Running Lean
Steady upgrades and a passion for taking care of the little things have Canfor’s once money-losing Isle Pierre mill breaking the 270-million-bdft barrier.
By Bill Tice
For Joe Kelly, the plant manager at the Canadian Forest Products Ltd. (Canfor) Isle Pierre sawmill complex near Prince George, BC, there are a number of parallels between his work life and his personal passion for running marathons. He says the two are more closely related than most people would think.
“I really draw my inspiration from long distance running,” says the avid athlete who has participated in and finished a number of high profile events, including the Boston Marathon, which he completed in 1996. He has run over 30 marathons, finishing three of them in under three hours. “Whether I am managing Isle Pierre for Canfor or running a long distance marathon, it’s all about setting goals, being determined to finish what I start, and surpassing obstacles. When I am running, the obstacles can be pain or fatigue. At work, it can be budgets or time constraints. When I run, I am always setting time goals for myself, and I take on these goals in small steps. I bring the same philosophy to work when it comes to managing the mill. I am always striving to make things work better or more efficiently. I love to be competitive, which is one of the reasons I run marathons, and I bring this competitiveness to the mill with me as well.”
This strategy seems to be working for Kelly, as in the sawmill alone, where they measure production volumes by the hour, they have recently gone from 42 MBF per hour to 50 MBF per hour just through fine-tuning efforts.
“We achieved this increase through the little things,” notes Kelly. “It was the small steps, like being more efficient on our lug fill and improving gaps between boards.”
Add these fine-tuning improvements to the gains realized through a $40 million upgrade to the sawmill that was completed in 2000, and smaller but more recent changes to the planer mill, and you have the makings of a rags to riches success story for a mill that now produces 270 MMBF annually.
“Back in 1997, this mill was not profitable and was on the brink of being shut down permanently,” explains Kelly. “At that time, the mill was only producing 2x4 and 2x6 in 8 to 10-ft lengths, so a number of us got together and scraped out a plan to add 12-ft products to our line. Our idea was to have Isle Pierre do the shorts for the home centre market, and let the company’s bigger mills do the long lengths. To produce the 12-ft lengths, we didn’t require a great deal of capital. Due to the way the mill was configured, we were able to cut and expand the decks and infeeds. Canfor was willing to take the gamble and let us try, and it paid off.”
Coming home
When the sawmill was upgraded with the $40 million investment, Kelly had moved on to other Canfor mills, but returned to run Isle Pierre three years ago. During the upgrade he missed, they installed two identical lines, which feature Comact canter quads and Newnes McGehee curve saw gangs and lineal board edgers. Both lines feed to a single Comact 38-bin sorter that runs at 180 lugs per minute. One line has a 17-inch VK Brunette debarker, while the other uses a 22-inch model, also from VK Brunette. Kelly says the only area that wasn’t touched during the upgrade was the cutoff saws. They are original and date back to the mill’s early 1960s startup when Lloyd Brothers of Prince George built the complex. Canfor purchased the mill in 1969.
The mill’s planer is a Stetson Ross 614, which was installed in the early 1980s and was recently converted to a 20 knife model. They have also recently added a Dynamic Tensioning System (DTS) from Wolftek Industries in Prince George. The DTS is helping to reduce the number of breakups in the planer from the drier beetle-killed wood the mill is now working with. Other planer mill improvements over the past few years include a new PLC tilt hoist with secondary forks, and Autolog’s Linear Planer Optimizer (LPO) technology for geometric grading, as well as Autolog’s online system for stamping and bar coding.
“We are still doing a few minor projects such as containment pads for mobile equipment, dust extraction in the sawmill/planer, and we just finished building a new mobile equipment shop, but nothing too significant in terms of production,” adds Kelly. “We have really spent the last six years getting this mill to run as efficiently as possible, and it is proving to have been the right move. In the past couple of years, we have been the company’s lowest cost producer, and we have very low conversion costs.”
CTL – Sort of
Today, mill flow starts in the log yard where a Wagner L130 log stacker and a Caterpillar 325 butt-n-top deal with up to 160 loads per day when it gets close to the busy spring break-up period. The logs are unloaded from incoming logging trucks, and then decked or hot fed into the mill. About 8% of the mill’s logs are cut to length, while the balance is precision end bucked in the woods.
