Roseburg Plywood Is Said To Minimize Open Knots, Core Gaps, Warping

Roseburg says its RigidCore plywood has entered the market for use in industrial applications for CNC machining of furniture, cabinetry and other products.

Most plywood used in the industrial market is machined into smaller pieces on CNC machines, says Roseburg. Product consistency and yield are critical factors in using plywood. Core gaps, open knots, warping and variations in thickness are a big concern for industrial customers, according to the company.

Roseburg developed RigidCore features 100 percent Douglas fir veneers with balanced layup for flatter panels with exceptional dimensional stability, 1/8-inch maximum core gaps, and proprietary C+ grade core veneers.

From Woodworking Network: https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/wood/panel-supply/roseburg-introduces-rigidcore-industrial-plywood

Roseburg Forest Products Names New President

From: Panel World Staff

Allyn Ford, CEO and president of Oregon-based Roseburg Forest Products, announced that the Ford Family and the Roseburg Board of Directors have chosen Grady Mulbery to assume the role of Roseburg President effective January 1. Ford will continue in his role as CEO until January 2017, when he will retire, at which point Mulbery will assume the joint role of CEO and president. Ford will continue as Chairman of the Board for Roseburg after stepping out of the company’s top executive role.

“I am pleased to say that we have selected an internal candidate to first step into the president’s role then move into the CEO role when I retire from that position,” Ford says. “Grady has demonstrated his readiness and willingness to lead our organization, and this not only provides a strong sense of security, but also one of continuity in pursuing our vision and living our values as a company.”

Mulbery joined Roseburg in early 2011 as vice president of Composites Manufacturing and later became vice president of Manufacturing. He has led Roseburg’s production operations since 2012. Prior to becoming part of Roseburg’s Executive Team, he was director of Manufacturing for SierraPine.

“I am humbled and excited by the opportunity to move into this new role with Roseburg, and I am committed to continuing the pursuit of growth and stability that Allyn has led for the past several years,” Mulbery says. “We have a strongly dedicated Executive Team and organizational leadership that shares in the vision that we have set for the company and a Board led by Allyn that also is committed to Roseburg’s ongoing development.”

Ford has been CEO/president of Roseburg Forest Products since 1997, after overseeing the company’s timberlands for several years. He succeeded his father, the legendary, late Kenneth Ford, who started the company in 1936.

Today Roseburg owns more than 630,000 acres of timberland in the Western U.S. It operates a sawmill in Dillard, Ore.; three plywood facilities in Dillard, Coquille and Riddle, Ore.; softwood veneer facility in Weed, Calif.; eningeered wood products facility in Riddle; four particleboard facilities in Dillard, Missoula, Mont.; Taylorsville, Miss.; and Simsboro, La.; MDF facility in Medford, Ore.; four decorative thermally fused laminate panel facilities in Oxford, Miss; Missoula, Simsboro and Dillard; two pre-finished panel facilities in Dillard and Missoula; two panel cut-to-size facilities in Oxford and Dillard; a wood chip export terminal in North Bend, Ore. The company employs more than 3,000. It has already announced plans to move headquarters from Dillard to Springfield, Ore. later next year.

Roseburg Plywood Mill Adds Wireless Alerts To Improve Safety

Roseburg Plywood Mill Adds Wireless Alerts To Improve Safety

The Roseburg Forest Products softwood plywood mill in Coquille, OR is a massive facility – 700,000 square feet –  with lots of moving parts. Logs entering one end of the plant are formed into finished plywood through a largely automated production process. Safety is a major concern – whether it is employee safety or the ever-present threat of fire. A new system of wireless alerting transmitters is enhancing safety and improving response times for electricians and millwrights, thus improving efficiency.

The Roseburg plant has long been a staple in the community. It is common for generations of family members to work here, creating a real sense of community. So safety isn’t just a buzzword. It’s personal. To speed the response to an emergency the company previously relied on a system of 4 hard-wired call buttons scattered throughout the plant.

