January 2001 - Logging and Sawmilling Journal -

A sawmill on the banks of the Fraser River and the aroma of freshly cut cedar are the first signs you're nearing the community of Ruskin, a cluster of half a dozen shingle mills, remanufacturing plants and a sawmill in the lower Fraser Valley in southwestern British Columbia. Most of these mills are based around softwood. But CarlWood Lumber Limited, a remanufacturing plant that produces alder, maple and birch hardwood lumber for the furniture and mill works trades, has been located here for 14 years. "We are primarily hardwood lumber operators," says company president Bob Carl. Inside the offices, sunken ceiling lights reflect off attractive pacific coast maple trim that is harvested and milled locally.

Although local logs are getting harder to obtain, Carl still sources alder, maple and small amounts of birch from land being developed, small farm lots and areas that are being relogged. "The upper Fraser Valley has some good maple and a little birch, but there's little good alder left," he says. Carl first got involved in the hardwood processing industry in 1958 when he joined his uncle, Robert McGregor, who had a mill on the Fraser Highway in Langley, another mill on Vancouver Island and a mill in Washington State. These mills fed lumber into Westcoast Hardwood Limited and Vancouver Sawmills Limited. Sawmills were a big industry locally back then the company's facilities covered a whole city block in Vancouver.

Bob Carl (above, left) and sales manager Tony Pistilli with an order of "select and better" birch produced by CarlWood and destined for local moulding markets.

"We got to meet a lot of individuals who operated small sawmills," Carl recounts. The drop in trade diminished as hardwood processing became more production oriented, but the simplicity of those days is reflected in the attention to detail. Traditionally in the show wood industries, with products such as tables, chairs, and cabinets anything where wood is completely exposed only high grade hardwoods were bought. Now the knot structure of hardwoods is used as a feature of furniture. "We sell to a door manufacturer in the southern United States that uses alder strictly for interior doors," Carl says. "They use a low grade type of alder for doors that's antiqued. The rougher it is, the better." Alder is the primary hardwood species harvested in BC, followed by pacific coast maple and birch. All BC hardwoods are light in colour, birch being the lightest.

Maple is mellow in colour and harder wearing than alder. Historically, hardwoods have been considered a weed tree by the major industries in BC, although that is changing. The hardwood sector is also working hard to develop markets for birch used in flooring, packaged furniture and restaurant furniture. Carl works with small mill operators to source a supply of wood. "We have quite a number of suppliers who are sawing birch for us. We're buying birch from as far away as Kispiox and Hazelton west of Prince George, areas north of Prince George, and all through the Cariboo."

There are a lot of people interested in harvesting birch but processing hardwood logs into lumber is a learning process. "You're grade sawing, you're not looking for high production, you're looking for flat sawn round knot shop type quality of wood," Carl explains. "And it takes a while to get people to understand they've got to turn the log at the saw and look for the grade. It's all grade." A fourth species, aspen, has not been as easy to market. "We have had very little success in marketing aspen," Carl says. "We just can't get a continuity of supply on one side and people who are willing to buy in reasonable quantity on the other side.

It'll come, but it's going to take some tim ." Pacific coast maple is harvested by hoe mostly from land clearing operations. Alder tends to grow in low lands and is harvested using rubber tire and wide track skidders. "Some of it grows on side hills and in gulleys but then you're getting fairly close to water courses so you have to be careful," Carl says. He prefers to deal with winter felled wood, but land development, where much of the hardwood is harvested, doesn't work that way. "We take the wood when it comes," Carl says. "We're very careful with our log supply in the spring. When the sap starts up in hardwood you have to deal with it very quickly." With alder it's a matter of days from stump to mill and from mill to kiln.

