produces thicknesses from 5⁄16in to 13⁄16in. Line 2 has a 4ft x 24ft 14-opening press.
Mr Zollman said he has had more requests for metric sizes, with perhaps 1% of production in metric. The different thicknesses are much easier to change than when pressing to stops. He added: “We used to have four to six people on each side of the press for each stop change. Press upgrades have eliminated the need for stop changes. We don’t miss stop changes at all. It could take from 12 to 15 minutes – lost production time – for each stop change.”
Pressed panels go to the Washington Iron Works unloader, followed by a wicket line going through a cooling chamber. Line 1 full panels go out to a stacker for sanding and Jenkins sawing with a capability to make 36 separate cuts, while line 2 production goes through a Jenkins saw for cut-tosize, followed by sanding on an eight-head IMEAS using 40-60-80-100 grit sequence. Mr Zollman said the sander has been a  great upgrade for the facility, saying Fred Kurpiel originally introduced the system here. The mill uses Norton abrasives.
Line 1 has a six-head Kimwood sander using 50-60-100 grit.
The Argos sorting system automatically scans both faces of each panel and sorts into bins for grade separation.
Next is a Signode strapping line – plastic strapping is popular with Boise’s customers. One end of the mill has a covered loading area for six railroad cars. One truck can be loaded in one area and two trucks can be covered in another in-plant area. Drivers use a harness system, anchored from above, to protect against falls from atop the load and product is shipped throughout the US, Canada and Mexico.
Some output is re-manufactured into counter tops, shelving, stair treads and cutto-size. Edges are filled and an edge coat applied, while shelving and treads are bullnosed. There is no laminating. “There are so many laminators out there,” Mr Zollman declared.
The mill has streamlined its production and salaried force to 140 for its three-shift operation. Depending on orders, it runs five-day or seven-day weeks and is a union mill.
There is a high focus on employee involvement, especially in mill safety performance.
Mr Zollman said: “Production has to take second seat to keeping people safe. We ask employees to monitor other employees and encourage safe working practices. It changes morale when employees are part of the process. We want employees involved in everything we do and safety is most definitely the first priority. We value safety and we expect our employees to value safety as well,” he emphasised.
“We’ll shut something down to fix it if there is any chance someone could get hurt. That’s where we’re following the lead of Tom Stephens, our new ceo. Employees are empowered to shut down equipment if they think there’s a potential for injury. Culture change hasn’t been a bad thing for any of us.”
The mill has standard operating procedures for all its operations, such as start-ups and shut-downs.

When Canadian structural panel manufacturer Grant Forest Products Inc announced in June that it planned to build two greenfield OSB mills in South Carolina, it brought the number of new plants or major capacity expansions in the North American structural panels industry announced so far this year to eight.
Most industry watchers expect some of these projects to fall by the wayside, but add together the total volumes of the confirmed or very likely new mills and major expansions (excluding two potential mills in British Columbia and the Chatham Forest Products project in New York, all of which Ainsworth’s Lumber Co Ltd is considering launching) and North America is looking at around eight billion ft2 of additional OSB capacity in 2008, by when most economists, within and outside the industry, expect the North American housing market to have receded from the record highs of 2004.
Forest industry analysts in the US and Canada, concerned about the effect on share values of companies heavily exposed to OSB, have questioned whether the sector has any self-restraint. At the very least, it seems to be fuelling its ‘feast and famine’ reputation, and the surge in capacity is likely to slash OSB prices from the healthy levels seen in 2004 and much of this year.

In the past several years since Simpson Timber Company’s venerable Shelton, Washington plywood plant was sold to Olympic Panel Products big things have happened all through the busy production lines – including a large production boost.
As Simpson gradually pared down its six plywood facilities to just the Shelton operation, it consolidated Shelton, which became the world’s largest overlay facility under one roof. And that roof covers 10 acres.

McKenzie Forest Products has taken a creaky and outdated plywood mill in Springfield, Oregon, thoroughly studied its processes and marketing, and embarked on a dynamic modernisation programme which considers the peculiarities of today’s market.
The mill is on the site of the old Booth- Kelly Lumber Co, bought by Georgia-Pacific in the late 1950s.When the present ownership acquired it after bankruptcy it was one of those CDX sheathing mills that popped up in the mid 20th century, fuelled by a  burgeoning housing market and without the competition of the yet-to-be-developed OSB.
The growth of OSB forced some of those sheathing mills out of business. Those remaining started to look at other products that could rest in the safe haven of special niches. Conversely, the very success of OSB, and its eventual premium price, caused  some of the mills to re-think plywood sheathing, which became a profitable product for them.
So it has been with McKenzie. During the glory days of this summer’s market it  occasionally switched at least part of its emphasis back to sheathing.
But generally the company’s emphasis has been on highest-quality panels manufactured  with high-solids exterior PF resins and solid Douglas fir veneers. The AB and AA grades are suitable for both marine and high quality industrial uses. These are manufactured in 3/8in to 1in thicknesses in, so far, 8ft lengths. However, 10ft lengths are planned.
Siding is another speciality, as are sanded panels for furniture, doors and other uses.
McKenzie manufactures Dynea HDO (high density overlay) and MDO (medium density overlay) Plyform for high quality concrete forming. These are 5/8in and 3/4in panels, laid up with a minimum of seven plies, edgesealed and treated with a release agent.
The company’s BB Plyform has a fully-repaired B grade face and back and a minimum of seven plies.
And the old faithful sheathing is designed for light frame wall and roof sheathing in thicknesses from 3/8in to 23/32in, in 8ft, 9ft and 10ft lengths.
McKenzie president and ceo Steven H Killgore traced the history of the operation. “McKenzie started in 1998 after the Springfield Forest Products bankruptcy. It was sort of a ‘buy your way out’ type of thing with the lender and new partners in the mill.”
He explained: “This was a commodity sheathing mill with a green end capability. The strategy was to take it from commodity plywood to speciality panels. The site was in mechanical disarray. And there were environmental issues that are being corrected.”
He recalled: “Except for one year, the other three years were fairly bloody. In April 2002, I was just finishing work with the transition team integrating Weyerhaeuser Company and Willamette Industries.
“While in college in 1976, I worked in a  plywood plant managed by Dennis Spencer. He was one of the principals in McKenzie and asked me to join. It was a point in my life where I thought I had an option to take a risk, to see if we couldn’t get this entity turned around and bring it to profitability by working in concert with the other partners. I Started in June 2002.
“We had a complex situation because we quickly started getting the order file. By then we had an off-line press for HDO, an off-line press for MDO and we installed a  sander.We had grade logs that we could peel and get marine grade. We had a 10ft press  so we could do 9ft and 10ft products.
“The plywood market was still in a fouryear trough of just awful prices. We struggled. We got the order file in place and then came educating customers about our quality products. The bank was very supportive. Our new controller, Jim Meyers, looked into which products were making money and all the complexities. Dennis stepped aside and I picked up the reins as president and ceo.”
Mr Killgore went on to recall: “While we still believed the strategy was correct, that the speciality panels were going to provide the profit opportunity and our long-term position here in the west, we had to find the combination. We had a lay-up line, three spreaders, and four presses – how does all that work together? We did some experimenting in early ’03. The earnings were getting better. We had decreased overtime and the head count; in May ’03 we cut one third of the workforce.We had 300 people and scaled back to about 180, on three shifts, and contracted the product mix to fit.We got the mill to a cash flow break-even by mid-2003.”
In August ’03, the market began improving. The managers knew costs were not in line, but the mill was able to make a profit. Steve Griffith of Optware Solutions, Beaverton, Oregon, suggested a linear programme.
“Once the programme was in place,” Mr Killgore recalled, “it showed that we could have made money with the product mix in prior months. It focused on veneer loss, production flow, flow of veneer and production scheduling.We had some significant changes in the mill’s flow.”
Many of the speciality products weren’t making it. Mr Killgore said commodity  producers who could manufacture any panel other than CDX were doing it. He lamented: “We were not only spinning our wheels, but we had department costs.”
His answer: “Let’s take this as a compass and start gearing our profit mix to the linear programme.We picked up well over 35% savings in our manufacturing costs in that  oneyear period with essentially the same products. We had shut down the lay-up line. The linear programme said you always run the lay-up line, with spreader production the gravy. That was the big change.”
They added Metriguard-graded veneer to the mix and it was available for this year’s favourable LVL market.
McKenzie runs the programme in oneweek windows. It provides the desired volume of each item, by category, thickness and size. It tells what veneer to use and how much profit the mill should be making.
Adalis Corporation, Vancouver, Washington, was another consultant providing an objective opinion on the mill from stem to stern. “We wanted to know what we needed to do for reliability,” said Mr Killgore. “Should something be repaired or should it be replaced to get the plant in reliable operating mode? That was a three-week process with them in the mill, working with our folks and watching machinery. We’ve been working through the recommendations.
“I just wanted another opinion. When you’re so close, it’s sometimes hard to get that objectivity. Adalis is currently engaged in a project to go to a one-step MDO as  efficiently as possible. They also did an efficiency plan for our composer to reduce waste and increase productivity,” he said.
Last year McKenzie added a bonus system based on production, quality and safety. “They’re doing very well,” he said of the employees. “The crew is happier. They’re better informed as we have frequent business update postings, and crew meetings where I talk with them.
“This is an old plant. I don’t think there’s an area we haven’t touched. We still have folks working on the environmental things. We had to rebuild our boiler. We had training. And we had to get the head count right.”