These featured two separate buttons – one for “man down” – indicating an injury on the plant floor, or “fire” – for a fire. The hard-wired boxes provided a means of alerting radio-equipped personnel to emergencies – but only when they were operational, which as they aged was rather hit or miss. Clearly, something had to be done.

“We knew we had to make a change” said plant Technical Manager Pete Carter, “because if one of these boxes went down, then the whole system was down.” The outage might be minor, requiring only a few hours to fix, or it could be major, taking the system out of commission for two weeks or more. To complicate matters, the company that manufactured the original system, Murphy’s Law, has since gone out of business, and no longer supports the equipment.

From Woodworking Network: woodworkingnetwork.com.

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PELICE Will Address Greenfield Projects

PELICE Will Address Greenfield Projects

Written By: Rich Donnell

Organizers of the 2016 Panel & Engineered Lumber International Conference & Expo (PELICE) have announced several keynoters from the structural panel segment of the industry. Keynoters from the non-structural composite side will be announced soon.

The fifth biennial PELICE will be held April 7-8, 2016 in the Grand Ballroom North of the Omni Hotel at CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Hosted by Panel World magazine, PELICE in 2014 attracted 420 industry professionals who enjoyed 10 keynote presentations as well as forecasts and technical presentations delivered by 45 industry experts, supported by 75 equipment and technology companies that exhibited in the Ballroom.

PELICE will be immediately preceded by the fourth biennial Wood Energy Conference & Expo on April 5-6.

“The 2014 PELICE was refreshing because it was the first one going back to 2008 where all the talk wasn’t about the recession,” comments Rich Donnell, co-chairman of PELICE and editor-in-chief of Panel World magazine. “There was a lot of enthusiasm about projects-in-the-making. I believe that enthusiasm will continue into PELICE 2016 as housing and remodeling markets continue to climb. There will also be a definite buzz in the air at PELICE because it will be held right in the middle of the primary season for the 2016 presidential election.”

Donnell also notes that since the last PELICE there have been a number of production technology developments that will be addressed at PELICE 2016, as well as developments in engineered wood products, such as cross laminated timber, and in composite panels.

“We’ve rounded up a great lineup of keynote speakers from the structural segment of the industry,” Donnell adds. “We’ll now turn our attention to the non-structural side for additional keynoters.”

Donnell says two keynoters—Jonathan Martin, chairman & CEO of Louisiana-based Martin Companies, L.L.C.; and Steve Swanson, president and CEO of Oregon-based Swanson Group, will speak under the heading: “If I Could Build a New Plant In 2016, Here’s What I Would Do.”

Martin will address the development of Martco’s new oriented strandboard plant being built in Corrigan, Texas. The company currently operates an OSB plant in Oakdale, La., which it built and started up in 2006. Its history with OSB dates back to 1982 when it built and started up a plant in Le Moyen, La. It also operates a softwood plywood plant in Chopin, La., another greenfield project.

Martin
Swanson will address the new plywood and veneer facility Swanson Group is building in Springfield, Ore. to replace the plant that a fire destroyed in July 2014. Swanson Group operates veneer, plywood and lumber operations in Glendale and Roseburg, Ore. Swanson Group also purchased Olympic Panel Products in Shelton, Wash. in March and is relocating those assets to the new Springfield facility.

Swanson
Also on tap is Kurt Liebich, CEO of RedBuilt and New Wood Resources, both companies part of Atlas Holdings. RedBuilt manufactures I-joists, open web trusses and LVL at several manufacturing plants primarily in the Western U.S.

Liebich joined RedBuilt’s predecessor, Trus Joist, in 1994 and served in numerous senior management roles. He remained with the company when Weyerhaeuser acquired it in 1999, and was appointed vice president of Trus Joist and later VP of marketing for Weyerhaeuser’s iLevel division. When Atlas Holdings acquired the former commercial division of Trus Joist from Weyerhaeuser in 2009, it appointed Liebich as president and CEO of the company, which they named RedBuilt.

