by Web Editor | Jul 12, 2017 | News
Oregon-based Roseburg Forest Products will expand its operations in the southeastern United States with construction of a new engineered wood products plant in Chester, S.C. Roseburg publicly announced the project July 11 at a joint news conference with officials representing the state of South Carolina and Chester County.
“This is an exciting strategic growth opportunity in a business that has done well for us,” Roseburg President and CEO Grady Mulbery said. “With the continued increase in housing starts in the southeastern U.S., we see ongoing demand growth for engineered wood products in the region and elsewhere. We are grateful to state and local officials in Chester for their hard work and collaborative efforts to facilitate this project.”
Groundbreaking on the planned state-of-the-art manufacturing facility is expected in early 2018, with anticipated operation start-up in mid-2019. Once completed, the plant will create 148 full-time jobs.
“This new plant will be the most technologically advanced manufacturing facility of its kind in the world with the highest capacity continuous LVL press in the world,” said Steve Killgore, Roseburg’s Senior Vice President of Solid Wood Business. “Expanding our manufacturing capacity in this way allows us to meet growing customer demand for a versatile product that combines the best of modern processing technology and structural capability.”
The new plant will make Roseburg the largest U.S. manufacturer of engineered wood products serving independent distributors without captive distribution. Roseburg first established its engineered wood products business in 2001 and currently manufactures RFPI Joists, RigidLam LVL and RigidRim Rimboard at its plant in Riddle, Ore.
Read more on this from Roseburg Forest Products at https://www.roseburg.com/News/Details/new-south-carolina-plant/.
by Web Editor | Jun 13, 2017 | News
Timber construction is opening a new market that has been keeping lumber and milling machinery busy at a growing number of wood products companies, including Montreal’s Nordic Structures, Sauter Timber in Rockwood, Tennessee, SmartLam, in Columbia Falls, Montana, and D.R. Johnson, in Portland, Oregon.
Oregon-based D.R. Johnson Wood Innovations, a subsidiary of D.R. Johnson, specializes in the manufacture of cross-laminated timber, or CLT, and glue-laminated beams from Douglas fir and Alaskan yellow cedar. D.R. Johnson Wood was the first U.S. company to receive APA/ANSI certification to manufacture structural CLT panels – and CEO Valerie Johnson plans to help grow the U.S. market.
D.R. Johnson has received the first U.S. certification to manufacture cross-laminated timbers (CLT) under a new standard approved last year by the American National Standards Institute. D.R. Johnson is one of only three North American companies certified by the Engineered Wood Association to construct CLT for use in buildings.
Johnson’s company employs 125 at a traditional sawmill and laminating plant, which was recently expanded by 13,000 square feet for increased CLT production. They’re currently fielding calls from hopeful builders, and manufacturing samples to be tested for fire safety and structural quality. One recent new wood construction project is a 14-story wooden apartment tower being built in Portland, Oregon.
From Woodworking Network: https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/wood/pricing-supply/timber-construction-has-lumber-milling-machinery-rolling
by Web Editor | Jun 7, 2017 | News
Officials in Oregon have approved construction permits for the first all-wood high-rise building in the nation. Construction on the 12-story building, called Framework, will break ground this fall in Portland’s trendy and rapidly growing Pearl District and is expected to be completed by the following winter.
The decision by state and local authorities to allow construction comes after months of painstaking testing of the emerging technologies that will be used to build it, including a product called cross-laminated timber, or CLT.
To make CLT, lumber manufacturers align 2-by-4 boards in perpendicular layers and then glue them together like a giant sandwich before sliding the resulting panels into a massive press for drying. The resulting panels are stronger than traditional wood because of the cross-hatched layers; CLT can withstand horizontal and vertical pressures similar to those from a significant earthquake with minimal damage. They also are lighter and easier to work with than regular timber, resulting in lower cost and less waste.
For this project, scientists at Portland State University and Oregon State University subjected large panels of CLT to hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure and experimented with different methods for joining them together. The project materials also underwent extensive fire safety testing and met fire codes.
State officials hope the building will stir greater interest in high-rise construction using mass timber and help revitalize the state’s lagging logging industry. Logging, once a major source of revenue in Oregon, has dropped sharply in the past few decades because of greater environmental protections for salmon and the spotted owl. The loss of the industry has devastated some of the state’s rural communities.
From The Register-Guard: https://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/35651365-75/portland-approves-permit-for-nations-first-all-wood-high-rise.html.csp
by Web Editor | Feb 3, 2017 | News
For centuries, wood was civilization’s primary construction material, but as the use of concrete, glass and steel grew, wood was largely relegated to flooring and interior paneling.
An exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington challenges that narrow use. It suggests that tomorrow’s buildings will or should be constructed of wood. The exhibition, “Timber City,” highlights the wide range of benefits offered by cutting-edge methods of timber construction, showing that wood is a modern, strong and versatile material.
The show highlights the two winners of the Tall Wood Building Prize, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “One in New York City and one in Portland, Oregon, are two premier cross-laminated (engineered, pre-fabricated) timber buildings going up right now,” said the exhibition’s curator, Susan Piedmont-Palladino. “They’re similar structures. Both buildings are using this material … in slightly different ways, but the goal is to build right in the middle of the city.”
And that’s what makes timber the perfect choice in a busy district like New York’s Manhattan, where construction speed and efficiency are vital. “Buildings go up very quickly. The materials for the building — the walls and the floors and the ceilings — are manufactured off-site. They come on a truck, pre-fabricated,” Piedmont-Palladino said. “So a work crew armed with power screwdrivers can basically assemble the building extremely quickly. There’s no long-term curing of concrete” needed.
Information panels in the exhibition explain that concrete manufacturing is the world’s third-largest source of greenhouse gases, and that harvesting timber — a renewable resource — has a lower environmental cost than mining the materials needed to make steel and concrete.
From VOANews.com: https://www.voanews.com/a/museum-cross-laminated-wood-building-material/3697202.html
by Web Editor | Jan 9, 2017 | News
To be competitive in the wood products industry, companies must stay on the cutting edge. But to get to the forefront, wood products companies must invest in their production facilities to increase automation and efficiency, and to lower manufacturing costs, experts say.
“It’s a competitive market,” said Jon Anderson, president and publisher of Random Lengths, a wood products industry trade publication based in Eugene. “Unless people are investing in their plants, they’re going to fall behind and, ultimately, fall by the wayside probably in the tougher markets.”
In the past couple of years, Swanson Group in Springfield, Seneca Sawmill in Eugene, Weyerhaeuser in Eugene, and International Paper in Springfield have made major investments in their facilities totaling about $273 million. Such upgrades are part of a trend throughout the North American woods products industry, Anderson said. Wood products companies in the Pacific Northwest, Canada and the southern United States have improved their operations, he said.
The improvements can help firms capture market share during strong markets and allow them to stay afloat when the economy weakens. “It’s the more efficient, more productive producer that is going to survive the downturns,” Anderson said. “We’re not in a downturn now, but most of these operators have gone through ups and downs in their time, and they are going to get ready for the next one.”
Seneca Sawmill on Highway 99 in Eugene is nearing the end of a major facilities renovation, including the installation of new kilns, revamping its shipping and loading facility and expanding its log yard. Early this year, the company plans to upgrade its planer, the equipment that smooths lumber. By the time it’s finished, the firm will have spent $63 million on improving its operations.
From The Register-Guard: https://registerguard.com/rg/business/bluechip/35084194-62/competition-drives-mill-investments.html.csp