Looking ahead, Mr Killgore said: “We see this all as a potential toehold to possibly get into engineered wood, into something broader. We have the veneer for LVL.We’re opportunists. We’ve moved from survival into performance. We have a very simple  mission: producing quality veneer and plywood with focus and agility. We have to be able to turn on a dime and adjust to the market. If an opportunity comes up down the road, we’ll certainly look at it.”
The mill is now doing 550,000ft2, 3/8in basis, five days a week.
The company also has a green end in nearby Eugene. It provides A and B grades and 9ft and 10ft veneer. The green end in the main mill is a small log installation with an 18in maximum diameter block.
The two green ends provide about 60% of veneer requirements. Mr Killgore said they’re about one third of the way through converting the Springfield lathe to 10ft production. The Eugene green end will eventually close. The final lathe work will be done this winter.
A large share of the mill’s business is on the US West Coast, but it has sales all across the country and into eastern Canada. They’re selling primarily to wholesale distributors. APA is their certifying agency.
Mr Killgore summed it up: “All of us around here are realising these are the good times and we’re enjoying them. We think we’ve positioned ourselves for those times when the markets aren’t so good. We hope we never get tested on that but we’re realistic enough to know that it’s possible. These kinds of prices aren’t going to stay forever.
“There may still be some contraction in the west, probably straight sheathing mills, but I would say those left in our industry are pretty good operators, Their hands are right on the controls and they watch every day. We’re almost a niche in ourselves.”

Potlatch Corporation is a century old western US wood products company with 1.5 million acres of its own timberland, a situation that keeps it in business. Many others, dependent on federal timber, were forced to close after preservationists’ pressures tied up federal forest management.
The company, with 15 mills in the US Pacific Northwest and Midwest, has been in both commodity and speciality wood products production at its St Maries plywood plant for many years. It is located in sparsely populated northern Idaho. During the past year’s booming construction panel market, the company has even produced sheathing when that product’s price was inflated as a result of the rocketing OSB market. But that is an exception.
Annual production is 150 million ft2, 3/8in basis, of plywood and veneer.
Tightly tested, high grade veneer for laminated veneer lumber is an important product sold to other producers. The veneer production is consistent with Potlatch’s trend toward making speciality products and shifting away from conventional construction plywood, which is losing market share to less expensive OSB.
Potlatch means ‘gift’ in the Chinook jargon which native American Indians and fur traders developed to communicate in the early 19th century.
The mill’s scenic setting could be considered a gift. It borders the shadowy St Joe river, a transportation artery in earlier days, and links with an extensive lake system. An adjoining sawmill shares dry land deck and debarking facilities.
Greg Cooperrider, who manages both the plywood mill and sawmill, said: “We’ve focused our operation here on sanded industrial grade. We have a good log supply and a good work force. We’ve been pretty successful at making quality plywood. We’ve taken a little bit of the sheathing business coming along, but we’ve stayed pretty much sanded.”
The situation is fairly well explained by the financial figures. Company communications director Mike Sullivan said: “Potlatch’s net plywood sales fell 14% in 2002 to US$34.9m. Last year the company’s net sales of OSB rose 12% to US$187.3m.” Potlatch manufactures OSB in Midwest mills.
But Potlatch is far from single-minded. It has experimented with many veneer and lumber products and has even given thought to producing an impregnated flooring product from some of the output from its 17,000 acres of poplar plantations.
Another studied speciality is LumaPly, foil faced on one side to minimise heating and cooling.
The mill’s average log diameter has dropped from 13in to 11in in the five years Mr Cooperrider has been in residence. The supply, coming from a 100-mile radius of the mill, is 70% Douglas fir with the balance in larch and white fir. Eighty per cent comes from company-owned lands.
The arriving supply is divided nearly equally between rail and truck transportation. Logs are unloaded by two LeTourneau machines. Caterpillar 980 front end loaders also serve the mill and yard.
The plywood mill will use 42 million board feet of logs in 2005, according to mill superintendent Bill Kopp.
The Cat or LeTourneau machines feed the 35in Nicholson ring barker, followed by a single 6ft circular saw which cuts logs to peeler lengths. The blocks go to the dozen hot water vats for 18 hours. Overhead hoses feed 140°F water. This comes from steam heated heat exchangers. Hog fuel heats the supplying boiler.
Potlatch installed a Metriguard unit two years ago to segregate the high strength material marketed as LVL veneer. Mr Cooperrider said: “Our logs fit the LVL market quite well because of their tight knot structure and the inland species with high MOE [modulus of elasticity].”
A Caterpillar 950 machine transfers the steamed blocks to the log deck feeding the Coe x-y charger which, in turn, serves the Coe lathe with Premier retractable spindles. The large spindle is 61/2in with a 21/2in smaller spindle. Cores kick out at 31/4in. A Coe trash gate diverts unusable roundup destined for hog fuel.
The veneer ribbon flows onto three 110ft trays before transiting the Ventek scanning system and the Durand rotary clipper. A Durand diverter directs 54in pieces to a Durand five-bin stacker. Randoms and fishtails go out to the green chain with three manual sorters.
Four longitudinal Moore steam-heated 22-section dryers dry the output; one sixdeck and three four-deck. These have Durand-Raute feeders and out feed. “We keep our moisture content below 10% because of the industrial panels. We don’t want any warping,” Mr Cooperrider explained.
Two dryers are manually sorted, with two pullers per dryer. The larger dryers, which handle 54s, output to a Ventek scanner segregating the material for a nine-bin Durand stacker. Six Raimann patchers upgrade the veneer.
Three Durand composers fabricate sheets for a Durand Raute automatic five-bin curtain coater lay-up line that can produce three- to nine-ply. The line uses Dynea resins.
Laid-up panels are pressed in a Williams- White 40-opening press and a 30-opening Columbia unit. Both are preceded by Coe pre-presses. Two putty lines follow.
A Globe saw line with standard panel turners trims the panels to standard size. A synthetic patch line, Globe tongue and groove machine, and Smithway six-head sander follow.
After Signode automatic strapping, bundles are loaded on box cars for rail or truck shipment in equal quantities.
The mill produces a good deal of underlayment and solid core A-grade marine ply-wood.  This must be manufactured from all Group 1 wood with solid core lines.
The operation, including office staff, has a total of 195 employees. The green end runs two 10-hour shifts while the dryers run three eight-hour shifts.

The US Pacific Northwest plywood industry once had many worker-owned plants called co-ops (for cooperatives), but only two remain. One of these, Hardel Mutual in Chehalis, Washington is one of the industry’s most successful – and becoming more successful.
Production is being boosted by nearly half, from 13 million ft2,3/8in basis, last year to 35 million ft2 basis when current projects are completed. The workforce will be increased by only 10 to 15%, to about 250.
A new veneer hog was a tiny part of the expansion, but is perhaps a clue of what’s to come.
The general manager minced no words: “I feel very strongly by the time we finish this project we are going to be by far the most productive plywood mill in the world.”
Hardel Mutual buys all its veneer, bypassing the necessity of dealing for timber sales or logs on a market that has been hobbled by environmental road blocks.
What originally set off the upward pace was a disastrous fire that destroyed Hardel’s nearly 50-year-old plant on the Olympia, Washington waterfront. The plant was rebuilt on its present site some 35 miles away.
Kingpin for the past 14 years has been Mr Piliaris who came from his hometown of Athens, Greece, via Australia.
Mr Piliaris is not afraid to spend money if it results in immediate or early returns, as it apparently currently does. All the present US$9m in changes is coming right out of cash. The only debt the mill has is a seven-year purchase contract for the building.
Mr Piliaris is a real ‘hands on’ manager. In his office corner a monitor automatically switches among 20 cameras throughout the mill so he can be immediately aware of any obvious problems in the flow. A big chalkboard is set up on one side with all the major equipment plotted, along with names of the people responsible for each piece.
The current expansion project includes many smaller improvements; at one time Hardel had 22 projects going. The lay-up line wasn’t the only big job. Presses were added and expanded, warehouses built, air quality projects accomplished, and outside storage paved.
Western Pneumatics Inc, Eugene, Oregon, is converting the mill’s RTO (regenerative thermal oxidiser) pollution control on the existing dryers to RCO (regenerative catalytic oxidiser), resulting in fuel savings. Just about to start is a new PPC Industries, Longview, Texas, ESP (electrostatic precipitator) on the Wellons thermal oil heater.
When all the work is completed the mill will have 140 press openings with a 4ft x 8ft, 40-opening; a 4ft x 10ft, 40-opening; a 5ft x 10ft, 30-opening; and a 5ft x 10ft, 30- opening press.
Mr Piliaris is quite philosophical about the high riding plywood market.“Everybody’s making money these days.We’re going to be productive. When the interest rates go up, demand will come down. But that doesn’t worry me as much as the imports.
“The Chinese, the Chileans, the Brazilians, are all building mills. Everybody wants a piece of the pie. Right now there is a shortage of the pie and a huge demand. When things turn around within a year or two, the economy will slow down and the inputs will really increase. That’s what I want to be ready for.”
He laid down the gauntlet: “I want my company ready. When that happens we won’t make millions, but we won’t lose millions. We have always produced and always sold. If  we make US$5 a panel and the profit drops to 50¢, we’re still going to sell it. But not too many people are going to do that. They’re going to be losing money. And they’re the ones who are going to have to cut back. I’m not going to cut back.”
His attitude is based on good management, good production people and very good employees. About half of them are long-time stockholders.
On the company’s policy of staying away from veneer production, he commented, “Wood supply is no problem at all. Veneer prices have not gone up as much as plywood.
Veneer people are doing OK, but plywood people are doing phenomenally well.
