Sliced flooring deck layers by Danzer to include North American Species

 Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Hardwood specialist Danzer has further increased its capacity for sliced flooring deck layers. Last month, four new drying kilns have been put into operation, at its Darlington, Pennsylvania, facility. Danzer is now able to produce sliced flooring deck layers from all major North American species close to the resource.

 
CEO of Danzer Veneer Americas, Greg Lottes says, “Since Danzer has introduced sliced 3.0 to 4.0 mm thick deck layers for engineered hardwood flooring in 2012, the focus was on rustic European Oak. High-value North American species like American Walnut benefit even more from the better resource efficiency of our slicing process.”

 
Danzer had started the construction work for four new Mühlböck drying kilns in Darlington, PA, in spring 2016. The kilns are now in operation since a few weeks and will reach their full capacity of 50,000 to 60,000 m² deck layers per month in the beginning of 2017.

 
Lottes adds, “American species are in high demand globally. With the new capacity addition in Darlington we are able to produce a high-quality product close to the resource and serve customers in North America and elsewhere very efficiently.”

 
In 2012, Danzer has started producing sliced deck layers for engineered hardwood flooring. It has continuously increased its capacity since then. At the end of 2015, the Danzer supervisory board approved a 15 Million Euro investment program for modifying or expanding three Danzer plants in Darlington (USA), Souvans (France) and Mělník (Czech Republic) in order to increase the company’s production capacity for flooring lamellas. The capacity increase in Czech Republic has been completed earlier this year: from the initial three drying kilns to now nine in Mělník. Darlington is completed as well. The biggest Danzer flooring project with two times six drying kilns in Souvans is scheduled to be completed 2017/18.

 
Explaining the advantages of sliced hardwood flooring deck layers, Mr. Lottes further comments, “Sliced deck layers can be produced flexibly in large dimensions catering to the current trend of long and wide single planks in hardwood flooring. Danzer’s extensive procurement network has access to all major and many minor North American species; hence, we can supply flooring producers reliably with their primary products in large volumes as well as with smaller production runs of special products for their niche ranges.”