“Precision end bucking helps the cutoff saw operator, as he knows the last cut on the log will be a length we can use,” explains Kelly. “For example, we might get three 12 ft lengths out of a log and the last cut might give us a 9 ft or 10 ft length. The processor operator in the woods has determined the size, and this is something we have worked hard with our woodlands group on. We jokingly call it ‘a poor man’s cut to length’ but it has worked very well for us.”
All of the logs are fed into the mill butt first through one of two side-by-side infeed decks and then to the two single cutoff saws. From the cutoff saws, the logs can be sent to either the 17-inch or 22-inch VK Brunette debarker. The largest log the mill will handle is 18 inches in diameter with a mechanical stop on the debarkers culling any oversize logs, which are then sent to the nearby Canfor Plateau mill in Vanderhoof.
Following the debarkers, the logs are dropped to one of three decks that feed the two Comact canter lines, which are identical and referred to as the “North” and “South” lines. Each line features an auto rotation double length infeed with slew and skew capability, and the canters have Comact variable frequency drives on the heads for chip consistency and quality. Following the canters, the lines are equipped with a Newnes McGehee curve saw gang edger with any side boards being directed to a board edger, also from Newnes McGehee.
Downstream from the curve saw gang edger, all boards, including the side boards, are brought back together on a transfer table that feeds a double unscrambler and then a PLC tong loader and a Newnes trimmer optimizer that is equipped with an NMI moisture meter. Both canter lines feed into the Comact hydraulic driven trimmer, a Comact push sorter, and a Gillingham Best stacker with auto strip placement.
From the sawmill, the rough lumber is transferred to one of five dry kilns, including three older Moore and two 150-ft Wellons (Salton) models. The mill does not have natural gas on site, so they use a hot oil Konus system to heat all five kilns and the sawmill and planer mill.
Modified planing
Continuous flow into the one-line planer mill is accomplished with the new PLC tilt hoist with secondary forks.
A clean-up trim saw is positioned just before the Stetson Ross planer, and then an NMI moisture meter and the Autolog LPO follow the planer. All the Autolog gear is handled locally by BC’s Mill Tech Services. Following the LPO, the mill has three grading stations where the graders handle visual defects and can override the Autolog system if required. The Comact hydraulic trimmer does two trim lengths. The first trim saw handles nominal length, while the second one does stud length. Grade stamping and bar coding is then completed before the lumber goes into a 90-degree turn and then into a Comact 20-bin sorter.
The prime sort for the day stays at the top of the sorter and is then sent directly to one of two auto stackers, while other products are directed to the sort bins, and then sent to the stackers later. From the stackers, the loads are dropped down to a Signode auto bander and then paper wrapped manually before being sent to the loading area or into inventory. Almost 40% of the lumber is shipped by truck, while 60% leaves on the CN main rail line.
But for Kelly and the staff at Isle Pierre, there is more to running the mill than just improving production numbers.
“I am just as competitive when it comes to safety performance,” notes Kelly. “We were the first mill in Canfor to have a wood products safety page that is used for employee information and for safety tracking. It will track every incident that has ever happened at every workstation in the mill. We are also working with Eclipse Training in Nanaimo, BC on a joint project with Canfor’sNorth Central Plywoods to develop a safety competency test program. We are in the first year of this three-year program, which will see every employee take a safety test once every six months. In the past, the employees have just read through binders. With this test, they have to keep reading the information and answering the questions until they get 100%.”
Like all mills in north central BC, Isle Pierre is facing a number of challenges with the beetle- killed wood, but Kelly says the biggest challenge they are facing right now is the slowdown in U.S. housing starts.
“Only the efficient mills will survive,” he says. “We know the rules, and this mill will make it. Our crews are already doing things like staggering their coffee breaks, so that they can keep running for the entire length of a shift. We are also running a significant amount of square edge product that goes to the home improvement market, and that lessens our dependency on the new home framing market, and we recently acquired an MSR machine from another Canfor mill. We just need to complete some building modifications, and then we can also be in the MSR game.”
In many cases, it’s the “little steps” that will help Isle Pierre succeed when it comes to meeting its goals and remaining safe and profitable. For Kelly, it’s just like running a marathon, overcoming one obstacle at a time until he reaches the finish line.