“We are a speciality plywood mill. I probably spend 20% or 30% of my time buying veneer. I cherry pick it. A specialised plywood mill has to have good veneer. If you peel it yourself you have to use what you have. I go around to probably 15 veneer plants. I buy 54’s from here, good random from there, good AB from here, 10ft from there. There’s nobody who could do the whole thing [peeling their own] and have that quality of veneer.”
He does his share of importing with Okoume veneer from Brazil to be made into siding. Its qualities are similar to Douglas fir.
The new WSM hog handles the larger residue volume generated by the increased production. The residues go to a Wellons fuel cell, generating hot oil for the mill.
Coe 16-section, 4-deck, and 20-section, three-zone, 4-deck stainless steel dryers have Sweed automatic feeders. Delta T controls continuously control dryer temperature and speeds to conserve energy. Hot oil inlet temperature can run as high as 500°F, to produce drying temperatures as high as 400°F. Viking fire deluge systems are installed.
A third dryer, a Coe 16-section, four-deck jet unit, will be added later this year, with Western Pneumatics RCO pollution control.
Seventeen Skoog patchers offbear to a  circular sorting table. A 10ft Hashimoto composer processes randoms into full widths.
Two Globe 66in 20E manual spreaders will serve mainly speciality products while the lay-up line will handle volumes.
The old press line was made up of a 4ft x 8ft, 40-opening Spar-Tek with pre-press and charger and receiver and a Williams- White 30-opening installation with Globe pre-press and charger and receiver. A 20- opening, 4ft x 8ft Williams-White press was converted from MDO and other specialities to a straight plywood unit.
A Globe saw line accommodates both 8ft and 10ft panels. It offbears to a Burrelbach grade line and stackers. A Globe speciality saw is also installed. Sanding is accomplished on a Kimwood 5ft machine, along with a Timesavers sander.
Hardel has a short railroad spur connecting with the mainline, but most product is trucked, mainly to the US West Coast.
Siding is an important part of the production. Thicknesses range from 1/4in to 1in. Hardel produces a full line of sanded panels and marine grade panels as well as 303 siding and structural 9ft and 10ft sheathing panels. APA is the inspection agency.

Spraying, stencilling and striping packs of panels is a messy necessity for wood based panel manufacturers. An Oregon firm is doing something about that with robotic methods it developed for other industries.
It all results in a painless automatic procedure that the company says does the job, conserves paint, limits messy spray booth clean-up, saves money and is safer.
Precision Technologies, a division of Eugene, Oregon’s Willamette Valley company, already has five of its automated spray booths, and several other lines, in operation in North American panel plants.
This represents the newest arrow in the company’s quiver, which includes such  specialities as resin and catalyst mixing and metering, extrusion heads and systems, finger- joint application systems, polyurethane mixing and a host of other robotic solutions. In the wood panel business, they serve plywood, OSB, and siding manufacturers.
As an example, they have two installations in the US’ newest OSB mill, J M Huber in Broken Bow, Oklahoma.
That 20ft x 20ft x 14ft robotic spray booth uses six-axis industrial application robotic arms by Motoman,West Carrollton, Ohio.
A four-stage down-draft air filtration system has accessible ‘tunnels’ in the bottom of the booth to easily access the filter media and the air can be safely released back into the plant with no outside venting required. This also has the advantage of saving heat energy in cold winter climates.
The system sends a signal to the operator when filter changes are required. The two-stage floor filtration rolls are changed weekly, or as needed. The third stage cartridge is changed monthly and the final stage fibre filter is changed quarterly.
Infeed and outfeed vestibules allow additional airflow to maintain a slight negative pressure within the booth to contain the material.
Of course the fact that these are water-based paints simplifies the air handling problems; there are no toxic fumes. Variable frequency drives on the fan motors automat- ically increase fan speed to maintain constant airflow as filters begin to load. Air flow is adjustable up to about 18,000ft3/minute.
Stencilling the loads to apply logos or grademarks is another part of the development. Stencils are automatically cleaned between loads. This allows the stencil face to come in direct contact with bundles.
The company designs stencils and has them cut from 1/4in aluminium by a local water-jet cutter which operates at 60,000psi. They are anodised to close the pores and thus prevent paint sticking to them.
The end stripe operates separately from the stencil system, but shares some of the controls. It can be placed in line either before or after the stencilling and will apply up to six stripes about 1in wide, with 2in between.
In operation, the load moves to the spraying position and stops. Stripe guns spray the leading end as programmed, the load moves forward, stops, and the trailing end is sprayed. Nailing lines can be applied in the same manner.
Using the same robotic principles, cardboard side protectors can be applied to the sides of 4ft x 8ft tongue and grooved units. In this case, vacuum heads pick up the material and place it against the load, hold it in place and staple it.
The company has developed a system for spraying T&G too, to be sure the grooves are sprayed. There is articulation so it will spray downward in one pass and upward in another.
Precision Technologies’ general manager, Eldon L Owen, enthusiastically describes the company’s system. “We thought the timing was good due to rising costs. We needed to get our spray booths more efficient, with increasing volumes. Our painters were 65 to 70% efficient. Paint that you can’t use, you still have to clean up.”
Mr Owen estimates that the average mill, using 100,000 gallons of paint annually, would save US$60,000 to US$80,000 a year, not including clean-up. Individual costs are about US$225,000 for a spray booth, US$65,000 for a stencil system, and US$45,000 for a striping system.
The system uses only four guns so there is less maintenance. Former spray booths had 10 to 12 guns. Mr Owen recommends weekly head changes because of the high volume. The robot simply brings the heads down to a trap door where they are removed and replaced in seconds.
The spray heads work 10in to 12in from the material and run at 800psi to 1,300psi. There is very little over-spray. Paint is filtered in a high pressure filter.
Mr Owen said that if a 0.019in tip wears to 0.002in, it will increase paint flow by 20%.
In operation, a forklift operator places bundles onto the spray booth rollcase and picks up the bundles on the offbear rollcase. Everything else is automatic.
As the bundles move toward the booth they are automatically scanned for location, height, width and possible skewing. As they move in, the robot verifies these  measurements and the stopping position. The computer makes the proper corrections for the load and directs the robot to begin. After painting, the bundle moves out.
The computer system is stand alone, but it can be tied into a plant computer. Allen- Bradley controls are used.
“You do not have wet waste to clean up,” added Mark Matteson, sales administrator. “Just pull the filters out and change them. Another nice thing about the efficiency of this booth and the way that it’s filtered is that you don’t have to vent through the roof. You can have the air coming from the mill and being exhausted back into the mill. This is a real advantage in a cold country – you don’t have to pull the air in from the outside, heat it up, and send it out the back,” said Mr Matteson.
Mr Owen declared: “Our whole goal was to increase the efficiency of the mills, reduce their clean-up and increase speed. Speed has gotten to be a factor with these larger mills. I think we paint a 4ft x 8ft, 38in high stack in 70 seconds.”
Mr Matteson continued: “When you have a degree of accuracy on a robotic arm of 5/1000, you can use fewer spray guns and you’re closer to the load. You can reduce the pressure, you don’t have as much bounceback or splatter. All those things add up.”
The system employs electric guns, so on  and off timing can be highly accurate, based on  robot speed.
Precision Technologies completely assembles and operates each unit on their shop floor, along with necessary programming. After final inspection it is disassembled to the least degree possible to ease re-erection at the mill. Loads are generally 40ft long.
Mr Owen said: “We developed an automated stencil system that pushes the stencil against the load and it cleans itself every time it paints. It comes back into a wash mechanism in between loads. It gets washed and squeegeed and the water for that is  recycled until it reaches a set tolerance content when it needs to be changed.”
This is water-based paint with wax and resins.
The division employs about 35 people, including five engineers. The forest industry makes up 40% of its work.

In a linked chain of events, plunging pulp chip prices have made possible increasing veneer raw material supplies for Potlatch, Inc in Oregon and Idaho.
The output of the company’s fast-growing hybrid poplar plantations has been favourably tested for veneer production, but some problems such as transportation distances have so far sidetracked that use.
The 17,000 acres of trees blanketing a flat semi-desert area of north central Oregon seemingly sprang up overnight, to the puzzlement of freeway drivers who buzz by. They’ve been managed as an agricultural crop since the first plantings in 1993.
“We’ll be producing 45 million board feet per year in sawlog volume and it’s all  contiguous,” predicted harvesting and marketing manager Pat Moore.
Regional hybrid poplar manager Greg Uhlorn explained the plantations’ origin: “We were concerned about our ability to supply chips for our pulp mill in Lewiston, Idaho.We looked at several alternatives and this looked like the best option. In 1993 we bought two large circle-irrigated farms and started converting them to drip irrigation for growing trees.We planted our first trees in 1994, looking for a six- or seven-year rotation for pulp chips.”
The growing environment on the planting site was good, lacking only water which was readily available from the large Columbia river five miles north. The potato farmers who formerly owned the land had developed circular pivoting irrigation systems.
The sandy soil is good. A freeway runs along one edge of the farm, a railroad mainline across it and there is that nearby Columbia river for barge transportation.
The problem was that the pulp chip market, in Mr Uhlorf’s words, “really turned on its ear after about the mid ’90s”. Today’s chip prices are less than half of what they were when the project started. This made the cost of producing the poplar chips uneconomical for pulp, and required rethinking the poplar management.
This prompted the decision to look at solid wood production and Potlatch began pruning to gain more clear wood which has a much higher value. They went from a seven-year to an 11-year cutting rotation and started planting just under 300 trees per acre, half the density of the pulpwood plantings. The utilisation target is hardwood lumber and plywood.
First prunings are restrained, only four or five feet, so as not to remove too many leaves  which are important to growth. The trees are 10ft to 12ft high at the end of the first growing season. After two years they are 20ft to 30ft tall with pruning up to 9ft. Final pruning is 20 to 24ft and the fully-pruned trees will grow another five or six years before harvesting.
