Grateful Dead Head by May Donnell

Loggers in Maine commenced chopping down pine in the southern part of the state as early as 1621. At the time, Plymouth Colony was the latest big thing in domestic adventure. Over the next 250 years or so, the loggers slowly moved north toward and through a vast supply of yellow birch, maple and spruce growing along the state’s remote hardwood ridges.

Between 1830 and 1855, years when the concept of Manifest Destiny ignited with housing and commercial development in America, Bangor, Maine was one of the busiest logging ports in the world. Historians speculate that 8.7 billion board feet of old-growth hardwood logs passed through the town during this 25-year period. They also guess an additional 7-10% of those logs was lost on its perilous way to the mills.

Operations Bench Mark by Wade Camp

Benchmarking is one of the most valuable management tools used to discover competitive positions. Periodic comparison of key success drivers, such as yields and costs, against “best-in-class” is the first step in continuous improvement. While 2008 seems long ago at this point in the 2009 calendar, it’s good to establish baseline data. With baseline data we can explore how markets may behave going forward.

Large-sample surveys, when participation is greater than 30 respondents, can provide insight into the population of all sawmills across the South. Then, we can assign, with confidence, maximum, minimum, averages and quartiles to mills within the population and build industry cost curves. This article explores some of the cost competitiveness shifts since 2005.

Optimizing For Grade by David Abbott

We’re just trying to keep our head above water in this lumber market.” That’s the word from David Richbourg, Plant Manager at H.W. Culp Lumber Co., a third-generation family-owned company producing heat treated southern yellow pine lumber. So far, so good; although hours have been cut, there have been no layoffs yet.

Culp has weathered many storms, and continued to increase production capacity through all of them; in fact doubling capacity in the past 20 years. Richbourg says this is primarily through greater efficiency and recovery, not by adding more shifts or hours.

Equipment & Supplier News

Router Bit Service, High Point, NC, has purchased a new Williams & White “Sure Sharp KGPM 120” bed knife grinder. Williams & White has another similar machine in operation at Canfor in Graham, NC, so Router Bit Service owners Scott Andrews and son Scott Jr., who researched several options, were able to contact head filer John Bolin and view the machine in operation as well as gain some feedback on the reliability of the machine.

The machine in Graham has been in operation for 13 years and Bolin and his staff have maintained the service requirements so the machine still looks and runs well. After a short time speaking with the staff that operates it each day, the Andrews were convinced that the Williams & White machine was the direction they needed to go in.

Hard News In The Making

Rex Lumber, Bristol, Florida, is the new name for the former North Florida Lumber southern yellow pine operation owned by the McRae family. The family’s other sawmill operation will remain Rex Lumber, Graceville, Florida.

In 1926, W.D. McRae founded Rex Lumber Co. on the very site that Rex Lumber in Graceville, Fla. sits today. In 1980, the McRae family sold the Graceville mill and founded North Florida Lumber in Bristol, Fla. In 2001, the family purchased the Graceville site back, returning to the historic name Rex Lumber, and building a state-of-the-art lumber manufacturing plant that began operating in 2003.

New Products & Technologies

Now you can edge and trim for grade and value without replacing your current scanning system. Today’s demands for increased recovery, faster throughput, lower cost and higher grade require more than geometric-based decisions. BioVision combines color vision technology with high density geometric scanning to deliver the highest value optimized decisions for grade and recovery, based on detection of natural and manufacturing defects, and configurable grade allowances per product.

BioVision’s modular design allows mills to easily implement this technology with a bolt-on upgrade to an existing transverse geometric scanner, or through a complete installation of both geometric and vision scanning systems right from the start. Independent geometric and BioVision modules allow for a controlled migration from time-tested geometric scanning to the world of BioVision grade scanning.

To Save You, Why Must I Kill You? by David Abbott

It’s an old theme. Sometimes, we try so hard to save something, our efforts actually cause its destruction. For instance:

I was sitting in a waiting room last week, flipping through a copy of Newsweek, dated August 3. In the letters page, Colin Stuart of San Francisco wrote a response to an article in a previous issue in which the magazine had declared the recession was over (if that were so, he pointed out, no one could tell based on job availability).