40,000 board feet per Shift! Huntsville Forest Products Sawmill Tour
foreign [Music] guys welcome back it's a bit of a gloomy day out here but I'm here in Huntsville Ontario which is more or less a few hours north of Toronto where I'm at Huntsville Forest Products and the man on my right is going to take us on a tour into a commercial Sawmill operation I think it's going to be a nice treat for us you guys can see what I do with a small Sawmill now these guys are the pros and they're going to show us what they can do with the big saw mills and as you can see behind us they sort of got me beat in terms of lumber quantity so without further Ado here's Malcolm on my right Malcolm's going to be our guide for the day and he is certainly the knowledgeable one here so uh Malcolm if you wouldn't mind showing us around we'd greatly appreciate it yeah it'd be a pleasure yeah a bit of background to start off is that as you said the suspenseful Forest Products it's a division of Halliburton forest and Wildlife Reserve it's one of the four hardwood Sawmills that we own and operate in central Ontario this is the largest one and it's the second most recent one to join our group so we acquired this facility in October 20 20. it'll be two years ago exactly on Wednesday next week and uh and since then we've acquired one additional Mill but this one's still relatively new to the group we on average cut between 35 and 40 000 board feet per shift at this Mill there's about 45 people working here and our focus is entirely on hardwood lumber heavy to hard maple but uh why don't we just get started and walk through the lumber yard and then we'll head in the milk and then we'll go into the log here sounds good awesome here we go so these here are the residue bins that capture the sawdust and the chips that are coming out of the mill it's not the prettiest part of the mill by any means we've got to do some repairs with the doors to stop stop spilling on the ground but basically what's happening is the chips and sawdust are coming out of the mill and going into those bins and then a trailer is being parked under the bins or a truck with the trailers backing under it and then they open up and they dump all the material into those bits so it saves a little bit of handling time but as I said it tends to be a little bit messy uncertain and you guys have a market for all of this yeah so all of our residues have a market our bark gets used for either uh fuel as like hot fuel um where it gets used for landscaping okay uh the sawdust gets used as a raw material for a bioproduct before it gets used in NVM panel board just down the road at paneling yeah and uh our chips are used in Maya refineries to make every every food additives specialty papers the cellulose acid so there's a market for every every log that rolls into this yard every piece of that log has a market and the use and so we say that there's really no waste in a facility like this and that sometimes we'll joke that the only waste is the noise yeah if we could count for that and sell it we would yeah sure and all the markets yeah no that's great it's it's great to hear you guys have absolutely no waste I guess that's how you can uh maximize whatever you bring in in terms of uh materials you're maximizing its use and profitability as well I'm sure yeah well you need it this is a very important part of the value stream and even the stuff that's falling on the ground it's still going to get recovered it's going to get still end up on a truck going somewhere oh it may not be the highest value use but you gotta you gotta make America for everything I this is great to see on a big scale you guys know at home at my place I try to have as little waste as possible if I do have waste it doesn't mean a heck of a lot to me but for these guys if they have waste you know that's a big deal shrimp sauce [Music] [Music] are flipping the Lord is there a certain side to the side yeah yeah so I sat down on the right yeah there's a saw just passed foreign so you'll see here I guess I railroad's not going out of business anytime sure that's the wine bar okay and the way up going around and around us so that's the resaw right here yeah that's the head okay you see that her deck is not very full that's right now so we don't tend to keep busy before going through the game what's the operator I think I was trying to do is to cut the most value from each block like a lot here we go so that there's the chain Turner there you'll see her it turned out log or maybe the next one yeah try to cut it basically he's trying to weigh his face right right last chance to come over hook foreign [Music] that's not going fair enough [Music] [Music] next Vlog I bet he'll send that to the game weapons [Music] computerized yeah exactly yeah that's great so I was wrong he's actually gonna send that to the people okay I thought he was a game [Music] special [Music] but there's there's a lot of decision making uh whether it goes one way or the other at that Stadium yeah both of these operators make [Music] them greater [Music] okay so we're out in the log yard uh why don't I just explain the whole thing so every deck of the log yard has a number and that way we're able to make sure we're cycling our inventory and uh and keeping things fresh and also sorting the logs by species sometimes sorting them by quality as well but typically just by species um so what we've got in front of us is a couple of decks of maple uh hard maple uh which is fresh ish and uh it'll probably be going in the middle as soon as we're back on Maple um we've been doing a lot of work in the yard to try to get it uh get it re-raveled and resurfaced so that's why there's some material over there um and then we've got two of these material handlers moving logs around uh on the left this individual is probably I'm not exactly sure but probably