Potlatch is using traditional tree breeding, picking the best specimens, with no genetic work. It is looking for such things as fairly straight stems and branching perpendicular to the stems which will create smaller knots than angle-branching.
Most of the work is contracted including tree improvement in nurseries, cutting  production for tree starts, logging and hauling. Plantings are entirely from cuttings roughly 13in long, 1/2in at the small end and 5/8in at the large end. Planters slip the cuttings into the prepared planting bed, in rows, with the top bud at ground level. Rows are 10ft apart and cuttings placed every 15ft.
The 3/4in plastic drip irrigation hose is laid down beside the cuttings with computer controlled irrigation starting in April, when the trees leaf out, and continuing until they start shutting down in September and October. Only eight inches or less of rain falls during the growing season. In the first year the new trees receive 6in to 10in of irrigation water, but older trees receive 40in to 42in.
Chemicals and fertiliser are injected into the water to combat tree diseases and insects and to speed growth. Weed killers limit vegetation harbouring animals and birds that can cause damage.
When Potlatch set up its farm it replaced the irrigation circle centre pivots with valve manifolds. It used as much of the existing buried pipe as possible, burying some additional PVC lines to supply the drip tubes.
The figures for the system are impressive. Pump capacity is 178,640 gallons per minute. There are 370 miles of buried pipe, from the 72in pipe under the freeway to the 11/2in pipe supplying the drip tubes. There are 14,300 miles of plastic drip tubing on the ground and 20 million emitters to supply water to about 7.4 million trees.
Mr Uhlorn said: “We’re looking at appearance-grade applications where structural strength is not critical. Our poplar is a good lightweight low density wood, light in colour. It machines, stains and paints well. This is the first hardwood plantation operation to be FSC certified.”
Harvesting units are blocks of 40 to 160 acres. Logging contractor Bryan Broadfoot uses a Timbco feller-buncher running a Quadco disc hot saw, moving across the field taking four rows at a time, cutting at ground level. He sorts as he goes, segregating trees which could produce solid wood. Earlier, when logging was only for pulp chips, he used a shear but this damages the butt log for solid wood production.
Another trailer-equipped Timbco picks up and hauls loads of 120 trees on a hayrack trailer to a roadside, returning with an empty one for the next load. These loads are entire trees, including limbs and leaves. A fifth wheel truck takes the trailers to a central processing site in the middle of the farm. Here, a Lako Oy dangler processor cuts solid wood logs to length. Because of the poplar’s natural crook and sweep, shorter bucking lengths dramatically increase utilisation.
There are two sorts for solid wood and the rest goes into a Peterson 5000 chain flail for chipping. The product is trucked to the port for barge shipment or directly to market.
Everything is utilised. Bark, limbs and tops are ground at the site in a Morbark tub grinder. Much of this is hauled back to the field as ground cover and nutrient base with the rest shipped to a nearby dairy in exchange for compost to apply to the fields. A Merry Crusher grinds up material on the logging blocks, preparing it for the next crop.
A Fuji King debarker will be on site soon, as the operation moves into full manufacturing. A 4ft lathe is a possibility. An option for enhancing the wood would be pressure-treating it with Indurite to increase hardness.
Mr Uhlorn said that at this point before the pruned material starts moving, veneer production would have to be dedicated to core inner ply. Later there will be opportunities for higher grades and face stock.
Jeld-Wen is incorporating the chips in its MDF doorskin production at White Swan, Washington. Mr Uhlorn believes the poplar would be good OSB material. Potlatch has run trials in its Minnesota OSB mills. Sawlogs go to Kinzua Resources sawmill at Pilot Rock, Oregon.
Mr Moore lists some plusses for the operation: “Our inventory is kept on the stump; we have a year-round operation so we have even flow and accessibility of product and even flow for shipment; and we’re accessible to interstate highways.”
He advised a maximum of three days from the stump, chipper, or mill for best recovery.
The tree wagons are unloaded with a Wagner loader and are either set down directly in front of the chipper or onto a small deck with the solid wood logs segregated from chip logs. A Link-Belt loads the hog, mounted on a Ford truck.
Greg Cooperrider, Potlatch’s plywood plant manager at St Maries, Idaho is enthusiastic about the material. He peeled eight truckloads of 7in to 10in, 17ft logs. “We conditioned them for 12 hours, but if they were fresh we could probably run them without conditioning,” he said. One problem was the stringy, cedar-like bark.
He said it should be dried on a mild schedule to minimise splits and it requires slightly more glue than some other species.
Using 1/6in veneer, he laid it up into fiveply panels. “It would make a very nice substrate for overlays,” he declared.

A veneer plant, opened 40 years ago in White City, Oregon, has been owned by Boise since 1976. Five years ago a fire levelled its sister plant in nearby Medford and this prompted re-tooling and a big jump forward.
Disaster was to strike again when a forest fire in August 2002 singed 9,000 acres of company-owned forest and called for quick action to beat the bugs to the wood. The fire started on US Forest Service land, but quickly spread to Boise land. Plant superintendent Dave Anderson said: “We started logging that same week, before the ashes were cold.We have been peeling those logs since the fire.” At the time of WBPI’s visit in mid-August, he thought the salvageable logs would all be peeled by the month’s end.
Some of the company’s young plantations, established after harvesting, burned too, with nothing left to salvage.
Despite that quick action, Boise lost some wood. “We didn’t see much early deterioration, other than logs were a bit dry throughout the winter,” Mr Anderson said. “This spring the bugs started coming out and the worms started getting in there.We even have some stain in the Douglas fir.” Normally, blue stain deterioration is seen in pine; there was little pine in the salvaged stand.
The US Forest Service fought a half-million acre fire nearby at the same time. Hamstrung by preservationists’ opposition to timber harvesting, they have yet to recover the burned forest’s value and prevent complete loss. Several Oregon State University forestry professors studied the problem and called for immediate action.
The Forest Service had produced a plan with alternatives ranging up to 450 million board feet of salvage while the forestry professors advocated salvaging up to 2.5 billion board feet. That much of the fire area is in a federally designated wilderness area, where road building and other activities are off limits, complicates the matter further.
In any case, work would not begin until next summer, after bugs and fungi have had more than a full year to build their numbers.
All of Boise’s logging is contracted, with logs delivered to the logyard where LeTourneau and Caterpillar 950 and 956 front-end loaders handle them. The Cats offload debarkers, stack on the ground, fill and unload vats and feed the lathe decks. A new 4ft lathe and another converted to high speed triggered an extra debarker shift. The logs are sprinkled to prevent deterioration.
A typical log mix was to be seen in July when there was 78% Douglas fir, 10% white fir and 10% pine. Most of the pine is ponderosa with a small amount of lodgepole. Monthly veneer production in two ninehour shifts is about 24 million ft2, 3/8in basis.
“We’ve been peeling the fire logs as fast as possible, usually within a week of their arrival at the mill,” Mr Anderson said.
The company’s adjacent sawmill handles debarking and bucking with a Salem 65in rosserhead and Kochum Cambio 30in ring barker. Earlier, the veneer plant could handle blocks as large as 80in in diameter but, at the time of the revamp following the plymill fire, they decided that 45in would be the maximum.
Highest recovery is necessary with contemporary high wood costs. On the 4ft line, they can peel down to a 21/8in core.
They sort for diameters at the debarker. Seven inches and under usually goes to the 4ft lathe. The debarkers remove any charred wood on the fire-killed logs.
The bucked blocks are forklifted to the 14 steam vats that have been converted to hot water at around 155°F. Mr Anderson said: “Steam sort of dries your blocks. Water seems to soften them and does a more even job of heating them. It’s quicker, too.We reached the point where we couldn’t get our logs hot in the winter.”
He said in summer they run pine off the ground ‘cold’. “It might be 100°F outside, so it’s really not cold. If you get a block too hot, it gets soft and will spin out on you.”
The mill runs two shifts totalling 16,000 to 18,000 blocks daily, including the 4ft lathe. Most of the lathe work has been by Coe Manufacturing.
Coe converted a Premier lathe. All Coe x-y systems and chargers are installed. The two 8ft lathes are powered by 450hp and the core lathe is 160hp. Elite controls are on the ‘A’ lathe with Raute on the other two.
The mill has clipping trash gates on the 4ft and ‘A’ lathes. These save time – 0.7 to 0.8 second, “And help you gain constant thickness, too, from not going in and out of your peel,” said Mr Anderson. Lathe cycle times are as short as four seconds. The computer follows everything with cycles timed to fractions of seconds. Milliseconds, when added together, can result in savings.
Mr Anderson said: “Sometimes you might not be able to identify a problem. With this data, you might find the charger coming in a little bit slow or the core drive coming in slow, or chucks not retracting quickly enough.”
Plant management has weekly maintenance meetings to find such solutions.
When planning the mill revamp following the plywood fire and the decision to consolidate veneer production at White City, they discussed the merits of two- versus threetray installations for the core lathe. They built so that adding a third tray would be fairly simple, but found that two trays were sufficient. A Lloyd Controls following system works well.
The trays are generally long enough to handle the blocks assigned, but if a ribbon is too long, the clipper takes over the lathe speed. Veneer is never broken at the lathe.
The core lathe speed is about 1,000fpm while trays unload at the clipper speed of about 500fpm.With the clipping trash gate, very little material goes to the hog. Nearly all goes to the clipper.
Boise crews built the core line tray system followed by a Raute three-bin stacker. One chain puller works at the end while four chain pullers work on the two 8ft lines.
There are Elite controls for the ‘A’ lathe and clipper and rotary clipper with Ventek scanners on all three lathes.
