Forest Products Industry Says Goodbye To Walter

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

 

Walter Jarck, whose career in the forest products industry spanned 65 years and ranged from logging machinery to engineered wood products, died January 3, surrounded by his children, in North Wilkesboro, NC. He was 92.

 

Jarck spent the last two decades of his life trying build a high scale, commercial production TimTek (formerly Scrimber) composite lumber manufacturing facility, and nearly pulled it off; but long before then as a forest engineer he was a pioneer innovator of pulpwood loading and forwarding machinery, and log harvesting and processing machinery.

 

Jarck was born on May 7, 1931 in Queens, New York, and learned a hard work ethic from his immigrant parents. It was when he moved with his mother to the Catskill Mountains of New York that he fell in love with the woodlands.

 

He graduated in 1953 from the New York College of Forestry at Syracuse and entered Naval Officer Candidate School. He became a destroyer officer and ultimately retired from the Naval Reserves as a Captain. He recalled while in the Navy working with ships and mechanical, propulsion, steam and hydraulic systems.

 

Upon leaving the Navy he went to work for Caterpillar Tractor Co. as a logging engineer and spent a year in their sales training program and experienced the welding, mechanical and engine shops and was involved in the development of root rakes. “By the time I left I knew how a scraper was built, how a bulldozer was built, so I was really turned on by that,” Jarck said.

 

In 1958 he moved to the South and went to work as a forest engineer for Bowater, which was building a paper mill in Catawba, SC. “My boss said, ‘we have a six hundred million dollar paper mill being built and we’re going to be relying on the sweat of a few laborers to hand load and to bring wood in. There’s got to be a better way.’”

 

While Jarck was supervising the construction of buildings and wood yards for the new mill, he started looking at ways to mechanize logging equipment, which would alleviate the traditional practice of mills having to stockpile six months of logs in their wood yards to overcome the winter weather.

 

In the early 1960s Jarck led the development of the Go Getter pulpwood forwarder and in the mid 1970s working with Charles Allen the Allen Jarck Harvester for felling pulpwood and processing it into sticks, an early version of today’s cut-to-length machinery.

 

In 1982 Jarck joined Georgia-Pacific as assistant vice president and senior forester. He was involved in policy making and in several acquisitions. He retired in 1996 from Georgia-Pacific as corporate director of forest resources and then taught industrial forestry courses at the University of Georgia for several years.

 

Jarck was far from retired. In 2001 he and partner Geoff Sanderson acquired the world rights to the Scrimber technology from the Australia government interests that invented it in the mid 1970s. Scrimber was produced from small plantation trees to form a reconsolidated wood product with uniform properties comparable to sawn timber.

 

Jarck and Sanderson formed TimTek (they didn’t purchase the Scrimber name) and their newly formed company purchased the pilot plant in Australia and relocated it to the campus of Mississippi State University.

 

They wanted to build a true scale plant that would produce a product up to 48 in. in width, up to 6 in. in thickness and almost any length. TimTek beams, they said, would compete favorably in the large sizes for trusses, garage door headers, joists, rimboards and long-span structural timbers.

 

Jarck wrote: “Our process can best be summarized by crushing the debarked small diameter stems in a scrimming mill, then drying the scrim or mat of fibers, adding adhesives, collating the mats, steam pressing, then cutting to size and finishing. The resource can be softwood or hardwood in the 4-8 in. diameter classes. Resources of this nature are available at delivered prices that are one-fourth or one-fifth the cost of resources purchased in the sawtimber or veneer log categories.”

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.”