Industry Developments

Benson Monroe Jones, who owned and operated Longleaf Lumber Co. with sawmills in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, and later established Ben Jones Machinery to buy and sell sawmill machinery, died March 20 in Columbus, Ga. He was 90.

As a Marine pilot in World War II with the VMB-423 bombing squadron, Jones earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal for his duty in the South Pacific Theater.

Jones was known as the “man who bought the town” of Vredenburgh, Ala. in 1964, after a fire destroyed the mill in the small sawmill town.

2009 Expo

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following companies, and others, were invited to submit the following material because they are advertising in this issue and also exhibiting at SFPA Expo. All of the information is directly attributable to the respective companies.

Lean Integration by Mike Lipke

The decision to integrate LEAN Manufacturing concepts and techniques into a business signifies a substantial commitment to the future direction of the organization. In order for LEAN to be effective it must become an integral part of every aspect of daily operations. When incorporated as part of an overall business strategy and used properly as a tool for change it can transform employees into high performing groups committed to continuous improvement.

The foundational elements of the most successful businesses are the mission and vision statements. They outline why the business exists, tell employees what its objectives are, and describe the values that are important. The best statements clearly identify what the business goals are in broad, inspirational terms. They give employees guidance regarding their purpose and expected behavior as key members of the company. Like the trunk of a tree they provide the support base from which all other aspects of the company grow.

Smooth Transition Stud Mill by Dan Shell

During the past decade, Simpson Lumber Co.’s—formerly Caffall Brothers—sawmill here has made a transition from long-time major cedar fencing manufacturer to producer of high-quality “Gold Label™” studs. Caffall Brothers had completed the stud mill transition by early ’05, and the mill was sold to Simpson in December ‘06. Today, Simpson’s Longview Lumber Operations mill is a green-only Douglas fir stud manufacturer, producing up to 160MMBF annually, markets permitting.

Rick Wood, plant manager who’s been at the mill since 1996, says that though the operation was one of the industry’s top cedar fencing producers, there was no specialized equipment, and the only optimized machine was an older Coe board edger. In 2001, Caffall Brothers began a series of projects to upgrade and ultimately switch the sawmill to a new product line.

Stable Log Position by David Abbott

When Langdale Forest Products rebuilt its sawmill in 1998, the company decided to go with a double length infeed feeding a canter/quad. “Everyone was doing DLIs then and we thought it was a good idea,” according to Vice President and General Manager Jim Langdale. “We were not as excited about its effectiveness as we thought we would be. It served its purpose but we never thought we made as good a cant as we should.”

The major problem, they eventually determined, was presenting the log to the sharp chain in the right position. “We would rotate a log, put it on the DLI and it would have 55 ft. to travel,” Langdale explains. “That is where we never felt like we got a real good job through the canter. With all the old DLIs you get some movement or rotation from the original scan as the log travels.”

Equipment & Supplier News

Randy Hill, President of Advanced Trailer, announced that the University of Idaho has been selected as the recipient of a grant his company will fund to study the application of Advanced Trailer’s agricultural crop drying trailer for biomass.

The application will remove moisture from wood chips which are used as fuel for the University of Idaho’s steam boiler plant located at the campus in Moscow, Idaho.

“The prior testing has shown that the trailer works and it does the job,” Hill said in announcing the grant. “But we were looking for a facility or institution that had an actual application where we could daily see the benefits of lowering moisture in biomass products used to fuel a plant.”

Hard News In The Making

Sawmill Efficiencies, Cutting Tools and Wood Bioenergy are the three primary subjects that will be discussed during Expo University, the conference portion of the SFPA Forest Products Machinery & Equipment Exposition to be held June 11-13 at the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.

Expo University will be held the first two mornings, June 11-12, and feature 21 speakers, with the three topic sessions running simultaneously in adjacent meeting rooms. The conference is coordinated by SFPA in collaboration with Hatton-Brown Publishers, Inc., publishers of Timber Processing, Southern Lumberman, Wood Bioenergy and other wood industry publications.

New Products & Technologies

This year marks Cone Machinery’s 25th year of serving the sawmill industry and on the occasion Cone is introducing a line of Blue Diamond Log Shavers that produce high volumes of shavings (more than 8 tons or 100 cubic yards of green shavings per hour) for poultry operations and equine bedding. The Cone log shavers are simple in design and inexpensive to operate, typically they can be run by one man, and utilize low-cost 8 ft. pulpwood logs.

Cone has also recently introduced a process that extends existing Mark II CNS infeeds to incorporate the use of three-dimensional log scanning to greatly improve the recovery of older sawmills. Call 229-228-9213.

We’ll Always Have Expo by Rich Donnell

Okay, it’s not as sexy as “We’ll always have Paris,” as Rick said to Ilsa near the conclusion of Casablanca, but the SFPA Expo is one of the few things participants in the lumber industry can count on. And frankly with times as tough as they are, it’s nice to have something, anything, that we know will be there.

The SFPA Expo is not what it used to be. I’m not saying that it’s worse than it used to be. It’s just different, and in many ways better. I remember when the show was as much logging equipment as it was sawmill equipment. It’s been a sawmill equipment show for some time now, and not surprisingly its size has dwindled due to consolidations and so forth, and its size has contracted even more this year due to the economy.