Boise doesn’t clip just 27in and 54in, but includes random widths up to 33in. That means an additional 6in of wood recovered than if a 27in had been clipped. Normally that would have gone over the end of the chain. This recovery benefit is gained by the fact that the green end’s customer is the company’s own plywood mill, with its composer handling random widths.
An important market is Boise’s LVL mill just a half-mile away.
As with most mills, safety is an important consideration. This mill has a better record than most, in fact 1,682 days without a lost-time accident at the time of WBPI’s visit. Everyone participates in safety, watching out for each other in the mill. This extends to project work.

Clarke’s Sheet Metal has seen some big changes in its 50 year history. It is located in Eugene, Oregon, once the heart of the state’s wood manufacturing industry where it could serve adjoining mills virtually out of the back door.
For Clarke’s it has been a matter of imaginative engineering, construction and sales efforts that have extended well beyond its backyard – far overseas in fact. And the company established a new operation in the US south to get closer to the important southern forest industry.
Current president W James Clarke recalls just coming out of war time service in Korea in 1952 when he, his father, Ralph H Clarke, and mother, Belle C Clarke, established the company. It began with fans and blowpipes, later moving into high pressure blowpipes, cyclones, truck bins and many other mill components.
Mr Clarke said the firm’s early business was primarily industrial sheet metal, but shortly became specialised to include pneumatic conveying systems for the wood products industry. These systems typically included a fan and ductwork to collect and transport wood waste from process equipment to a cyclone receiver. As customers’ needs expanded, Clarke’s developed a complete line of metering and storage bins and expanded its products for pneumatic conveying systems to include dust filters and associated explosion safety devices.
Clarke’s first started manufacturing doffing and picker roll bins in 1981 and has nearly 100 of them operating in the US, Europe and Asia. Technical advances have reduced maintenance and increased life. 
Clarke’s developed its heavy duty Flo- Matic bin for storing and discharging hard to- handle materials such as hog fuel. A top conveyor distributes the full length, utilizing total bin capacity. A traversing discharge auger provides a controlled material flow out of the bin where it is transferred on to an accumulation conveyor. 
Clarke’s primary and secondary Pneu- Aire filters collect dust on the inside of bags, where it is removed by a reverse air purge system. Each of the filter bags is isolated from the incoming air stream. The purge air pulls dust from inside the bags. The positive cleaning action allows the dust and cleaning air to move in the same direction. 
With the addition of dust filters to Clarke’s product line, the need for explosion safety devices emerged. The fine collected wood dust can be quite explosive and the smallest spark can ignite it. The PyroGuard spark detection and extinguishing system detects and extinguishes sparks before they have a chance to enter dust collectors or storage bins. Other mechanical devices such as Hi Speed abort gates, back draft dampers and explosion vents are typically incorporated into the pneumatic systems. When applied properly, these devices greatly reduce the potential of an explosion. If an explosion takes place within the pneumatic system, the activation of these safety devices will minimise the damage caused to the overall system. 
Clarke’s early experience in the wood products industry paved the way for its involvement in many particleboard, MDF and OSB facilities in the US and overseas. The firm provided doffing roll metering bins and pneumatic conveying systems at Fuzhou Man Made Board Plant in Fuzhou, China. All the pneumatic conveying and filtration systems for the Medite MDF facility in Clonmel, Ireland followed. 
Mr Clarke recalls one particularly challenging project in Alaska when he moved a big 70ft waste burner up from California. The job was almost completed when a strong windstorm reaching 147 miles per hour hit the area. Burner parts were scattered along the beach for 11/2 miles. After moving the parts back to the site and bringing in new steel they got the burner ready to raise and waited for two days of foggy calm weather to finish the job.
As Clarke’s customer base grew so did its manufacturing facility. The current office and fabrication facility in Eugene, Oregon, has 45,000ft2 of fabrication area along with a 3,600ft2 machine shop and a 2,500 ft2 electronics laboratory.
Primary equipment includes a 14ftx30ft CNC plasma burning centre, 10ft-wide plate rolls and two press brakes, the largest 20ft long with a 350 ton capacity.
The machine shop is equipped with a CNC milling machine, and a CNC horizontal boring mill as well as multiple lathes used in the fabricating of Model ER and CFV machined rotary airlock/feeders. The electronics laboratory assembles and repairs the spark detection/extinguishing systems.
In 1983, Clarke’s bought a stand-alone manufacturing facility in Shreveport, Louisiana to more economically service southern US customers. This facility has 57,000ft2 of fabrication area and utilizes fabrication equipment similar to the Eugene plant. It does not have a machine shop. The work area is ideal for fabrication and final assembly of large components, such as the metering bins. Pre-assembly and delivery to the job site in the largest pieces, feasible for shipping, can greatly cut installation time.
Recent projects have included supplying six picker roll metering bins for the new J M Huber OSB facility being built in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, and two wet picker roll metering bins and two rotary drum screens for the Langboard OSB facility in Quitman, Georgia. In the late 1990’s, Clarke’s delivered this same type of equipment, bins and screens, to Kronopol OSB facilities in Poland, France and Germany. The equipment was manufactured at both of Clarke’s facilities. For the overseas projects the equipment was shipped via container and delivered to European ports.
The management of Clarke’s Sheet Metal, Inc is made up of W James Clarke as president, Mike Eide, vice president of manufacturing, and Andy Clarke, vice president, sales and engineering.

Five years ago a hangover spark from an earlier dryer fire kindled flames that raced through Boise-Cascade’s plywood plant in Medford, Oregon.
On the last day of operations before a 1998 holiday shutdown, a pitch fire behind the cooling section in the mill’s number two dryer broke out. The sprinkler heads quenched the flames, but just 20 minutes before the mill closed a spark in the rafters flared up again and flashed into dust. It was like dynamite detonating.
The fire exploded over to lay-up, down to the finish end and ran the length of the long crane shed. Fire crews focused on saving the power house but they lost the entire plywood plant and the planer mill.
Shift supervisor Phil Brown, an employee here since 1965 recalls the event: “I came from home and helped move veneer and vehicles away from the building. We couldn’t move fast enough. We saved maybe a third of the veneer. We had so much veneer stacked in the crane shed. It was a half mile long and the roof fell in 15 minutes.”
The mill is located on a large 124 acre site. With the ruins still smoking, management debated the future. They finally decided to rebuild, but only a high production four-press dry end. The salvageable veneer equipment would go to Boise’s green end at White City, six miles away. The Medford mill would import veneer from the company’s four veneer plants in the area.
The first panel in the ‘new’ mill came out of the press just one year later – the mill was essentially the same, except for the green end.
Mr Brown said: “During the rebuild, supervisors chased down different things. Two others and I helped put the glue loft together. A lot of our own people put the spread line back together. Many people were involved in the project.”
In some ways the fire was positive in that past experience could work into the new layout. Much of the existing equipment was salvaged. “We were able to design the plant so that when trucks pull in with veneer we have a steady process forward so that nothing moves backward. I think we dropped eight Hyster forklifts, just by everything running consistently forward,” Mr Brown added.
He said dryer production is now at an all-time high and lay-up is better. It resulted in a mill producing 356 million ft2, 3/8in basis, of plywood annually with a crew of 400.
However, the project is still not finished. A chalked X on the mill floor marks the spot where an MDO press will be installed later this year. This 20-opening press, in storage, was replaced by a 40-opening after the fire. Its plates are being resurfaced.
The mill runs Douglas fir, pine, spruce, fir, and hemlock. Green veneer in 1/10in, 1/25in, 1/40in and 1/6in thickness is trucked to the site. The mill carries about 2.5 million ft2 of green veneer in the yard. It is parceled out to the two 16-section, three 14-section and one 12-section steam-heated Coe and Moore dryers which offbear air through two GeoEnergy RTO systems. Ventek moisture meters are installed on all of them and a Ventek scanner on one. Four Jeddeloh Sweed feeders are in place.
There are two 16-section, three 14-section and a 12-section dryer. Three dryers offbear to Jeddeloh Sweed stackers. Two tenders monitor the dryers. Twenty four hour dryer production is one million ft2 while 1.1 million is laid up in the 24 hours.
A Clarke’s Sheet Metal spark detection system is installed.
Veneer that does not come out in full sheets goes to a Panel Equipment composer that makes it into either a 4x8ft or an 8x4ft sheet for the lay-up lines.
The mill aims for 13% re-dry for good production. Four of the dryers are equipped with Metriguards to assure proper specifications for LVL. The Medford mill supplies about 30% of the blanks for Boise’s White City, Oregon, LVL mill where they are finger- jointed into long beams. This material, with everything laid up parallel, is plywood laminated veneer, or PLV.
The mill has an elaborate flow-through Raimann patching installation with 25 machines, 22 of them in a line. Before the fire, two patching shifts were required, now just a single shift does the job. These machines produce solid faces for special products. The three satellite machines patch for specialised products. A Holt glue loft is run by a single operator.
A Coe spray line and a company-built curtain coater line lay up panels. Both lines were in place before the fire, but required much work to restore operational ability. Mill superintendent Tom Gilman said the spray line requires nine or 10 people to run, but productivity is so great that it replaces about a dozen people. The line uses 11 people for seven-ply and eight for five-ply. This line offbears to a line feeding the 40-, 30-, 36- and 32-opening presses. The computer keeps track of required panel mix. The mill has about 45 different lay-ups from three ply to seven ply. The thickest panel is 13/4in.
The curtain line operates with a crew of four – an operator for the main station, two offbearers and someone to clean up.
Sandwiches move to pre-presses then to 32-, 36-, 30- and 40-opening presses. These are Globe, Globe Raute conversion, Columbia Raute conversion, and SparTek.
