Panel Age 50

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How The Panel Industry Changed The World In The Past 50 Years his special publication addresses many of the amazing accomplishments of the past 50 years in the panel and engineered wood products industries (structural and non-structural).

Somebody asked me why, in the year 2013, did we decide to look back 50 years, to 1963. The reason is because 1963 was the year that softwood plywood in the Southern United States began to take shape with three plants being built, all of which started up the next year. Until southern pine plywood came along, the structural panel industry was missing a big piece of its puzzle. Also, about this same period is when the non-structural panel industry, including particleboard and then MDF, really began to find infrastructure and resemble what we see today.

Those are the more specific reasons we took this on. The general reasoning was that today, 2013, felt like a good time to pause and reflect on how everything transpired to get here. And when you really get down and look at the past 50 years of the panel industry, you realize just how innovative it has been.

By no means does this publication attempt to be an encyclopedia. The goal was never to mention every company and every name that might have been involved in every product development. After all, this is only a 76-page publication, not 7,600 pages. This is, rather, just our perspective; the point of view of a trade media entity that has written about these developments for the past 50 years. Obviously, there are certain segments of the

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panel industry, certain stories, companies and personalities that have always captured our attention more than others. Still, we regret having to leave out so much.

This endeavor required teamwork between Georgia Research Institute, which solicited the advertisers you see in this publication; The Donnell Group, which is the small publishing firm that publishes these kinds of publications now and then; Panel World magazine, which provided the tons of printed documentation and photographs that were accessed and filtered through; and Hatton-Brown Publishers Inc., which provided the production and design expertise.

Dan Shell, who serves as managing

editoro f Panel World magazine, did most of the leg-work and the writing, and for that deserves the author’s byline. Dan has been writing about the panel industry for 25 years. Fred Kurpiel of Georgia Research Institute actually came up with the idea to do the publication. Fred, whose knowledge of the history and developments in the panel industry is far greater than most, would have preferred that we do the 7,600-page publication. We have recognized numerous personalities throughout this publication because of their contributions. Fred stands right there with them.

Having said all that, we hope you enjoy Panel Age 50. After you’ve finished reading it, I think you’ll realize that the panel industry has a lot of work to do in the next 50 years if it wants to live up L to the previous 50.

—Rich Donnell Editor-in-Chief Panel World

Many of the photographs in this publication have become somewhat famous and will be recognized by some readers. A good example are the photos on pages 6 (GP log peeling), 7 (GP Fordyce plant) and 12 (GP OSB). Forest History Society provided the photos on pages 8 (Southern Pine Plywood) and 17 (Douglas Fir Plywood Assn.). The photo on page 8 (Kenneth Ford) came from Roseburg Forest Products. Photos on pages 24, 28, 33 and 64 were provided

by Composite Panel Assn. The Parallam PSL photos on page 42 and 46 were distributed many years ago by MacMillan Bloedel. Louisiana-Pacific provided the homebuilding photo on page 53. The distant photo of the plant on page 56 came from Uniboard at Moncure, NC. Siempelkamp provided the “oneof-a-kind” photo on page 60 of LP’s Harry Merlo and Dieter Siempelkamp checking out a new technology called the continuous press. On the back cover, that’s Roseburg’s complex at Dillard, Ore., when it still had the log pond. Other photos came from the archives of Panel World magazine.

All advertisements in Panel Age 50 are accepted and published with the understanding that the advertiser and/or advertising agency are authorized to publish the entire contents and subject matter thereof. The advertiser and/or advertising agency will defend, indemnify and hold any claims or lawsuits for libel violations or right of privacy or publicity, plagiarism, copyright or trademark infringement and any other claims or lawsuits that may arise out of publication of such advertisement.

Georgia Research Institute, The Donnell Group, Plywood and Panel World, Inc. and Hatton-Brown Publishers Inc. neither endorse nor make any representation or guarantee as to the quality of goods and services advertised. Copyright® 2013. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part without written permission is prohibited. Printed in USA. Panel Age 50 is a one-time specialty publication free to a select readership of Panel World magazine. For information, call 800-669-5613.

