Downstream are three inspectors, who make crayon marks on the boards that are read by a scanner, which records the grade of each board and gives a cutting command to an automatic trimmer. Each week, , board feet are processed by these seven workers, who rotate through the seven positions throughout each day. If you were to ask any sawmill owner in the Northeast about labor, you would likely hear the same story: finding and keeping dependable employees is a huge challenge.
HHP has taken advantage of its proximity to the more urban setting of greater Boston and has hired a cadre of 15 Cambodian workers, all with resident alien status, who travel to Henniker from Lowell, Massachusetts. They have proven to be eager workers who are quick to learn and to advance. We need stability in our work force so we can stay consistent with our production and our costs. Sawyer operating the resaw from an air-conditioned booth. Labor continues to be an everyday concern, but the biggest challenge facing sawmills today is a steady, affordable supply of wood.
At HHP, that responsibility falls into the hands of Don Winsor, whose job requires that he bring 10 million board feet of sawlogs and , tons of pulp into the yard each year.
Except presumably for the last sentence, what he says is true. Mills cultivate relationships with loggers they can rely on to bring them a steady stream of the kind of wood they want. But loggers need to shop around for the best prices, and for the past few years, prices have been very good. To buy those logs, mills are competing not only with other sawmills but also with buyers for the international market, particularly Canada.
That stopped being a reliable system for HHP. Eighty percent of their raw material comes from stumpage purchased directly from landowners; this move away from gatewood is a return to the way mills traditionally operated. Stacking kiln-dried white ash lumber using custom drying stickers.
And it has worked out well. The quality of the wood is excellent and the volume is good. In most cases, they bid on timber sales and hire a logging contractor to cut and deliver the wood. Winsor is a licensed New Hampshire forester, and winter will find him supervising the work of as many as 15 logging contractors. To supplement the wood from those jobs, HHP also started its own logging division by investing heavily in mechanized harvesting equipment. Knowing they wanted to be able to work lightly on the land, they bought a new Timber Pro forwarder and a CAT cut-to-length processor in It allows us to work year-round.
In a way, the story of HHP can be told through the trucks that enter and exit the yard each week. Coming into the yard in an average week are 50 truckloads of logs, loads of pulpwood, and 10 to 12 loads of stock for pallets. Leaving the yard and loaded with product are a comparable number of trucks carrying an array of products that include: hemlock bark; hardwood bark; sawdust; hemlock chips; hardwood chips; white wood chips they include no oak or cherry ; veneer logs which are worth more being re-sold than sawn ; roundwood pulp; green hardwood lumber; kiln-dried hardwood lumber; and wooden pallets in more than patterns.
From the looks of it, they must be getting close to getting 6 feet of product out of 5 feet of logs. Sorry to hear, Alan. We do a short piece in the magazine every issue called Stewardship Story.
My land in Hamden, CT was struck by a tornado. I have at least eight to ten foot logs cut and stacked. I bought 5 acres of land and want to clear cut one acre and select cut the other 4 acres.
I live in southern Maine. Any suggestions? I have three huge red oak were babies back in when cleared most of the lot to build our home. Today at least three are so large they threaten the house. This past winter with wet soil and strong winds we had some fallen limbs that could have caused trouble and luckily did not.
I use wood stove for heat and cooking in winter but safer for me to by firewood then have to put on a new roof… Will measure a tree now to give you an idea…biggest, I think it is but could be wrong measures over 7 ft around. Love it, it talks to me, but all good things must one day come to an end. Will be hard, but necessary. Please give me some good news. I am looking to have around 13 HUGE pine trees cut down in my yard.
I have heard that some mills will come to your house to take your trees. If this is true, does anyone have any information for me about this process or know of a mill around here that would be interested. Maybe a reader can help? In the program we develop place-based curriculum activities related to stories in our magazine. I can be reached at My students are studying the regions of the U.
Any suggestions for a site that can visually show how a tree becomes boards or paper? Thanks, Rachel. Looking for any possible people needing clean pine off cuts of lumber for any sort of renewable use. In North America, European colonists found vast forests of trees, and wood became the principal building material. The circular saw, which had been developed in England, was introduced in the United States in and was widely used in sawmills.