Vacuum feeding serves all the machinery on the finish end. Another move was to elevate all the machinery to ease clean up.
A Globe feeder serves the Globe saws which offbear to a five-bin stacker. A fourman putty line, Globe T&G machine, (working predominately 3/4in, but also 5/8in, 3/4in, and 11/8in) and a Kimwood six-head sander round off the finishing side, along with an oiler for concrete form material.
Shipping is 40% by rail and 50% truck. Exports are a thing of the past with the state of California as the principal market along with other areas of the US southwest and eastern seaboard.
In plywood, specialities are a necessity these days. Mr Brown says: “Our grade faces aren’t as available as they were 15 or 20 years ago. You have to compensate with some occasional sheathing. We’re trying to get more into the industrial panel business, such as providing material for window and door part manufacturers. We’re laying up about 13 trucks a week for windows and doors – maybe 4% to 5% of production.
“Our engineered wood business took off and the plywood market followed that trend,” he concluded.
One unusual feature is a horizontal ‘cooling tower’ which cools water from the power plant. Water, at over 100°F, is sprayed into a pond for cooling.
Safety is an important consideration as it is in all Boise Cascade mills. One example is a harness system suspended from the ceiling of the covered truck loading slab. Drivers working on top of their loads tie on to prevent falls, should they slip.
“Your best resource is your employees,” said Mr Brown. “They can tell you what does and doesn’t work. A lot of input from our employees helped with the rebuild after the fire. We had experienced people who knew what they were talking about when they set up this machinery.”

Tolko Industries owns 75% of Meadow Lake OSB Ltd Partnership and manages its new mill in central Saskatchewan. It is a rather greenfield operation but a nearby pulp mill and sawmill have used the resource there for a number of years.
The OSB market has soared since late spring and the company managed to trim three weeks off the new mill’s start up date to try to get some product on the market promptly.
A 400,000ft2 sheet steel building houses the mill that started just 470 days after ground-breaking. Company employees and contractors joined forces to produce an effective planning and construction team.
Eventual production goal for the Can$200m (US$146.3m) mill is 600 million ft2, 3/8in basis.
Manager Ricardo Hillmann said: “This has been designed as a commodity plant. In the beginning we will be running 7/16in as the main product, although we can go down to 1/4in and up to more than 1in thicknesses.
The layout was designed to accommodate a possible second line to produce value-added speciality products. This initial line’s goal is high production of high quality standard products at minimum cost.
The new mill is based on proven technology. Tolko has used lessons learned from its big OSB mill located in High Prairie, Alberta.
Tolko has its own wood supply area with logging and hauling contracted, but will buy about 20% of its supply from private owners and nearby farmers. Eighty per cent of the raw material will be aspen with the balance in various pine species. The conifers will be handled in 8ft lengths.
Average log size is 71/2in with a minimum 3in top. The system will handle up to 20in diameter but this limit will not be reached. There is a nine-month logging season but most of the wood will arrive in the winter with up to 200 truckloads daily. Estimated annual consumption is 900,000m3.
The logs are trucked in through a scaling station to the decking area. The log yard is subcontracted using mobile equipment.
A front end loader feeds two conditioning ponds that will hold 16ft logs for eight hours of production. Pond temperature is between 40°C and 60°C. A separate feeding system handles 8ft logs, lengths that will make up about 20% of the raw material supply.
Two CAE Fuji King tumbling debarkers were chosen to handle the quite varied logs that can range from straight to knotty, dry or frozen. These can simultaneously and efficiently handle diameters of 2in and greater and lengths from 24in and up.
Barking plates are arranged to rock the logs as the rotor turns. Rotation speeds and the outlet gate regulate residence time to prevent over or under debarking.
A twin Tanguay PL460 crane installation assures continuous feeding to the two CAE 28/81 stranders producing targeted strands of 1x51/2in. Output of those goes to 600m3 wet bins. These provide nearly an hour of strands for the line. The cranes, hard-wired to computers, remotely control the head end of the operation.
The two energy units by CTS Energy, Marietta, Georgia, burn mill residues during the summer, but purchased fuel will be necessary during the winter. Residuals from debarking and bucking and from other areas of the plant are stored in bins and metered into the units that supply hot oil heat to the dryers, hot press, log conditioning ponds and, in the winter, to the plant building.
A West Salem Machinery hog processes residues. The 2,000m3 of ash produced annually will be land-filled. These energy units furnish 300oC heat to the twin Büttner 24ft by 80ft single pass rotary dryers as well as maintaining the mill temperature at 20°C, even in -45°C outside temperature. The outlet gas passes through an electrostatic precipitator and the dried flakes are then directed to 600m3 dry bins.
UMA did the detailed design work on all the chain conveyors and flake transportation systems in addition to its principal job of designing the entire plant.
The plant is self-sufficient for fuel in the summer, but requires extra fuel in the winter. The mill has about 26,000 connected horsepower and requires 16MW of incoming electrical power.
The strands are metered into the blender where they receive 3% MDI resin and 1.5% wax. Borden and Tembec supply resins.
Dieffenbacher took over at the forming line that includes metal detection, four forming heads, trim and cut-off saws and press feeder. The surface layer is parallel and the core is cross-oriented.
The huge 12-opening 12ftx24ft press has perforated platens with 1/4in holes providing steam injection to the mat. This feature, not yet in operation during our visit, enables pressing thicker boards with shorter press times.
The cauls impress serrations on one board face to provide a non-slip surface for workers when installing the OSB as roof sheathing.
Press emissions rise to a large hood from where an air suction system moves them through cyclones into baghouses.
Board density is 625kg/m3 with 1,000ft2 of board produced from 1.6m3 of wood. Although the plant can produce thicknesses from 1/4in to more than 1in, 4ftx8ftx7/16in will be the main product.
The glassed-in control room is located above and to the side of the main line. From here, operators and their computers control the forming line, press, dryers, and EFP.
Workers servicing the line from the formers to the press outfeed wear respirators for safety. Production workers work 12-hour shifts with four shifts allowing continuous operation.
The pressed boards offbear to the Globe finishing line that has a two-pass saw system that can cut boards from full 8ftx24ft down to 3ftx6ft. A paint booth and twin Samuel Acme strappers end the line.
The warehouse area beside the saws will hold 31/2 days’ production when the plant reaches full capacity. Both trucks and rail cars can be loaded inside the building as well as outside.
North America and the continent’s central north will be the mill’s main market. About 80% of the mill’s output will be rail shipped and the balance trucked.
Environmental considerations had high priority during mill planning. A high earth bank surrounds the plant and no effluents leave the site. There is a storm water pond which will contain all but 10-year events. Sewage lagoons and 1.25 million gallons of fire pond storage are on the site.
In case of an energy system shutdown, propane can provide heat for the mill with a small vertical standby boiler, but not for operations. Building temperature can be kept at 20°C during the cold winters.
For efficiency, all the offices are in one area. The laboratory adjoins the control room which, in turn, overlooks the forming and pressing line.
Others in the team include production manager Cedric Magic, technical manager Randy Thomas, woodlands manager Dave Knight, maintenance manager Pablo Carbajal, human relations manager Jim Hurd and controller Roger Cook.
Tolko Industries’ general manager for OSB and paper is Rick Huff, based in the company’s head office in Vernon, British Columbia.
Project safety supervisor Bob Callahan is particularly proud of the 850,000 man-hours that have gone into construction and start-up without a single lost-time accident.
Wabi was the general contractor on the project with Pyramid providing the electrical work. Hinz Automation did the electrical engineering and programming work. UMA Engineering Ltd of Vancouver, British Columbia carried the project from the preliminary feasibility study through to detailed engineering.
Allied Blower, Surrey, BC, did all the extraction systems. Grecon handled spark detection as well as the quality system including thickness, weight, and blow detection. The mill has six bag houses.
Although experienced managers and supervisors were recruited from the industry, operators and other hourly workers were hired locally. Management interviewed about 1,500 candidates for the 121 positions. “We did quite a lot of work with the aboriginal community, 30% of our operational group are aboriginese. Performance Associates was contracted to train them. They wrote technical manuals for the various responsibilities. Management individuals also received training,” said Mr Hillmann.
APA is the product inspection agency.
With Tolko holding 75% investment in the mill, the balance is owned by Crown Investments Corp, Meadow Lake Tribal Council, and Northwest Communities Wood Products. The organisation is a limited partnership.

Weyerhaeuser Company’s new US$80m Louisiana particleboard line at Simsboro, near Ruston, Louisiana, is in successful start-up after 16 months’ construction work. Classified as a modernisation, it amounts to the newest particleboard plant in the US. The product is called Ultra Pine.
The line’s capacity is more than 240,000 million ft2 annually, more than doubling that of the old mill started in 1971. On the environmental front, water consumption has been cut by 10% and air emissions limited, despite the doubled production.
Most of the work was accomplished under the previous owner, Willamette Industries, which was recently absorbed by Weyerhaeuser. But the near-flawless start-up is under the Weyerhaeuser flag. Manufacturing space is 510,000ft2.
General manager Darrell Keeling explained the background: “We started thinking about replacing this mill three years ago. The ultimate decision was to build a new particleboard mill in Carolina and rebuild here. One of the big things was the rail service and the people here. The east-west line that comes by the plant is one of the major southern main lines.”
He continued: “The main focus was to replace the old multi-opening press with the most modern technology we could buy and that was the continuous press. We wanted to be as automated as possible. The old plant had a lot of forklift handling which could result in product damage. The Lukki system took care of that.”