been picking up a load that was delivered today that needed to be scaled or it needed to be checked or something else and he's now going to go put it in the appropriate deck uh whatever number that may be the other uh the other material handle it there looks like it looks like he's handling oversize or over length material that had to get trimmed so a bunch of logs that were too long for the mill got laid out ends got cut off of them and now he's getting them ready for them to go back into the appropriate pile and uh and end up with the mill depending on the time of year the yard here can be very full or pretty empty where at the time of year that I'd call kind of medium it's not really that full but it's not too empty either and uh and it will also affect how much these two machines are working the busiest time of year is late winter when both these machines are just going Full Tilt because we got tons of trucks coming in the yard is full of wood and we want it to be full of wood at that time because it's right before the winter ends and we stop logging for a couple of months but at this time of year Summer's kind of over we're getting closer towards winter so we've got about medium inventory and uh both machines are being kept busy uh keeping the yard nice and organized and just on that Malcolm uh just for our viewers here who don't maybe understand the whole logging Seasons a lot of logging happens in the winter right around our area everything freezes up uh for those of you who don't know the sort of geography of this area there's like a few things around there's Hills but there's tons of water if you can imagine logging with heavy equipment and water those two things don't really mix when things freeze up in the winter as you were saying logging really kicks off and that's when you guys are that's exactly right so about 60 to 70 percent of our of the logging that supplies this facility but other facilities like it per year would happen between December and the end of March okay so in that four month period you're getting 60 to 70 percent of the logging done and then during the summer uh basically the logging operations pretty much shut down for April and May uh then they try and get started up in June and then they're in full till July August first part of September and then when you get to fall things start to slow down from a logging perspective because it starts to get wet again and also hunting season gets yeah that makes sense so just as we're making our way around the around the yard here I had a question for Malcolm about log sourcing I know for myself my logs come from my property but obviously that's not the case well maybe it's not where do your logs come from here Malcolm yeah so this Mill it'd be heavy to Crown Land a good chunk if it would come out of Algonquin Park as well there would be some private wood in here um that comes from woodlot owners very little of the timber in this yard would have come off of properties that we own uh and manage so it'd be probably in that packing order like the local Crown Forest which is managed by Westwind for stewardship then Algonquin Park and then uh and then other people's private land who decided to do some Forest management all right and just for those of you at home who aren't quite sure where this is located this is pretty much west of Algonquin Park Algonquin Provincial Park is a massive park I think it's like 7 700 square kilometers I'll have to do the conversion for you Americans out there uh yeah huge area to gather from and obviously Gathering From a huge area like that allows you to get a good good number of logs on site and so this is just another start of a pile right so that's just like the ones on our right exactly starting a new deck because you want to keep your inventory cycling especially uh outside of winter this time of year it's starting to get cooler so it doesn't really matter but during the summer sorry the spring the summer and then the early fall you want to cycle your inventory pretty often so that it doesn't stain and so we established decks and try and keep the decks into the mill in the appropriate order so that they're they're staying fresh once you get into winter itself it doesn't really matter because the logs are frozen but at this time of year we're still playing it cautious and uh what what type of timeline do you have like do you have a time where the log should only sit there for a certain period before their before they're processed yeah so during the peak of summer so say like mid-june to mid-september um you don't really want the log sitting around for more than two weeks okay you can help it you want to move them pretty quick now I should qualify that that's for the called the Whitewood species like hard maple or Yellow Birch for something like red oak or black cherry you can sit around quite a bit longer but you still want to cycle them as regularly as you can in order to keep them fresh uh for soft Woods which I normally Mill if I let it sit around in the warm months like a log anywhere for that matter I'll start to get insects boring into it is there the same types of problems with hardwood that you found not not really the bigger concern would be stain okay staining kind of staying in the in the lumber if you let the logs drown too long in the summer some some log yards in some parts of the world will have uh they'll spray their logs they'll have big Water Works that are going and keeping the logs wet in their front pool during the summer we don't do that here but that is the thing you'll see that more often than you've said okay no we don't worry too much about the insects it's more about the stain this this sizing here I'm noticing they're all consistent is this is that like a 12 foot length or a 10 foot length yeah that looks that looks like uh like a 9-6 uh length which is uh or a 