A large-scale bandsaw was developed and patented by Jacob R. Hoffman in and replaced the circular saw for many sawmill operations. Lumber produced in early sawmills had varying dimensions depending on the customer's specific order or the mill's standard practice. Today, lumber pieces used in construction have standard dimensions and are divided into three categories, depending on the thickness of the piece.
Lumber with nominal thicknesses of less than 2 in 5 cm are classified as boards. Those with nominal thicknesses of 2 in 5 cm but less than 5 in 13 cm are classified as dimension. Those with nominal thicknesses of 5 in The nominal widths of these pieces vary from in cm in 1 in 2. Most rough-cut lumber pieces are dried and then finished, or surfaced, by running them through a planer to smooth all four sides. As a result, the actual dimensions are smaller than the nominal dimensions.
For example, a standard two-by-four piece of dried, surfaced dimension lumber actually measures 1. Pieces of lumber that are not only surfaced, but also machined to produce a specific cross sectional shape are classified as worked lumber or pattern lumber. Decorative molding, tongue-and-groove flooring, and shiplap siding are examples of pattern lumber.
Today, processing wood products is a billion-dollar, worldwide industry. It not only produces construction lumber, but also plywood, fiberboard, paper, cardboard, turpentine, rosin, textiles, and a wide variety of industrial chemicals.
The trees from which lumber is produced are classified as hardwoods or softwoods. Although the woods of many hardwoods are hard, and the woods of many softwoods are soft, that is not the defining characteristic. Most hardwood trees have leaves, During felling, the trees are cut down with chain saws and the limbs are removed. At the mill, the logs are debarked and bucked, or cut to a predetermined length.
Then they proceed to the bandsaw for further processing. Hardwood trees include oaks, maples, walnuts, cherries, and birches, but they also include balsa, which has one of the softest and lightest of all the woods. Softwood trees, on the other hand, have needles instead of leaves. They do not shed their needles in the winter, but remain green throughout the year and are sometimes called evergreens. Softwood trees include pines, firs, hemlocks, spruces, and redwoods.
Hardwoods are generally more expensive than softwoods and are used for flooring, cabinetry, paneling, doors, and trimwork. They are also extensively used to manufacture furniture. Hardwoods are available in lengths from ft 1. Softwoods are used for wall studs, joists, planks, rafters, beams, stringers, posts, decking, sheathing, subflooring, and concrete forms.
They are available in lengths from ft 1. Both hardwood and softwood lumber pieces are graded according to the number and size of defects in the wood.
Defects include knots, holes, pitch pockets, splits, and missing pieces on the edges or corners, called wanes. These defects primarily affect the appearance, but may also affect the strength of the piece. The higher grades are called select grades.
Hardwoods may also be graded as firsts or seconds, which are even higher than select. These grades have very few defects and are used for trim, molding, and finish woodwork where appearance is important. The higher the grade, the fewer the number of defects.
The lower grades are called common grades and are used for general construction where the wood will be covered or where defects will not be objectionable. Common grades are designated in descending order of quality by a number such as 1 common, 2 common, and so on. Pieces of softwood common grade lumber may also be designated by an equivalent name, such as select merchantable, construction, and so on. Lumber intended for uses other than construction, such as boxes or ladders, are given other grading designations.
In the United States, most trees destined to be cut into lumber are grown in managed forests either owned by the lumber company or leased from the government. After the trees have reached an appropriate size, they are cut down and transported to a lumber mill where they are cut into various sizes of lumber. There are very few pieces of perfect lumber. Even though great care is taken to avoid or minimize defects when sawing the wood to the required sizes, there are almost always some defects present.
The number and location of these defects determines the grade of the lumber, and the purchaser must choose the grade that is appropriate for each specific application. As the number of older trees available for logging diminishes, so does the lumber industry's ability to selectively cut pieces of lumber to the sizes needed for construction.
Many of the trees being logged today are second-generation or third-generation trees that are younger and smaller in diameter than the original old-growth trees.
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