One goal was to provide customers with any desired size panel. With the previous 16ft multi-opening press they had been rather restricted. If a customer wanted a 12ft panel, a four foot tail was left. Now they cut a 24ft without loss.
All the mill’s production is sawn to order. Weyerhaeuser’s sales department, located in Fort Mill, South Carolina, handles sales for all particleboard and MDF and sends a weekly schedule to the mills. Locally, the schedule is optimised by master panel size yielding the least waste. The orders are input into the system to be filled at the saw.
Project manager Martin Elshout outlined: “The production line has a press operator, a line utility, and a couple of labourers for clean-up. Two people can run it from blending to the stacker. Most of the crew of 21 works in the finish end, taking panels from the saw and strapping.
“We are shipping up to 1,000 miles, but our primary target is going to be the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, and the upper Midwest. The Indiana furniture market has been one of our best markets,” he said.
The board properties are similar to the old mill’s, but the board can be four or five pounds lighter with reduced density. Instead of a 49lb or 50lb board, the line can run a 44lb or 45lb board.
Mr Elshout explained: “The continuous press technology and continuous line enables us to do that. Even though the board will be lower density we will still be able to make, or exceed, the same performance criteria as the old line. We’re just doing it with less density because of the consistency.”
Willamette engineers planned out all the concepts and equipment selection. Final engineering was accomplished by Mid-South Engineering Co, Hot Springs, Arkansas, with project management by Willamette’s Bob Duhé.
Blending, forming, pressing, sanding and sawing is all new along with two new core dryers. With some modifications, the mill maintained its hammermills, and screening room, which were moved to the new building.
Half the incoming shavings and sawdust originates in Weyerhaeuser sawmills and the rest comes from the market.
In the old mill installation trucks had to unhook from their trailers to unload, but the new Phelps truck dump handles both as a unit. Formerly, raw materials were stored outside, but a new building provides cover from the elements.
A Cat 950G front-end loader moves material from storage to the Pal roller screen to pull out the acceptable fines which go straight to the face dryer. Face overs are hammermilled. Core accepts go to the steam bin while overs are processed in a Jeffrey hog before steaming in a stainless steel vessel to soften them before refining in two Andritz 2,500hp units. There are four such refiners.
Flaps under the screen are adjustable to balance core and face material leaving the screen. All the silos are SHW. The mill has one screen for core refining and another for face refining. All the incoming plywood trim goes into core. “We don’t want ply trim in the face,” said Mr Elshout.
Part of the rebuild was the addition of a small Clayton 10,000lb/hour gas-fired steam generator, which replaced a much larger 30,000lb/hour steam boiler.
Green sawdust is pre-dried down to 25% moisture content in a Westec triple pass dryer before joining the dry shavings and final drying. Dry core material drops into the 80-unit dry core bin, ready for the blenders. Dry face material is transported in a high pressure blower system to a 60- unit face bin. Westec silos are installed.
Exhaust fans over the press and board cooler pull air into a duct to the four dryers and then to the Geo Energy RCO. This can be by-passed directly to the RCO.
“We considered separate systems from the press and the dryers but we didn’t really want to recirculate the gases out of our dryers. We did this to cut down on the sheer size of the RCOs. We have about 300,000ft3/minute capacity through our RCOs,” said Mr Elshout.
The mill has two face and two core resin tanks and tanks for urea, wax, and catalyst. Dynea currently supplies the resins.
Dosing heads on the top level feed through the bins into the Imal blenders where the resin, wax, urea and water mix on through the blenders. Injection screws add sander dust in the blender just after resin is added. This is mainly for the faces. None of the sander dust is burned. Then it’s on to the Metso Classiformer line.
The forming line, pre-press and press are all Dieffenbacher. The 10ft-wide 28- frame press is 36m long, operating at 410°F to 420°F, heated by thermal oil. Ten pumps circulate thermal oil, leaving the heat exchanger at 475°F, through 10 heating platens. Two main steel belts run on 9,000 rolling rods.
An automatic GreCon unit on the offbear side continuously monitors densities of the two surfaces and core with an Imal blow detector and thickness gauge also on-line. Automatic saws cut to master panel lengths.
Average thickness will probably be somewhat less than 5/8in. “The thinner board runs better on a continuous press and I think in good market conditions we’ll push for the thinner product,” Mr Elshout predicted.
The new continuous line means greater consistency. On the old multi-opening line, panels came out of the press at 0.06in to 0.10in over nominal thickness, while 0.02in is average on the new line. This means real material savings.
And thickness is more consistent across the board. Any inconsistencies would be quite apparent when thin paper overlays are employed in final board use.
Corvallis Tool (CTC), made the transport equipment from the blow detector to the offbear side of the grading and stacker.
Pressing, sanding, sawing is the normal manufacture order. The sanding line is Metso with an Imeas sander followed by an Imeas cross-belt sander. The cross-belt is Imeas’ first for wood products.
The tracked Lukki system handles stacks on steel pallets. It automatically moves bundles around, remembering their location and contents. The carrier has a 50,000lb capacity and receives its computer instructions from a radio antenna in the centre of the storage area. Metso furnished the computers.
At the computer Mr Elshout described the Lukki operation: “It shows me size, thickness, and number of pieces. If I want to know when it was produced, I can come here and I’ll have the production date and when stacking started. That particular bundle is 5/8in. It shows what time we started sanding it and what time we finished.”
The computers are located in the sanding and saw control rooms. Either of these operators may order the board they want.
Every pallet has its own code which applies to the Schelling book saw. The Schelling orders boards and cuts them for the final product, after which new bar codes are applied. The Schelling handles books 81/4in thick. The line is followed by three stacking stations and two automatic strapping lines.
Flamex fire detection is installed throughout the system and there are two water ponds for fire emergencies.
Shipping is evenly divided between rail and truck with major markets in the US South and Midwest. Indiana, Ohio, Arkansas and Texas are important.
Mr Elshout said the project had an excellent construction safety rate. “Our employees have really done a good job. Being part of the new project and continuing to run the old plant was a major challenge. We have a training centre in the front office. The first step was to get many of our veteran employees computer-literate. We wrote job manuals for the new equipment and many vendors helped with the training.”

Business is changing even for one of the newer particleboard mills in the US; Temple Inland’s, in the optimistically named town of Hope, Arkansas, in the US Southeast. And Hope has another claim to fame, as the ubiquitous signs emphasise. It is one of the former home towns of ex US President Bill Clinton.
Temple, a Texas-based company with four other particleboard plants, built the mill in 1996. Mid-South Engineering designed the mill and was the main construction contractor.
Temstock is the industrial grade product’s trade name.
This was based a good deal on purchased 15% moisture content southern yellow pine planer shavings. “But with the supplying mills focusing on yield in their processes, we’re seeing smaller fibre size to work with,” said Ron Tews, plant manager.
He continued: “Our supply is somewhat seasonal. During the wet winter months the supply side falls short of the demand curve. This time of year there is more material than we need.”
Temple has covered storage for 10,000 tons of material at 16% moisture content.
The mix is made mostly of dry planer shavings with a maximum of 30% green sawdust. A pre-dryer brings the sawdust down to 15% to 18%, according to Mr Tews, who explained that sawdust is limited mainly because of bark contamination. He doesn’t see the bark as a physical problem, more a cosmetic one.
He went on: “Other sources of wood fibre are a possibility, although we haven’t come to any definite alternatives. We’re evaluating, analysing, and using our applied research centre in Diboll, Texas. We have small scale prototypes of different material mixes.”
The bulk of Hope’s raw material comes from a 50-mile radius, delivered from such company sawmills as Weyerhaeuser, International Paper and Potlatch. Their mills generate more than they can use internally. The Hope mill also buys from other companies and private sawmill operators.
Production manager Wayne Hargraves, a 25-year particleboard veteran, leads us through the process.
The raw material is all southern yellow pine shavings with a 15% moisture content maximum. Trucks are weighed in and out with gross, net, and tare weight recorded. Payment is by tonnage.
From twin Phelps truck dumps the material is moved into the raw materials storage building with a capacity of 10,000 to 12,000 tons. A Volvo front-end loader moves it to Acrowood shaker screens. Overs, of more than 5/8in, go to a Bliss hog and back to a shaker screen. From there, core and face material is segregated. A metal detector is also installed in this flow.
From the milling area, the raw material goes to the green and dry SHW silos, which provide a surge capacity of 40 to 50 tons. Face stock goes to six Bliss hammer-mills and four Sprout-Waldron 1,250hp refiners from where it is blown to dry metering bins ahead of the dryers. The dry silo holds 40 to 50 tons – about 45 minutes of operating material.
Temple has conventional three-pass M-E-C dryers, a face dryer, core dryer, and a swing dryer that can handle either, but is mainly used for core. A McConnell sander dust burner is used as a heat source.
The dried material is conveyed to SHW dry silos from where it is conveyed to an Imal blending system, introducing Borden resin and wax, and to the Schenck forming line.
An air former lays the faces while a mechanical former lays down the core.
The mat proceeds to an hydraulic hot oil heated Washington Iron Works 10-opening 9ft x 25ft screen caul press where, for example, 3/4in panels are pressed for 310 seconds at 325°F. The big press produces 2,250ft2 in a single charge. The oil is heated in an M-E-C McConnell wood burner. “At the right moisture content, it doesn’t take much wood dust to make a good fire,” said Mr Hargraves.
Average thickness produced is 5/8in with a 11/8in maximum, but 1/2in production is increasing.
Offbearing panels spend 20 to 30 minutes in an 80-board cooler. The company sands before sawing and the panels proceed directly to the Steinemann eight-head, 9ft sander. The panels can be rough-stacked ahead of the sander.
