Taking Stock: The Long Pedigree Of Toil

Article by Rich Donnell, Editor-in-Chief, Panel World

The engineered wood products industry is a small world, when you consider the few number of EWPs that have made it into the commercial mainstream.

One product that comes to mind that never found its footing is Scrimber. A researcher with an Australian governmental group is credited with inventing the product in the mid 1970s. It was an engineered lumber produced from small trees, and said to have uniform and construction strength properties for traditional lumber, beams and header applications. Logs in the 3-8 in. diameter range produced from early radiata pine thinnings were debarked and run through a scrimming machine where the log was crushed to form a mat of interconnected long strands, followed by drying, adhesives application and steam pressing.

Georgia-Pacific took a look at it but backed off. In 2000, a former GP corporate director gained rights to Scrimber research and technology, renaming the product TimTek, and a couple of years after that principals with Shuqualak Lumber in Mississippi formed Loblolly Industries in anticipation of starting a plant in Meridian, Miss. to produce Scrimtec, their new nomenclature for Scrimber-TimTek.

To this day, you continue to hear Scrimber development rumblings— more dimensional stability, greater fire retardancy, hardwood Scrimber, bamboo Scrimber, etc. Think of the number of people through almost 50 years who have tried to refine Scrimber.

One man who seemed to be on the verge of a product breakthrough, not with Scrimber, but with a product called Cross Laminated Strand Timber (CLST), was Graeme Black, CEO of Lignor in Australia. He died suddenly in East Melbourne on October 26, leaving behind an extended family. You may have met him when he made a presentation at PELICE in 2020.

He formed Lignor to develop and patent products and processes entailing stranding technology. Most recently it was CLST, touted as a stronger version of traditional cross-laminated timber, while using underutilized juvenile species and performing with a lower carbon footprint. In fact in a recent issue of Panel World, Graeme and Lignor announced intentions to construct a CLST plant in Maine with a $25 million investment.

Following his MBA from the London Business School, Graeme had been a director of Craigpine Timber and Simmonds Lumber, served as a consultant in numerous projects and was genuinely devoted to forest sustainability and the environmental attributes of wood products.

Upon Graeme’s death, the Lignor web site stated, “Graeme was a visionary leader. He brought to the team a vast experience in business and a pioneering spirit that inspired us all every day. He also brought the personal qualities of intellectual curiosity, kindness and resolve.”

Rosboro Grows With Glulam

Article by Dan Shell, Senior Editor, Panel World

SPRINGFIELD, Oregon – During the past decade-plus, Rosboro has made several major moves and undergone big changes, including the introduction of a revolutionary glulam product, the sale by family ownership to institutional investors in 2016 that included selling its timberlands—and subsequent acquisition by One Equity Partners in 2021. Along the way, the company has upgraded its operations and is on the cusp of a major expansion.

“Not much has changed fundamentally for us—we’re still the same company with the same values and focus,” says Brian Wells, Rosboro Senior Vice President of Markteing & Strategic Development. However, no longer having that readily available and low-cost timber base to help absorb market impacts has made the company more responsive, he believes.

“The lack of timber has forced us to get better at what we do,” Wells says. “We make moves every day to respond to the market.” He adds that “at the end of the day we believe in our position as the top producer of glulam in North America—and we intend to keep growing that position.”

Rosboro is a legendary name in West Coast forest products manufacturing, founded when the Caddo River Lumber Co. moved west from Rosboro, Arkansas in 1939 and began producing lumber on the site it still occupies in Springfield. Veneer and plywood operations were added in 1959, and the company opened its first glulam plant in 1963. A pioneer then as now, Rosboro’s plant was the first to use a continuous fingerjoint line, RF glue curing and machine-rated lamstock.

GLULAM SUCCESS

A big part of Rosboro’s glulam market strength comes from X-Beam, the company’s full framing width stock architectural glulam introduced in 2010. The product turned heads and drew a slew of skeptics when it hit the market: priced the same as previous architectural beams but with more wood fiber to fit wall framing widths, many believed the product was leaving money on the table. However, X-Beam’s benefits, which include uniformity with standard framing widths, fewer SKUs for wholesalers to stock and better construction performance such as reduced shimming and other job-site alterations and modifications, won over the market.

GP Takes Patchwork To Another Level

Article by David Abbott, Senior Editor, Panel World

MADISON, Georgia – This June, Georgia-Pacific’s Madison plywood plant started up two new Raute automated poly patch lines, part of an ongoing shift towards automation company-wide. Since 2016, G-P has invested well over $65 million in capital projects at Madison, much of it in automating formerly manual positions.

Previously, the mill repaired small defects manually, with up to three people on each line per shift doing that repetitive job, according to Madison Plant Manager Tony Brown (who was promoted three months ago to a regional manager position, meaning he now overseas not only Madison but also G-P’s plywood facility in Gurdon, Arkansas.).

Most plywood mills patch unsawn panels, but G-P opts to patch sawn panels. It’s a more efficient approach, Brown believes. “It allows us to grade that panel visually at the panel saw so we come to the patch line with just the panels we know fit a certain grade and can be fixed.” This method, he says, prevents a lot of wasted time kicking out panels with too many defects to be patched or panels that don’t need to be patched.

Another benefit: greater precision and less error. With a manual operation, employees visually determine if defects fall within grade rule size parameters for patching. “So I am depending on a human to make that judgment call,” Brown says. “A computer can do that a lot better than a human eye can. With imaging software, it knows exactly within a millimeter what diameter that knot is, the length of that split, and it knows whether it meets grade rules or not, in a fraction of a second.”

Swanson Group: Leader In Overlay

Article by Dan Shell, Senior Editor, Panel World

SPRINGFIELD, Oregon – Closely watched as one of two major plywood plant rebuild projects following disasters in 2014—a tornado at a plant in Mississippi in April and a fire at Swanson Group’s plant here in July—the Swanson plywood plant here really hit its stride several years ago after becoming fully operational in 2017, says Swanson Group President and CEO Steve Swanson. The facility is a top supplier of HDO and MDO plywood products and a top tier plywood producer overall.

After announcing the rebuilding project in January 2015, the Swanson Group sought to get the facility back up ASAP. Considering the economic climate and overall market strength, Swanson says it was a bit of a “desperate time” for the company, and he couldn’t build the mill “by just throwing everything at it” like major capital projects in the past.

As the mill started up in 2016 and first began peeling, Swanson leveraged production immediately, first selling green open market veneer, then dry veneer as the various production equipment came on line.

“Finally we started laying up some product (late 2016), but all the while we were trying to preserve our market share in overlay,” Swanson says. During construction the company had leased the old Pacific States Plywood plant nearby to make some basic, one-step overlays. Not the best idea, since the facility wasn’t designed for it, he says. “But we were able to make some product there.”

Swanson also moved a small amount of overlay production to its Glendale, Oregon commodity plant. Again, both situations were less than ideal, but the commitment to the overlay market remained.

The same commitment has come into play more recently: As sheathing prices skyrocketed several years ago, Swanson could have halted its overlay program, reduced costs and chased the market with almost all sheathing products.

Some of the sales staff wanted to do just that, but the company didn’t. “Instead, we stayed with our overlay program and actually increased our overlay market share during that time,” Swanson says, adding that many mills that had dabbled in overlay products made the switch to sheathing, which provided more of an opening to expand overlay output.

“We gradually increased prices as costs have gone up, and we have maintained a margin in that product,” Swanson says. “I think today we’re the largest overlay producer in North American, certainly from a single facility.”