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.

As a result, we developed a versatile Sawmill Kit specifically for use in sawmill component alignment. It consists of a jig transit, optical micrometer, scales, a shaft squareness target, and a few other accessories. It is capable of shooting most common machine centers in a sawmill.

We developed the kit by keeping a couple of things in mind – simplicity and support. We know that Plant and Maintenance Managers wrestle with the question, "Can my guys pick up a new technology and will they buy in?"  The last thing they want to do is to make a purchase and have it sit on the shelf. We also know that they are concerned about the availability of training, both at the time of purchase and as future needs arise.

We believe our kit is easy to learn and use by existing sawmill personnel, and gives improved performance over previous methods in both time spent performing alignments and accuracy achieved.

But of course, we here in the “Show Me” state are not the only ones that are skeptical. When we first introduced the kit, our claims were sometimes met with a raised eyebrow. So, our field service guys, consisting of sawmill industry veterans (former Head Filers with over 25+ years of experience) have visited a number of sawmills to perform alignment jobs using our own kit. Orders for the kit consistently followed, once people saw that we weren’t kidding.

As our alignment solution for sawmills has gained acceptance, we have noticed something else that’s interesting. Because alignments are quicker and easier to do, the maintenance culture in some mills has become more proactive. Customers have told us that machine center alignment checks have become more frequent, and are now used as a predictive tool, rather than a reactive response.

Successful mills recognize the importance of precision machine center alignment and the need to incorporate that process into preventative maintenance programs. This new toolset not only gives sawmills excellent results when performing alignments, but also gives them a way to analyze machine data, establish baselines, and then determine the optimal frequency of line-ups for each machine center.