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A Half-Century Of Expansion In North American Structural Panel Markets “The invention consists in cementing or otherwise fastening together a number of these scales of sheets, with the grain of the successive pieces, or some of them, running crosswise or diversely from that of the others…”

—1868 U.S. patent issued to John Mayo, considered the first plywood patent and the first “engineered” wood product patent in the U.S.

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product of the West Coast, plywood’s commercial birth in 1905 in Portland, Ore. in many ways heralded the beginning of a truly American century that saw the nation grow into an industrial and economic powerhouse the likes of which the world had never seen. Those early orders at Portland Mfg. Co., the first producer of boxes and furniture, cabinet and trunk stock, quickly expanded into a major industry. Through the first half of the 20th century, economic

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and technological development gradually improved the product and expanded plywood’s market variety and share, complemented by fast growth in overall production output and number of mills.

The 17 Pacific Northwest mills that produced 358MMSF (million square feet) (3/8 in. basis) in 1929 grew to 30 mills producing 1.4 billion SF in 1944 with strong wartime demand. Thanks largely to work by the Douglas Fir Plywood Assn. formed in 1933, plywood had developed as a standardized building product widely accepted in housing construction. World War II added to plywood’s acceptance as the product was put to the test in a wide variety of applications.

But it was America’s post-war economic boom and great suburban build-out that created a plywood growth explosion in which the number of mills more than tripled from 1944 to 1954. During that time, production grew more than 300%—

to almost 4 billion SF. Production almost doubled again to 7.8 billion SF by 1959, outpacing some growth projections by almost 20 years.

While the first 50 years of plywood’s history centers on the U.S. West Coast and Western Canada, the past 50 years of the plywood story is in many ways a story of the forest products industry in the U.S. South, where the first southern pine plywood wasn’t produced until the 1960s.

The rise of Southern U.S. plywood in the past 50 years also parallels the increasing important role of southern pine products in the overall national forest products mix and the reliance of the industry on Southern U.S. conversion facilities to meet national forest products demand. Changes in the Southern timber base to generally smaller diameters—and the tougher challenge of peeling southern pine logs—also helped drive technologi-

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cal advances that increased overall veneer recovery and plywood manufacturing efficiency worldwide.

Pine Peelers The first chapter of the structural panel industry’s past 50 years begins right there: The challenge of efficiently producing quality plywood from the various southern pine species, primarily loblolly. It’s a challenge that confronted many forest products developers and manufacturers, with southern pine’s sappy nature, plus growing conditions (especially in plantation timber stands developed to maximize fiber volume) that lead to wide growth rings as the primary characteristics that have to be addressed during multiple treating, peeling, handling, drying and pressing operations.

The Southern counterpart to West Coast plywood had a high bar to meet: For decades the Western U.S. had turned out increasing levels of high quality plywood, much of it produced from tightgrained Douglas fir with bright clear faces. Research into southern pine plywood’s prospects wasn’t optimistic: A 1952 study by Yale’s School of Forestry and the Forest Products Lab at Madison, Wis. claimed manufacturing it simply wasn’t feasible. Most manufacturers subsequently passed on the idea.

From an initial breakdown standpoint, the first challenge product developers faced in peeling southern pine were growth rings at least twice as wide as the Douglas fir logs used by West Coast mills. Wider growth rings made for a coarser peel, with more likelihood of breakage. Peeling southern pine into full 8 ft. sheets without breakage or cracking hadn’t been done consistently.

Adding to the challenge faced by early plywood developers was southern pine’s higher moisture content. This posed additional concerns in the drying process, where southern pine was more prone to warpage and curl, leading to machine handling and overall product quality issues.

