Brunson Instrument Company

A Blog for Metrology Enthusiasts

Making hay while the sun shines, right? Wait.

Brunson Instrument Company
By Brunson Instrument Company on Apr 14, 2021 1:27:54 PM

What about making MORE hay?

The price of lumber is at an all-time high. No news there.

First it was the pandemic-inspired do-it-yourselfers making their quarantine time more comfortable with that new deck or addition. Then it was a rebound in new home building in the third quarter of last year.

And now, President Biden's American Jobs Plan has allocated $213 billion for housing--rehabbing, retrofitting and building a million rental housing units, and building another 500,000 houses for low and middle-income buyers.

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Case Study: Properly aligned sawmill equipment lasts longer, saves money for Brunson client

Brunson Instrument Company
By Brunson Instrument Company on Mar 20, 2017 10:43:48 AM

Brunson helps Buchanan Hardwoods use precision alignment to uncover costs and add revenue to their bottom line

Buchanan Hardwoods - a leader in the lumber industry, supplying hardwood products to markets worldwide - came to Brunson Instrument Company in 2016 after installing a new carriage track in their Alabama sawmill.

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How Much is Machine (Mis)alignment Costing You?

Steve Addington
By Steve Addington on Aug 20, 2015 3:07:00 PM

If you work in the lumber industry, misaligned machines may be costing hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—of dollars in lost revenue.

Poorly aligned equipment is a hidden drain on valuable resources and a major contributor to costly breakdowns, lost production and product waste. A fundamental requirement for optimizing sawmill machinery is precision alignment. It is also one of the most overlooked activities in a mill. In this blog post, we'll discuss how proper alignment can uncover these hidden costs to add new revenue to your bottom line.

 

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Brunson Sawmill Kit Proven to Increase Recovery

Brent Grisamore
By Brent Grisamore on Aug 19, 2014 11:33:00 AM

Over the last 18 months, quite a few sawmills have invited Brunson’s service group to perform a line-up and/or have purchased our Sawmill Kit and training. One timber manufacturer purchased Sawmill Kits for 12 mills, and will be installing even more kits in the future. Eight of the top twelve lumber producers in North America have asked us to perform line-ups in their mills using our optical alignment technology.

What are we hearing from these customers? The mills which are implementing the Sawmill Kit solution into their regular preventative maintenance programs have been the most successful. Some of the results we have seen include a reduction in board deviation by over 50% - and improvements in recovery up to 2.6%. A couple of customers have shared that these results delivered annualized savings of $500,000 to $1,000,000.

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Part Three of our Sawmill Alignment Solution Series

Brent Grisamore
By Brent Grisamore on Jun 19, 2014 11:33:00 AM

brunson_sawmill_blog_art3

Over the last couple of years, we have worked closely with respected sawmill industry consultant and alignment specialists, looking at the challenges of common machine center alignments in sawmills. This includes aligning chip-n-saw lines, gang & board edgers, overhead endoggers, sharp chains, head rigs, track and rails, band mills, sash gangs, horizontal resaws, planers, trimmers and others, in primary and secondary breakdowns.

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Part Two of our Sawmill Alignment Solution Series

Brent Grisamore
By Brent Grisamore on Jun 5, 2014 8:39:00 AM
sawmill_blog_art2

As previously discussed in our blog, we have found that sawmills of all sizes use piano wire, feeler gauges, mechanical levels, dial indicators and plumb bobs to perform critical machine alignments. It is not unusual to find outside service providers using some form of laser alignment device in a mill, but generally these systems are not owned by the mill.  We have seen sawmills using outside alignment technicians as frequently as once a quarter, while still pulling wire between visits.

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Part One of our Sawmill Alignment Solution Series

Brent Grisamore
By Brent Grisamore on May 16, 2014 11:14:00 AM

sawmill_blog_art

While traveling into sawmills in the United States and Canada over the past few years, we at Brunson Instrument Company saw an unfulfilled need in the area of machine center alignment. Most sawmills whether small or large, producing anywhere from 25 mbf (25 thousand board feet annually) to 125 mbf and greater were still practicing old mechanical methods of lining up key machine centers. Using piano wire, dial indicators, feeler gauges and mechanical levels was more common than utilizing a highly accurate, repeatable instrument for important measurements.

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Metrology - It isn't weather.

Bethany Hoppenthaler
By Bethany Hoppenthaler on Apr 7, 2014 8:47:00 AM

We at Brunson Instrument Company live in a specialized world of industrial measurement. We deal with the measurement problems faced by people who build, inspect, or maintain fairly large machines – machines like aircraft, paper mills, sawmills, satellites, ships, machine tools, particle accelerators, and automobiles, to name a very few. 

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About the blog

The Brunson blog is designed to be a platform for collaborative exploration in the field of metrology. You can expect to explore new Brunson products, hear from industry professionals invited to be contributing editors, and gain insight from customers who use Brunson products. So if you are one of the chosen few people who understand that Metrology is not a study of the weather, please join us here.