Next comes the extensive Schelling book saw installation. The 9ft line provides the versatility to produce both 5ft- and 4ftwide stock and Temple is producing about an even mix between the two. Mr Tews sees a significant advantage in this, saying: “So far this year we have not experienced market down time like a number of 4ft plants.”
A Globe jumbo stacker handles large panel storage.
Allen Bradley PLCs are used throughout the mill. Direct computer communication is available to most of the equipment suppliers for remote troubleshooting.
There is an increasing amount of production to order. The mill ships (evenly divided between truck and rail) mainly to a 300 mile radius for such products as RTA (ready to assemble) furniture and kitchen cabinet products. Some goes to laminated products.
The mill operates four shifts, seven days a week, with 129 employees, all salaried. Employment policies guarantee a high-quality workforce. They have a quite strong testing regimen in basic maths, reading skills, and mechanical aptitude.
Mr Hargraves said: “The more jobs that you know and can demonstrate, the higher the opportunity for more income. We are definitely one of the higher paying employers in this area. We pay more, but we expect more.”
The company has on-the-job training for advancement.
“We operate with what we call CPI, continuous process improvement,” said Mr Tews. All employees are in one team or another pursuing improvement in their processes. It’s part of our daily routine.
The plant occupies 52 acres on a 142-acre site with 290,000ft2 under roof. It’s an interesting site, a World War II ammunition storage area that was thoroughly checked before construction. A few ammunition bunkers have been left intact.
The plant’s design capacity is 208 million ft2, 3/4in basis with a state air quality permit for 220 million. “Proactively, we gained the best technology,” Mr Tews said, We have RTO and wet ESP lines.”

The Del-Tin Fiber MDF plant near El Dorado in southern Arkansas, an imposing installation, is gradually working its way up to its full 150 million ft2 annual production of its trade marked Solidium board. Currently it produces at about 80%, running four shifts on a seven-day week with a total workforce of 122, including office staff.
This is a joint venture between Deltic Timber and Temple Inland. It provides a market for Deltic’s residues which supplies nearly half the plant’s raw material from its sawmills.
The original mill study was done by Mid-South Engineering, Hot Springs, Arkansas from the ground up, which also negotiated the joint venture as well as engineering the mill. Mid-South had worked with both Temple Inland and Deltic Timber for many years.
The other half of the raw material comes from International Paper (I-P) and Weyerhaeuser mills, other sawmills, and some chip mills. It all comes from within a 100-mile radius. Another wood residue company provides fuel for the heat energy plant.
The mill began production on southern yellow pine sawdust and chips, but is now running entirely on chips. The sawdust contributed heavily to dryer loads and drying is running at full capacity. There just isn’t capacity to pre-dry sawdust.
The raw material enters at a truck dump and goes out to the Finnish BMH stacker and reclaimer in outside storage. Another dump is dedicated to fuel – a mixture of pine and hardwood bark, and ground-up pallets. This is supplemented with green sawdust. Ground-up board trim also goes for fuel. General and plant manager Gary Griffis explained: “We shut off the sawdust. We’re much more consistent as a result today.”
Material entering the mill crosses BM&M shaker screens, separating material into fuel fines, overs and acceptable. Segregated material feeds into silos. Two augers meter out of the chip silo into face and core infeed conveyors. Metal detectors are located at both the truck dump and conveyors feeding into the refiners.
Chips go into a pre-steaming bin and then to the digesters and Andritz 8,000-hp 60in refiners. Emphasis has been on additional refining to provide a much more consistent fibre and, consequently, more homogeneous boards, and a high quality board. There is a parallel operation for face and core. Standard Borden UF resin is injected into the blow line with an atomizing nozzle just beyond the refiners. A scavenger system dilutes the resin and reduces formaldehyde emissions.
Dosed fibre is blown to the two-stage M-E-C face and core dryers. The first stage dries material to an 18 - 20% moisture content while the second takes it down to 12 - 14%. The first stage is heated by a Callidus heat plant, the second by hot oil from a heat exchanger served by off-gases from the Callidus plant. GreCon meters monitor moisture content, about 12%, after the second stage dryer.
Heat is captured all along the line. Fuel is hogged and goes to a mixing bin in the Callidus system where it is split between two kilns. A plug screw forces fuel into the feed end of these kilns, the goal being to gasify the fuel as it moves toward the flame front.
Off-gases containing the gasified fuel leave through ducts which feed into the large, secondary combustion chamber which is a big cross-over loop towering above the mill.
“At that point,” explained Mr Griffis, “we hit it with fresh air, providing oxygen. Then we get the combustion that produces the heat for our various uses.” However, this is supplemented with natural gas burners.
As the heat comes down the big duct it passes through an air-to-air heat exchanger. The introduced air comes from the press enclosure which includes formaldehyde fumes eliminated in the process. This air stream feeds the dryers from where the exhaust air passes through a recuperator – another air-to-air heat exchanger. The oxygen introduced into the Callidus system is the dryer exhaust.
As Mr Griffis pointed out: “We’re totally utilising and destroying all of our emissions through almost a triple pass.”
The flue gas stream headed toward the stack passes through a boiler making steam and then through the hot oil heat exchanger. The boiler produces steam for refining and turbines running some pumps/fans, and also hot oil for the second- stage dryer and the press. As the flue gases continue, they pass through an electrostatic precipitator.
All this isn’t easy. The dryer operator, in controlling moisture content, must have a constant supply of heat and the Callidus system must run consistently.
One operator has computerised control of the heat plant. The wood yard, refining and dryers are controlled by one operator, as is the forming and press line. All three are located in one control room. Each has a support person out in the mill. Entering the Schenck forming system, the material dumps into separate face and core forming bins. These feed into an air sifter that removes particles, resin spots, resin chunks or fibre balls too big to go through the press.
Mr Griffis explained: “At that point we enter our heating and humidification system where we heat the air stream and also inject steam to help increase fibre temperature and control moisture again. The material goes to the infeed cyclone which dumps the fibre onto infeed conveyors. These are parallel systems.”
The face infeed cyclone has a diverter to split face material between top and bottom faces. Core material goes to the core infeed cyclone and this dumps onto the core infeed conveyor. These three infeed conveyors go to a Schenck swivel-belt conveyor that lays the fibre into the forming bin, distributing it evenly across the width. Out of the forming bin the material goes through Schenck mechanical formers which distribute the fibre evenly through the forming line belts. There are three formers: bottom face, core, and top face.
Each former has a weight scale and GreCon moisture meters on the core and top face. The mat goes through a Schenck 1900 PLI pre-compressor then another metal detector to protect the press, adjustable trim saws and Grecon density gauge. Next is a reject opening through which a mat can be recycled at full line speed out to the core forming bin. All this is automatic except for changing line width by moving the saws in and out. The Schenck line was supplied by Dieffenbacher.
The mats transfer to the 9ft wide, 38m long, Küsters continuous press equipped with automatic chain guides. It can press material from l/8in to 1in. Del-Tin runs from 7/32in to 7/8in. Berndorf of Austria supplied the continuous steel belts.
Entering temperature is about 415°F and maximum pressure is 750psi per frame. The 65 frames can be controlled independently. Each has a pressure pot row with nine 10in diameter cylinders across the press’ width. These provide the pressure. On top of it is the hot oil heating platten. On top of this is a multitude of small roller chains transferring the heat from heating platen to the stainless steel belt then to the mat in the middle. On the top is another steel belt, roller chain and heating platen. Heat can be changed by zone, while pressure can be changed per frame.
“If you are running something requiring higher density you put on a lot of pressure in the infeed,” said Mr Griffis. “If you’re running thicker boards, you go further into the press before you apply higher pressures.
“Küsters is the only press with these small roller chains which provide much more flexibility in the product mix because of heat transfer.” Del-Tin selected the press because of its ability to run thin boards with higher and more uniform heat transfer across the mat, he explained.
“The idea in pressing a mat is that you have to keep it in there long enough to cure it,” Mr Griffis explained. “That’s getting the centre of the mat to 212°F to remove the water, turn it to steam and then you have your mat cured. That happens around frame 40 or so. Then you begin to adjust the thickness on your board. The thinner you get, press dwell time is shorter. You can run your press faster.”
Next are two Dieffenbacher flying cutoff saws. Leaving that area the pressed panels go through a thickness gauge. “We try to keep thickness variation across the panel to plus or minus three or four thousandths [of an inch],” said Mr Griffis. “You don’t want the sander removing any more material than absolutely necessary.”
The outfeed side was supplied by Metso. Three star coolers allow the board to cool with some post-curing. Panels are then automatically stacked and can go directly to the sander or to the Lukki storage area. The Lukki is an automatic retrieval system. This computerised overhead hoist on rails uses steel pallets. It puts a stack into one of 54 cells and logs the products’ ID, thickness, width and length into the database. When the sander is ready for that particular product, providing the sander is not running behind the line, the operator types in a request and the Lukki goes out, picks it up and takes it to the sander.
It does the same for the large Schelling book saw system, but this can run independently.
It cuts lengthwise first, then rips and cross-cuts, feeding to two stacking lines. The computerised priority for the Lukki is press first, then sander and the saws third.
The sanding line was by Metso, except for the sander itself, a Kimwood eight-head, nine foot wide sander that has primary and secondary sections. The primary’s job is to remove most of the bulk and, secondary, is the finishing sander producing a desired finish up to 150-grit. This is the largest sander ever built by Kimwood and is followed by a Kimwood cross-belt sander which finishes and removes lengthwise marks. It produces a finish similar to 180- grit belt. The operator’s cab also houses the grader who will send to one of two grade bins: A or B. Strapping is by Signode. Some 5% to10% of shipping is railed. The rest is truck shipped.