According to company records and various accounts of early Southern plywood development and commercial production, three companies—Kirby Forest Industries in Silsbee, Tex., Georgia-Pacific at Fordyce, Ark. and Southern Pine Plywood (a joint venture between U.S. Plywood Corp. and Temple Industries Co.) at Diboll, Tex.—were at the forefront of the product’s evolution in the Southern U.S., with all three making plywood in 1964.

“The conventional wisdom was that you couldn’t make southern pine plywood, and that there wasn’t a glue that

would hold it,” said former Georgia-Pacific CEO Robert Pamplin (who helped make G-P so successful at producing it that the company attracted an anti-trust action a decade later). Yet soon after Georgia-Pacific purchased the Crossett and Fordyce Lumber Companies in 1962, “We wanted to see if we could make a satisfactory plywood product out of (southern) pine logs,” Pamplin remembered in a later historical account.

One of the best accounts of the first southern plywood comes from Fred Fields, the quintessential industry insider and former owner of Coe Manufacturing, an early plywood machinery developer that produced some of the first equipment widely used in West Coast and Southern plywood production. Fields, who died in 2011 at age 88, gave a detailed history of his involvement in Southern plywood development in his autobiography, “My Times With Coe: Free Enterprise At Its Finest,” published in 2010.

According to Fields, “The first company that looked into manufacturing southern pine plywood and began build-

had several railcar loads of logs shipped out. Steaming of logs was becoming a way of life, and the plant in Roseburg had good steaming facilities and that’s the reason we did the tests at that plant. We took those logs at Roseburg and ran them through the peeling, drying, pressing, sawing and sanding operations there.”

The tests were done in conjunction with the Douglas Fir Plywood Assn., which took samples of the plywood to its lab in Tacoma and ran multiple product testing procedures. The result? A positive report to Kirby that the product was indeed feasible and commercially possible.

“This was a year or two before Kirby’s plant was ever completed,” Fields said.

“There was an awful lot of work, a lot of shuffling around, trying to determine what change in machinery should be made, what gluing problems that were presented, and a whole myriad of questions that would be asked in a new process.”

About the same time, Georgia-Pacific was conducting its own testing under the direction of vice president of plywood production Jens Jorgensen, who had sev-

Georgia-Pacific built a southern pine plywood dynasty.

ing a plant was Kirby Forest Industries at Silsbee, Tex. Then Georgia-Pacific started building a plant at Fordyce, Ark. and may have made the first plywood before Kirby, but both of them were producing southern pine plywood in 1964.”

Fields’ first contact with Southern plywood was through Kirby, but it was Georgia-Pacific that ultimately gave Fields and his company a purchase order for the ages as G-P set out to build a succession of plants and establish a Southern plywood empire through the 1960s and into the 1970s.

Fields recalled that Kirby wanted to ship a good sample of logs to the West Coast to make them into plywood. Fields arranged to have that test conducted at the U.S. Plywood plant in Roseburg. “We

eral railcars of southern pine logs shipped to the G-P plant in Coquille, Ore. Again, the results were positive.

Kirby ordered its plywood equipment from Coe first, including an 8 ft. lathe and two dryers. This was quickly followed by Georgia-Pacific, which ordered an 8 ft. lathe and 4 ft. lathe along with two dryers.

Both orders shipped within a few months of each other. But G-P was the first to get the machines installed and running.

According to Georgia-Pacific plant records at Fordyce, operator James Speer peeled the first southern pine log February 4, 1964. Unseasonably cold weather hampered operations, and Speer later said he remembered icicles hanging off his hardhat that day.

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could peel 800 logs, and by February 27 a big ceremony greeted the first commercial shipment of “yellow pine plywood” from the plant at Fordyce. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus was on hand to congratulate Georgia-Pacific on the plant’s accomplishment, and Carl Keys of Arkmo-Keys Lumber Co. in North Little Rock symbolically “accepted” the historic load of panels. The shipment was even christened by Miss Arkansas Forest Queen, who bashed it with a bottle of Arkansas River water.

