I was invited to take a ride to Maine today to tour the Fontaine softwood lumber mill in Stratton Me. I did not think to take pictures but they really would not do justice to the operation anyway.
We were led onto a catwalk over the conveyer belt the brings the logs from the debarker and as near as I could time it a debarked log passed under my feet every 4 seconds. All logs are computer scanned to figure how to cut them for the most volume then the pass through a series of band mills and are processed into dimension lumber. They saw around 1 million board feet each day and only run 1 shift. They also bring green lumber from another location to the Stratton mill for kiln Drying and planing currently they are drying and planing 1.6 million ft./day but are adding more and better equipment to bring the total to 2 million ft.
Very little hand labor goes on in the mill, I saw less then a dozen men doing actual hand labor. Everyone else was sitting at a computer in a AC room with a half dozen monitors and closed circuit TV's in front of them, or were running the various yard machines.
All of the waste is used or sold. Some chips are used to fire the boilers that heat the kiln and much of the remainder goes to a wood fired power plant a couple hundred yards away and is traded for electricity.
One of the posters along the tour rout proclaimed that each hour 20 truck loads of logs are processed enough to build 35 houses. Makes my 100 board feet/hour look pretty paltry.
We were led onto a catwalk over the conveyer belt the brings the logs from the debarker and as near as I could time it a debarked log passed under my feet every 4 seconds. All logs are computer scanned to figure how to cut them for the most volume then the pass through a series of band mills and are processed into dimension lumber. They saw around 1 million board feet each day and only run 1 shift. They also bring green lumber from another location to the Stratton mill for kiln Drying and planing currently they are drying and planing 1.6 million ft./day but are adding more and better equipment to bring the total to 2 million ft.
Very little hand labor goes on in the mill, I saw less then a dozen men doing actual hand labor. Everyone else was sitting at a computer in a AC room with a half dozen monitors and closed circuit TV's in front of them, or were running the various yard machines.
All of the waste is used or sold. Some chips are used to fire the boilers that heat the kiln and much of the remainder goes to a wood fired power plant a couple hundred yards away and is traded for electricity.
One of the posters along the tour rout proclaimed that each hour 20 truck loads of logs are processed enough to build 35 houses. Makes my 100 board feet/hour look pretty paltry.
