At Large
Industry Developments
Dept. of Wood Science and Forest Products at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va., will hold its annual Wood Week September 15-19. Activities include the largest university-sponsored career fair in North America for the forest products sector.
Wood Week 2008 will be held on the Virginia Tech campus. The Wood Week Career Fair is scheduled for Thursday, September 18.
Feature
Pellet Machine Roundup
Andritz Sprout pellet mills are designed and built on the basis of 50 years of experience and produce top quality products for animal feed, aqua feed and biomass products. The pellet mills are designed for conventional steam pelleting or expander pelleting. Modular design allows for upgrading to meet future requirements.
The roll adjustment systems allow quick, simple and very accurate roll adjustment. The pellet mills range in size from 40 to 800 HP with 620 to 14,000 cm2 (90 to 2,200 sq in.) of die working area.
Pellet Snapshot by Dan Shell
Once relegated to a minor forest products industry product, with lumber and boards and panels taking priority, wood fuel pellets are developing into a major product line as home heating fuel prices rise, and as international and domestic efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and conserve fossil fuels build momentum.
Traditionally within the forest products industry, a lumber mill—usually in the Northern U.S. or Canada, in an area where wood is regularly used for home heating—might have a small pellet-making operation on the side to sell into local or regional wood fuel pellet markets. But now, major pellet-producing facilities are popping up across the U.S. and Canada.
Recover Uplift by Tonya Cooner-Vots
Looking back over the past several months, Troy Lumber President Fred L. Taylor says it may not have been the wisest idea to install two major pieces of sawmill machinery at the same time, but it was the only way they could get things working the way they wanted. “It was a double challenge, but we had all the right people to make this happen in the time we needed it to,” Taylor says.
This 2008 upgrade comes 12 years after a fire caused by complications resulting from Hurricane Fran in 1996. A post-fire project targeted rebuilding the mill to keep the company alive. “We didn’t go for state-of-the-art anything, but what we could afford that we could get in,” Taylor recalls. “It may have cost us, but it got us up and running again.” Production following that upgrade leveled out at 65MMBF annually.
Where Plant Roads Meet Public Roads by Larry Carter
Entering and exiting public roadways at industrial plant locations is something just about all of us experience on a regular basis. At first glance, it may appear that little thought or planning needs to go into the layout and design of a plant entrance. But a careful observer quickly recognizes both a good entrance and a poorly planned access. A truly safe plant entrance requires careful consideration of many variables for the benefit of employees, suppliers and patrons as well as the public motorist who may never enter your facility.
Who Owns the Timberland? by David Stauth
Almost all large, publicly-traded forest product companies have shed their timberlands in the past 20 years, a reflection of global economic pressures, new tax laws and other forces—and this phenomenon has changed the very nature of commercial forestry.
In their place are new real estate investment trusts and timberland investors that are focused on maximizing their profits, mixed in with remaining small and private forest landowners and companies struggling to survive. These wide-ranging changes are poorly understood and may not serve the best long-term interests of society, according to recent studies in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University.
Working Outdoors by Jennifer McCary
Picture a narrow winding ribbon of pavement covered in an arched green canopy of overhanging hardwood trees lining either side. That’s the view that greets visitors to the quaint community of Pomfret Center, home to two century-old private boarding schools and a population of nearly 4,000. It is also home to Hull Forest Products, a family-owned sawmill and forestry service established more than 40 years ago.
Owners Bill Hull, his sons Sam and Ben, and daughter Mary have taken a leadership role in ensuring that picture perfect greenscapes remain part of southern New England’s heritage through responsible forest management and conservation. Two-thirds of the company’s 12,000 acres of timberland are third party FSC certified through the Smartwood program. Conservation easements ensure that the land will forever remain productive working forests providing jobs, resources, wildlife habitat, open space and recreation.
Machinery Row
Equipment & Supplier News
Mike Almond of Australia has purchased controlling interest in the newly formed company of HALLCO Industries Inc. The innovator of the Live Floor conveyor system, Olof Hallstrom, and his wife Mary have sold their interests in HALLCO.
Almond owns a transport company, B Mountain Industries, in Newcastle on the East Coast of Australia. Mountain Industries has been involved in trucking and rail operations since 1980, employs 150 and runs in excess of 100 subcontract owner/drivers in the trucking fleet. The company also owns grain storage and fertilizer distribution sites in the Australian grain belt. Almond has represented the HALLCO product in Australia and SE Asia since 1987 when he first visited Tillamook and met the Hallstrom family.
Newsfeed
Hard News In The Making
U.S. Green Building Council is looking at the involvement of additional certification bodies in the LEED Green Building Rating System for the use of certified wood. Currently, only wood products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council are eligible for LEED points.
Under newly proposed credit language, wood certification systems would be evaluated for eligibility to earn points using a measurable benchmark that includes: governance, technical/standards substance, accreditation and auditing, chain of custody and labeling
Product Scanner 10
New Products & Technologies
A four wheel drive articulated forklift, the TX4-300, is the latest addition to the TX Series at Taylor Machine Works. The 132" wheelbase TX4-300 has a rated capacity of 30,000 lbs. at 24" load center. Designed and built specifically to overcome the challenges of rough and undeveloped working surfaces, the TX4 also incorporates the innovative and performance-proven features of the TX Series introduced by Taylor in 2007.
Front and rear drive axles are heavy-duty planetary axles bolted to the chassis with hypoid ring gear and pinion. Power is provided by a Tier-certified 6-cylinder 190 HP electronic turbocharged, charge air after-cooled diesel. Completing the power train is a 4-speed, fully reversing, modulated powershift transmission with inching and standard automatic powershift control. The rugged chassis utilizes a two-piece joint providing superior strength and mobility between the front and rear sections. The manual forward-tilting cab is standard and is mounted on an all
The Issues
That Owl Thing Again by David Abbott
According to recent reports by the Associated Press, environmental conservationists are not satisfied—surprise—with a recently revised recovery plan for the northern spotted owl that includes increased logging of old-growth forests. According to the Wildlife Society, the Society for Conservation Biology and the American Ornithologists Union, the new plan will cause the destruction of 20-50% of currently protected spotted owl habitat. Their scientists say that the spotted owl population has continued to decline by 4% a year for the last 15 years.
The AP headline reads, “Spotted owl habitat slashed as population declines,” immediately giving the reader the idea that the two have a causal connection. “The Bush administration has decided the northern spotted owl can get by with less old growth forest habitat as it struggles to make its way off the threatened species list,” according to the article.