Milling in BC

[BobL]

Last weekend I went to William's Lake in British Columbia to visit a young CS miller (Brad) who is a regular poster on the arboristSite milling forum. Brad is also a keen woodworker and tool maker and works at a local chipper mill. As well as chewing over CS milling he took me to see some interesting milling operations and that log cabin building site I posted about earlier this week.

Here's a panoramic shot of the industrial area of Williams lake where there are 5 mills, a number of wood processing plants, and an electric power plant that runs on wood waste.
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The smoke is from a rash of bushfires that were burning along one side of the vallley. Fortunately it was burning away from town and it had rained overnight so that put a damper on things. The smoke smelled of burning pine - quite different to burning eucalypts.

Here is a closer up view of the Electric power plant.
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The plant burns wood waste from the which is mainly bark, sawdust and small branchs. Wood chips are not burned but sold for paper pulping. The plant generates 83 MW so it makes a sizable contribution to the regions energy needs.

Just to give you an idea of the size of the woodwaste pile check out the dozer at the top of the pile.
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Here are some log piles.
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The saw mills pays a royalty on the logs as soon as they are delivered to the mill, so they tend to hold them in the bush so they no longer stockpile large amounts of logs at the mill like they used to.

Close up of the log piles.
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If the logs look tiny it's because they are. The chipper mill will mill a log as small as 150 mm in diameter and they don't take in anything much bigger than about 12" - they don't fit through the machines and these logs get sold as premium logs.

This beastie is used to move piles of logs around
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Brad has an elderly buddy who has been repairing small engines in the area for 50 years. This is about 1/10th of his CS collection. He has spare parts for just about every CS made since the 1950s. I even picked up some parts for my old Mac 10-10! What this guys doesn't know about CS is probably not worth knowing.
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More soon.

[BobL]

Brads mill is what is called a chipper mill. It turns undersize 8 - 10" logs into 50 x 100, up to 150 x 150 mm sections. That's all it does. It does very little cutting - instead it chips the outside of the log into a rough piece which is then put through a serious planer mill to generate a reasonable surface.

Here is the log loader.
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Logs are already cut to around 10ft long by the harvester but here they are also docked close to the finished length.

This is one of two debarkers. The bark is sent via a belt to a waste bim.
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These are the chipper heads. They just chip the excess off the outside of the log.
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This is one of 4 motors that drives the chipper heads.
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And here's the rough as guts 50 x 150 it gnaws out of the log. (This started out as 150 by 150 that was later split in half but a splitting saw).
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The mill has been used a few years ago to mill logs up to 1.5 m in diameter with this bandsaw.
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Here's a close up of the bands
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While I was there the boss offered me the big Bandsaw for nothing - he just wants it out of there. There are very few big logs remaining in the area and the economic downturn in the US means timber sales are not doing too well.

Here are some of the waste bins.
The small one on the right holds the bark that goes to the electric power plant - the other two hold chips that go for paper.
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[BobL]

Once the pieces were cut to size they are partially kiln dried.

Here is a view of the chipper mill and one of the Kilns. The railway line is the Rocky Mountaineer line that runs from Vancouver to Jasper.
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Then the pieces go through the planer. The planer has 4 variable spacing heads that can finish anything from a 50 x 50 to 150 x 150. The heads look like this.
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Then the lumber is graded/sorted/stacked and packed. Brad is a lumber grader - he has to flip about 80 pieces of lumber a minute and say yay or nay so that the stackers move them to the 'economy" stack.

There was a lot of other things at the mills site, like a finger jointer that cut and glued short lengths of timber into longer bits. There was also a shavings mill and baler for making shavings for animal bedding. Being serious horse country, horse owners are prepared to pay a premium for shavings.

It was a really interest

[Scribbly Gum]

Thanks for sharing this Bob.
Is the mill sawing small logs because only smaller logs are available?
It has certainly been a trend here on the East coast of Australia for the timber jinkers to be hauling smaller and smaller logs as the years have passed.
Cheers
SG

[BobL]

Thanks for sharing this Bob.
Is the mill sawing small logs because only smaller logs are available?

In general yes but like most things, it's all return on investment. When the Yanks were building heaps of premium homes and apartments, they paid top $ and then mills in turn paid premium for premium logs and milled premium lumber. A lot of this cheap lumber is going to local builders for cheap stud walls and to China for general building. The Chinese buy all the "Economy grade" which they use on building sites as form work and scaffolding. Economy grade often has wain on two sides. It's brutal ugly milling when you stand back and look at it. I don't particularly want to see any more softwoods for the rest of my life after seeing this.

[artme]

Interesing set of posts Bob. I can understand your present aversion to softwoods!!

[weisyboy]

couple of logs there.

dint know they made a shot wheelbase husky:D

[dai sensei]

Great post Bob.

Shame the bandsaw would cost so much to send back here, I'd love one with a throat that size :rolleyes: Wonder how it would handle a eucalypt :U

[BobL]

Great post Bob.

Shame the bandsaw would cost so much to send back here, I'd love one with a throat that size :rolleyes: Wonder how it would handle a eucalypt :U

The Pemberton mill in WA (there is one in BC as well) bandsaw cuts through karri with a bandsaw like there is no tomorrow so there would be no problem provided the blades are kept sharp. It's not just the bandsaw itself that one would need but also the band sharpener which weighs about 4 tons! The band are removed from the saw and transported with a gantry to the sharpener. Apparently there are bandsaws like that all over Canada and the US being scrapped because there are so few big trees left to mill in these places.

[nifty]

Such a shame to see such great machines outlast the resource they are designed to cut

[BobL]

Such a shame to see such great machines outlast the resource they are designed to cut

Yep - that's what's happened. Same with chainsaws. With so many harvester type machines in action and so few big trees left, there were 2100/090/084s to be had for very little money if one was to peruse the pawn shops. These days the 090 is a serious collectors machine and don't last long in pawn shops but the others are still occasionally seen. Fewer and fewer new big saws are being sold.