18 WESTERN PALLET
Bin sorter at Marienville.
Once the boards have been edged, the last major step is for them to be graded and sorted. Grade inspectors manually mark each board with color coded symbols to start the sorting process. But making sure the boards get to the right place can be difficult, and sometimes dangerous. That’s part of the reason why, at the Marienville facility for instance, we employ a machine that scans each board to read the symbol and automatically sort it to one of 60 bins depending on grade, width or length. In addition to making it safer and easier to sort the boards, this system also provides an “extremely accurate tally of the footage of lumber” says Baker, which makes it easier to talk with customers about what’s available and to pull exactly the right product for customers.
The Marienville facility, which was built in 2000 with the scanning technologies, is “in the top 20%… industry-wide” as far as its technological use, estimates Baker, who notes that “there are a lot of smaller mills that do everything in a very old-fashioned, very manually-oriented way, with almost no technology.” But in today’s competitive market, Baker thinks this technology is more than just helpful, it’s “almost mandatory.” Without the headrig scanner, for instance, he says, “we would not be able to compete when we buy timber, we just couldn’t get the yield out of the logs.”