Atlas Holdings also appointed Liebich as president and CEO of Wood Resources LLC, which later sold with two plywood mills to Boise Cascade. Atlas subsequently formed New Wood Resources with Liebich as CEO. New Wood Resources operates the long-running plywood plant in Omak, Wash., and is also building a new plywood plant in Louisville, Miss., known as Winston Plywood & Veneer.

Liebich
Brian Carlson, president of OSB manufacturer Huber Engineered Woods LLC, will also join the keynoters lineup. Huber operates five OSB plants. Carlson has worked at Huber for 20 years and in various capacities prior to his promotion to president, including as product and field sales director, VP of sales & marketing and overseeing business development and strategy.

Carlson
The remaining keynoters as well as the complete agenda of speakers and technical session topics will be released in September.

As of early August, numerous equipment and technology companies had already signed on as exhibitor sponsors of PELICE. Leading the way is Babcock & Wilcox MEGTEC, which is a Gold sponsor not only for PELICE, but for the preceding Wood Energy Conference & Expo.

Early Silver sponsor exhibitors for PELICE include Baumer Inspection, Biele Wood, Brunette, Cogent Industrial Technologies, Con-Vey, Dieffenbacher, Electronic Wood Systems, Evergreen Engineering, GP Chemicals, Globe Machine Manufacturing, Hexion, Imal-Pal, M-E-C, Merritt Machinery/Meinan Machinery, Mid-South Engineering, MoistTech, Raute, Sweed Machinery, TSI/ Sigma Thermal, USNR, Venango Machine, Veneer Services, Westmill Industries, Willamette Valley, as well as Bronze sponsors Ventek and GreCon.  (Brunette, Cogent, Con-Vey, Dieffenbacher, Evergreen Engineering, GreCon, Imal-Pal, M-E-C, Mid-South Engineering, MoistTech, TSI-Sigma Thermal, Veneer Services/Bio­mass Engineering & Equipment will also join B&W MEG­TEC as exhibitors in the Wood Energy Conference & Expo.)

For more information visit https://pelice-expo.com/.

13 Composite Panel Plants Named Best In Safety

Thirteen composite panel facilities and one corporation as a whole were recognized for their safety achievements during the Composite Panel Association’s annual spring meeting held last week in Bonita Springs, FL.

Arauco North America received the Safety Innovation Award for the Safety Leadership Program implemented at its particleboard and MDF mills in Moncure, NC. Arauco’s use of leadership training, monthly safety updates communications, and procedure and policy development resulted in the facilities recording their lowest incident rate in the last 15 years, while the severity and frequency of incidents also decreased. Workers’ compensation claims also dropped 90% in 2014.

Composite panel plants in the Class I (low worker-hours) and Class II (high-worker hours) were also recognized for:

• Best long-term safety record over the past three years: Del-Tin Fiber LLC, El Dorado, AR (Class I) and Louisiana-Pacific Corp., East River, NS (Class II).
• Having zero incidents among Class I plants during 2014: Arauco North America (MDF), Bennettsville, SC; Arauco North America, Malvern, AR; Arauco North America, Sault Ste Marie, ON; and Del-Tin Fiber LLC, El Dorado, AR.
• Safety improvements: West Fraser Mills Ltd. (WestPine), White Court, AB (Class I) and Langboard Inc., Willacoochee, GA (Class II).
• Achieving an incident rate of less than 50% of the industry average, over the past three years.  Class I plants were: Arauco North America, Malvern, AR; Del-Tin Fiber LLC, El Dorado, AR; SierraPine, Martell, CA; West Fraser Mills Ltd. (Ranger Board), White Court, AB; and West Fraser Mills Ltd. (WestPine), Quesnel, BC.  Class II plants were: Arauco North America, Albany, OR; Louisiana-Pacific Corp., East River, NS; Louisiana-Pacific Corp., Roaring River, NC; and Roseburg, Missoula, MT.

From Woodworking Network: https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/news/woodworking-industry-news/composite-panel-plants-recognized-safety-achievements