10 6 length maybe which is what we would like from the logging Crews if we're prioritizing Railway ties and it helps helps ensure that the log can make a tie but but really we will accept logs random length okay so you're really relying on a real knowledgeable logging crew to make sure whoever's harvesting it knows what the what the finished product is the loggers that Supply this facility and all the other Mills around us those loggers are very talented professionals yeah it is not a redneck Lumberjack yeah I bet kind of thing those are skilled operators that have to have a pretty good grasp of uh mechanics Finance environmental issues markets specs geometry uh all those things like the uh the loggers are uh are a super important groups of this supply chain and uh in a pretty talented group of people yeah we're looking at some Lumber uh this particular pack is selecting better uh Yellow Birch this would be the highest grade of lumber that we produce but we produce a bunch of different grades of lumber sort them many different ways it's probably safe to say that about half of our lumber production is Industrial Products like Railway ties pallet and related related things then the other half is appearance grade Lumber um the uh the industrial Lumber tends to be used for as I said Railway ties pallets Shoring Timbers dunnage blocking stuff like that whereas the appearance grade Lumber gets used in everything from residential flooring Cabinetry furniture and related applications one thing that's really important to know about about hardwood lumber that's different from softwood Lumber is that virtually none of the boards in this pack are going to get used as a full board right so the hardwood lumber grading system is based on clear cuttings and that's because most of this Lumber once it gets Kiln dried and uh and and sent to an end user is going to get sliced and diced into components you know so if you think about say the flooring that's inside your house or the cabinets if they're made out of hardwood lumber none of them are you think using a full-length board full-size board they're using a strip like that and that's what ends up happening to much of this wood is uh cutting it into the components that are needed to make those finished products just a question this right here obviously is green I can feel it although it just rained you guys always sell your wood green and then the the the next person will dry it to whatever spec they're they're needing yeah at this point uh we sell everything at our Mills uh Rock and green um at some point in the future I expect that we'll have Kilns but that could be five years from now it could be longer from now but it's uh we view it as an eventuality given the scale that we've uh we've built up but for today we are Rob Green hardwood lumber company okay okay so this is one of the uh one of our really important products these are Railway ties um seven by nine inch cross ties and uh they're sending a bundle here because they're gonna uh they're gonna get inspected and then they're going to be packaged up ready for shipment to uh to a pressure treating facility we will treat the ties stamp them do some other stuff to them and then ship them the railways Railway ties are an important product group especially for the kind of Timber we have which tends to be larger uh would sometimes big-hearted sometimes not color and appearance is often not too important to the railway as long as the tie is sound and so these ones have to be sound and so there's a few in gear that I wouldn't be surprised if once they get inspected get bumped out but but the majority of them look like look like good sound Railway ties that'll be in the ground for 20 years or more and and in terms of the length the length that's coming off your Mill here it's a rough length and then it'll get it'll get sawn at the pressure pressure treating facility oh you will okay yeah yeah and ship it that the uh at the Finish length but coming out of the mill um sometimes we're doing it cut to length and sometimes we're doing it as the random like coming out and then trimming it out in the yard would this be the bigger product for you guys compared with the lumber packs we just saw or is it a bit of a depending on the the customer it would depend on the it would depend on the logs first and foremost oh okay and then to an extent it depends on the markets uh right right now we're uh we're we're cutting a fair amount of ties so it would be pretty significant product that cutting but at different times it could be less and species it doesn't matter per se or do you have a do you have a preferred specie you you make railroad ties out of or ties out of broadly speaking it's dense Hardwoods okay so you wouldn't make a railway Toyota Poplar yeah it makes sense but any of the other you know Cherry hope uh Maple Birch Etc that would be Beach that would be fine um and uh and from our perspective where we prioritize ties it depends on what the other cutting lists are what the other markets are and all that but the vast majority of the ties in this pile are hard maple I see some other species too but these are mostly hard maple and that would be pretty typical for us because most of what we cut is our maple well folks that's going to do it for our tour today of the Huntsville Forest Products big thank you to our expert there Malcolm Malcolm showed us around all the aspects of this industry and he certainly is a wealth of information and I took an awful lot away from our visit today if you guys have any questions maybe you wanted to investigate the Huntsville Forest Products a little bit more be sure to check out the website and all the contact information down in the description of this video and as always guys get out there do some sawing if you can be well and I'll see you all you guys next time
2022-11-04 19:55
