Friday, May 30, 2025
The quality control team at Timber Products works hard to ensure that the veneer produced by the company is continuously checked as it goes through the various stages of production. Sometimes veneer can get damaged due to bending, chipping, crushing, etc. The Group’s facilities have composers who give their lower-grade veneer a second chance. If a sheet of veneer is found to be damaged, it will be sent to one of the most honorable pieces of industrial wonders they have in their mills: The composers.
But why are these machines so amazing? The composers enhance discarded veneer (D-) to a particular grade for the Group’s plywood manufacturing. They accomplish this by having a single operator go through the veneer in a number of steps. The width, length, thickness, and grade are first chosen by the operator. Following their passage through the Metriguard scanning system, the veneer sheets are manually entered into the composer. After that, veneer sheets will pass through a scanning system to find any flaws in their composition. It is then submitted to the clipper after the flaws have been found, where the composer removes the problematic portions and clips out the veneer sections to be used in a new sheet.
The damaged veneer is chipped and used in other goods, or it falls onto a beltline and is sent to be used in hogs that provide steam for other machine centers. That nice, cut veneer is left in place until the composer finds another suitable veneer piece and joins them using hot melt glue, string, and glue dots, which guarantees a strong and consistent bond. After the veneer pieces are assembled into a whole sheet, the veneer is clipped to the appropriate width using a dimension clipper.
Two new Hashimoto composers, one measuring 8′ by 8′ and the other measuring 10′ by 8′, were recently installed in Timber Products’ Medford Plywood and Grants Pass Plywood plants. The old composers in both mills were nearing the end of their lives, making repairs expensive or even unsupported, which resulted in major downtimes and slowed down output. For this reason, it was decided to install these new pieces of equipment.
According to Glenn Rossi, old veneers wasted a lot of usable wood: “We estimate that 20% of the potentially usable wood was wasted by the old compressors”.The new Medford composer can process and stack veneer sheets of 4 ‘x4′, 4’x8′, and 8’x4’ at a rate of 45 m/min, or 3500 sheets or more in an 8-hour shift. Veneer sheets measuring 4’x2, 4 ‘x4′, 4’x8′, 4’x10′, 8’x4′, and 10’x4’ can be processed by the composer in Grants Pass at a rate of 30 meters per minute. By increasing production rates and decreasing waste, both machines are helping Timber Products better serve its clients.
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