Friday Afternoon
Friday afternoon we visited the Connors Sports Flooring factory in Amasa, followed by a tour of Louisiana Pacific's Sagola OSB Mill. We ended the day with a cut-to-length harvesting demonstration followed by dinner at the Blind Duck Inn.
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.
Our guides for the tour were John Olson, Conrad Stromburg, and Brad Geyser. They led us through the flooring mill, the subfloor department, and the parquet department to illustrate how hardwood lumber is converted into flooring.
Connor buys both green and dried lumber of 6 inch widths to create floor boards with minimum waste. Any waste that is produced is utilized on-site for fuel to heat the buildings and also to run the dry kilns. Sawdust and shavings are sold for raw materials for other secondary products such as particleboards and toilet seats.
The tour went through the stacker shed where we saw where incoming loads of green lumber are broken down into courses (stacks of lumber with the layers separated by sticks to allow air to flow through) for drying. The dry kilns are fueled by production waste, which is burned to produce steam that dries the green lumber. Once dried, the lumber goes into the flooring mill where they pass through a ripsaw that cuts the lumber into 2 inch widths. The resulting boards then go through a planar that surfaces them to a uniform thickness. Boards are graded and then go through a side matcher that puts the tongue and groove profile on the side edges (so the boards can lock together in the flooring.) Then it goes through end matcher which puts the tongue and groove on the end of the boards, finishing the production. The boards are then conveyed to a nesting line where boards are rated and nested into bundles for storage into the warehouse. The mill recently invested $170,000 to became the first in its industry to receive ISO 9001 quality management certification. The third party certification assures that quality checks are in place throughout the production process to assure that performance standards are guaranteed in the final product. The flooring mill employs 61 workers.
During the tour we also visited the mill's subfloor shop where the panels that support the flooring boards are manufactured. The OSB that Connor floors utilize as a subfloor is a product teachers will learn more about later in the day when they visit the Louisana-Pacific Sagola OSB Mill.
In another building we viewed the parquet department where edging from the flooring mill that is too narrow to make the 2 inch flooring boards is converted into smaller sticks that are used in parquet flooring. The incoming edging is checked for defects and cut to length if necessary and then run through a molder which splits them into narrow strips that can be trimmed into parquet flooring. The parquet boards are then graded and packed.
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Louisiana-Pacific
Sagola OSB Mill Tour
Louisiana-Pacific Corporation's Sagola Mill manufactures Oriented Strand Board
(OSB,) an engineered wood product that makes use of under-utilized trees. The
mill produces 1,000,000 sq. ft. of OSB daily in 10 different board thicknesses ranging from 1/4"-1 1/8".
That's enough boards to construct 3 homes per day.
During our tour stop, teachers learned how logs were converted into OSB.
Resource Manager, Jon Lamy explained the process succinctly, "We take the bark off, chip it into small pieces, put glue on it, and stick it all back together into 4x8' sheets." Jon welcomed teachers to the mill and then introduced our tour guides; Bruce, Tom Jacobs, Randy Beauchamp, Brett, and Leonard Ivy. Teacher were then broken into five groups and we followed the logs along the mill production line to see how they were made into OSB.
Courtesy of Louisiana-Pacific's OSB Facility Visitor Information Guide
Louisiana-Pacific's mill illustrates one application where lower value trees can be efficiently utilized to make a valuable product. It also underscores 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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Harvesting
At our last stop of the tour,
a 240-acre block near Felch, Michigan, teachers viewed how forest management prescriptions were carried out
by state of the art harvesting equipment. The prescription was to move the stand
from an even-aged stand dominated by aspen to a more uneven-aged stand by taking
the popul (poplar) trees out to make room for hardwoods like birch. Teachers saw a harvesting demonstration featuring a cut-to-length logging system consisting of a
processor and a forwarder.
The harvester, equipped with a processor head is able to enter a stand, pick out individual trees, fell, delimb, cut to length (buck), and stack the resulting logs all in one motion. From there, the forwarder, a truck equipped with a grapple arm collects the cut logs and transports them to a roadside landing where they can be sorted and then loaded onto trucks for shipment to the mills. Teachers saw both of these machines in operation. One of our teachers, Susie MacArthur, got to ride along in the cab as the harvester felled several trees.
After the demo, the equipment was parked up on the landing and Bob Hill and Logger/Contracter, Mark Anderson answered questions about the equipment and gave teachers a photo opportunity to pose with the harvester.
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Dinner
Afterwards, dinner is provided at the Blind Duck Inn.
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