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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.