Friday Afternoon

Friday afternoon we took a tour of the Connors Sports Flooring factory in Amasa, followed by a tour of Louisiana Pacific's Sagola OSB Mill. We ended the day with demonstrations of harvesting and forest management practices at St. Johns Forest Products followed by dinner.

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Factory Tour

Connor Sports Flooring Corp's Amasa mill is the largest maple flooring mill in the United States and the second largest in the world. At this facility they have the capacity to turn 15 million board feet of lumber into their various sports floor products. 80% of the wood Connor uses is hard maple. The rest is red oak, yellow birch, and other hardwoods.

Teachers got an opportunity to view the plant and see and hear how hardwood lumber was converted into flooring. The OSB that Connor floors utilize as a subfloor was a product that teachers learned more about later in the day when they visited the Louisana-Pacific Sagola OSB Mill.

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Louisiana-Pacific Sagola Mill Tour

Louisiana-Pacific Corporation's Sagola Mill manufactures Oriented Strand Board (OSB), producing 1,000,000 sq. ft. of OSB daily in 10 different board thicknesses ranging from 1/4"-1 1/8". Teachers learned about the process of converting logs into OSB. Louisiana-Pacific's mill was excellent at illustrating how little of a tree is wasted during the production process. Bark and production waste is used as fuel to generate heat for the plant. Water is recycled throughout the system and pollution is eliminated using state-of-the-art technology.

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Tour of St. John Forest Products and Dinner

At St. John Forest Products participants learned about Forest Management and Harvesting. Henrick Carlson and Tom St. John demonstrated a cut-to-length logging system consisting of a processor and a forwarder to show off how much technology is involved in modern day harvesting.

Afterwards, dinner was provided at the spectacular St. John Lodge. Teachers were fascinated by the traditional blacksmith at work on the grounds.

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