Vast amounts of alder can't be inventoried unless the facilities are there to process the wood rapidly. "We prefer a window of ten days from stump to mill and ten days from mill to kiln," Carl says. That window opens in April as soon as the sap starts up. "There's a four or five month period where you have to be very careful what you're doing with your product," he continues. "You've got a very narrow window in which to work in and you've got to have wood in the process very quickly." Carl works with a number of small sawmills in the Fraser Valley that cut wood for the remanufacturing plant in Ruskin. He'll buy logs and have operators like Jim Hewson, owner of J & G Custom Cut in Maple Ridge, custom cut the wood on a WoodMizer LT40HD 624 horizontal band mill. The lumber is then trucked to the reman mill. "We finance the logs delivered into the mill yard," Carl says. "They cut the wood and as soon as they have a truck load they move it to us so we have inventory in transit between these small mills to our plant all the time."

CarlWood works with a number of small sawmills in the Fraser Valley that cut wood for its reman mill, located in the nearby community of Ruskin.

One to two trucks loaded with 10,000 to 20,000 board feet of logs are received at the reman plant per day. The end product depends on the quality of the log. Green lumber comes into the plant where it's graded, stickered, and kiln dried. There are two dry kilns on site. The wood comes out of the kiln and is put through the planer and regraded. Any upgrade trimming that needs to be done is completed then the wood is packaged and tallied for sale. There are 17 employees who run a single shift. "We're running about thirty-five to thirty-eight thousand board feet per shift through the planer," Carl says. At any one time there's about 200,000 board feet in process, which translates to about seven million board feet a year in production.

The company buys alder and pacific coast maple saw logs in ten foot lengths, ten inches at the top and larger. "If times are a little tough, we might take them down to eight inches," Carl says. "In birch, we will buy an eight inch top log. Sawing anything under eight inches is not economical. "You get a large variation in the size of maple, we buy from ten inches right up to three feet," Carl continues. The finished wood is sold to local upholstered furniture markets and into the US. They also ship to Asia and Europe. The hardwood market does not follow softwood market cycles. "The hardwood market starts at the bottom and climbs very slowly over a number of years," Carl explains. The market follows the general well being of the country. A drop in housing construction is one of the forces that can cause the hardwood sector to drop. "If there's a downturn in the economy, people don't buy upholstered furniture," Carl says. Carl acknowledges his company has been having a fairly good run for the last few years. "The US market has been quite good for us," he says.

There is no one major market for BC hardwoods, however. For this reason, CarlWood Lumber tries to keep its exposure spread around. "The American market can be extremely competitive," Carl says. "There's lots of alder and maple in Washington and Oregon and our freight costs into California and Arizona are higher than anybody else's." Quality is everything as far as hardwoods are concerned and meticulous attention is required during the dry kilning process. "Because we're a small firm, we don't have a dry kiln operator," Carl says. "It's mostly myself or sales manager Tony Pistilli who look after the drying quality control." Pacific maple, alder, and birch are dried to the industry standard of six to eight per cent for hardwoods. The dry kiln operation takes approximately one week per inch of thickness. A charge of lumber is in the kiln for about six days. Fresh cut, green three-inch stock can take 28 days to kiln dry.

The end products include furniture frame parts, flooring, panelling, case goods, and hotel furniture. Tony Pistilli acknowledges that marketing hardwoods in BC is not difficult. "It's such a small market," he says. "The Vancouver market is fairly limited on western species and we're only going to the primary distributor level so marketing is fairly easy." But it's taken fifteen years to get to that stage. "It's been a slow growth in the Vancouver market especially," Pistilli continues. "There's still a long way to go but there's better recognition of western hardwood species." Oak, hard maple and mahogany are still the dominant hardwoods but the trend is changing.

"Western species are starting to pick up," Pistilli says, "especially in the northwestern United States." Much of the recognition of alder as a hardwood species can be attributed to Weyerhaeuser. "Weyerhaeuser has done a marvelous marketing job on alder," Carl says, "and the Western Hardwood Association has done a great deal of marketing for the independent operators ." Focus has been directed to Washington and Oregon, but Carl is confident the markets for hardwoods will continue to grow. "We have to go out and shake the bushes once in a while and push up the supply a little," he says. "We just have to work with those mills and never let them down.

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It's in the Details

In BC, the land of softwood lumber, a hardwood reman plant is finding markets with its focus on quality and detail.

By Rick Crosby