JULY 2022

Georgia-Pacific Touches Up Diboll Lumber

Article by Jessica Johnson, Senior Associate Editor, Timber Processing

DIBOLL, Texas – After 125 plus years, a sawmill starts to show its age. But for Diboll Lumber, which is part of the impressive portfolio of SYP mills in Georgia-Pacific’s hat, age ain’t nothin’ but a number. Sort of. For Plant Manager Danny Wright, who started as an off-the-street hire as a young man, some of the machines might be vintage, but the heart of the plant beats strong. And that’s thanks to the dedication of the employee base; 185 are currently on staff.

Wright says, “We’ve added some pieces and upgraded, but the majority of the equipment is ’99 model. What’s the secret? It’s the people. We’ve got multi-generational employees working here. It’s their community, they want to see it flourish. We’ve kept it going for a lot of years.” That pride in the beating and banging that often goes hand-in-hand with operating a sawmill that has been different “sawmills” since Temple-Inland first opened, and a recent string of capital investments has maintained Diboll Lumber’s place on the sawmill map, increasing capacity to 280MMBF and securing its place as a modernized mill.

But even with those investments, Wright is quick to stick to his (and the mill’s) roots. The latest and biggest investment since 1999 was to two of the facility’s batch dry kilns—essentially bringing them up to current Wellons specs.

And thanks to the re-tube and re-skin of Diboll’s existing units, the batch kilns aren’t breaking down as frequently as they once were. What was the biggest bottleneck in the mill was handled with a 16-day shutdown of the boiler and kilns with more than 100 contractors on-site. By re-tubing, replacing all the sheet metal (re-skinning) these two Wright says are basically new. “And we moved our bottleneck from the kilns to making the sawmill feel the pressure,” Wright laughs.