Fletcher Building orders Fine OSB plant from Dieffenbacher

The plant will be built at Fletcher Building’s Laminex site in Taupo, in the centre of the country’s North Island. The new plant will include Dieffenbacher’s new Belt Dryer.

The new Belt Dryer is an example of how Dieffenbacher technology will support the sustainability of the new plant. It is designed with a low thermal energy consumption, works at lower temperatures than drum dryers and can use low-calorific energy from the waste heat of other plant components that would otherwise remain unused. Furthermore, it can be used in combination with cogeneration.

Fletcher Building’s new CEBRO plant will have the flexibility to produce Fine OSB (an OSB core layer covered top and bottom by layers of particleboard) and conventional OSB. 

Dieffenbacher will also supply an energy plant, a debarking line, purchased material infeed, strand production, a MAIER Impact Mill, the screening and air grading, material recovery, glue preparation, glue dosing and gluing systems, the forming station and forming line, a CPS+ continuous press with Press Emission Control System, raw board handling, pneumatic systems, electrics and automation, the digitalization solution EVORIS and the digital service platform MyDIEFFENBACHER. 

In addition, Dieffenbacher subsidiary B. Maier Zerkleinerungstechnik GmbH is responsible for engineering the entire wood yard up to the strander.

The new CEBRO plant will replace a particleboard production line featuring an almost 50-year-old single-opening press supplied by DIEFFENBACHER to Fletcher Building in 1974. 

“It’s remarkable that our old press served us so well and for so long,” said Paul Thorn, Fletcher Wood Products, capital works manager at Fletcher Building.

Construction in Taupo will begin in early 2024. Start-up is scheduled for the fourth quarter of the same year, and full-scale production by mid-2025.