Fields remembered that both the G-P and Kirby plants complemented each other despite being competitors, and since his company supplied equipment to both, Coe’s service technicians were able to apply lessons learned at each plant.

“In the meantime Kirby got its plant up and running and it started up pretty well,” Fields said. “They were probably a little more organized, but they didn’t have the experienced people like G-P. Georgia-Pacific just picked up a whole shift of people from a Western plant and sent them to Fordyce and they had experienced people throughout the plant. But Kirby had to hire guys out of the sawmill.”

Meanwhile, weighing in on the early Southern plywood ventures, Arthur Temple, head of Temple Lumber and partner with U.S. Plywood in the Diboll plant, reportedly refused to credit G-P’s early startup because it was too “Western” flavored.

The Southern plywood venture was new, but Georgia-Pacific had been a major plywood producer in the Pacific Northwest since the 1950s when the company was renamed Georgia Pacific Plywood Co. in 1951, then moved from Augusta, Ga. to Olympia, Wash. in 1953. Three years later, Georgia-Pacific Plywood Co. moved again, to Portland, Ore., and also changed its name again, to Georgia-Pacific Corp.

More than 70 plywood plants had opened their doors in Oregon between 1940 and 1960. Georgia-Pacific embarked on a major $160 million timberland and mill acquisition effort during the 1950s and established major plywood manufacturing facilities in Bellingham, Wash., at Coos Bay and Coquille along the central Oregon Coast, and in Eugene/Springfield in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Dick Baldwin, who worked in the early 1960s at Weyerhaeuser’s state-of the-art plywood and sawmill facility at North Bend, Ore. (now the site of a Coquille Tribe casino called “The Mill” that still uses some of the original mill structures), notes that both Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific were big corporate drivers of plywood expansion and manufacturing on the West Coast in the 1960s and ’70s.

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Southern Pine Plywood in operation at Diboll, Texas, 1964

Meanwhile, major independent West Coast plywood producer Roseburg Forest Products had entered the industry with the startup of a two-lathe line plant at Dillard, Ore. in 1952. A second plant was added at Dillard in 1956, and a veneer

Roseburg’s Kenneth Ford took a serious look at southern pine plywood, but stayed with his strengths in the Northwest.

plant was built at nearby Dixonville.

Roseburg continued its plywood expansion in the 1960s, completing the rebuild and starting up a plant purchased in Coquille, Ore. in 1959, then building a panel finishing plant in Dillard. Roseburg acquired a small plywood plant at Riddle from Riddle Veneer in 1965 and also a plywood plant in Green from National Plywood.

In the late 1960s, Roseburg owner Kenneth Ford decided to build the “mother” of all softwood plywood plants at the site of the small Riddle plywood plant: a third of a mile long, 15 acres under one roof and a total floor space of 750,000 sq. ft.—including a covered loading dock that could accommodate 18 rail cars.

The finished facility at Riddle started up March 1970 and featured three lathes, six dryers, five multi-opening hot presses, two layup lines, a panel sizing line and two sanders.

Ford also took a serious look at building a plant in the Southern U.S., communicating with Fields of Coe numerous times, but Ford apparently never found the “numbers” to be compelling enough.

As the last 50 years of the structural panel industry began, more plywood producers became cognizant of the limitations of the old-growth peeler resource

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and also sought to utilize the smaller timber in the Intermountain West and Southern U.S. As the plywood industry established itself in the Southern U.S., it also spread farther inland in the West where smaller logs were more the norm. Log costs were also a factor in the move to new regions, as West Coast timber prices rose throughout the 1960s.

While much of the growth in plywood expansion in the 1950s through most of the 1960s came from the West Coast, expanding plywood production in the late ’60s and ’70s is attributed primarily to increased Southern output. Industry indeed expanded throughout the timbered areas of Montana, Idaho and Colorado and eastern Oregon and Washington in the 1960s and ’70s, but volumes from those regions were and have remained much smaller than West Coast and Southern production levels.

In 1965, according to a U.S. Forest Service Forest Product Laboratory report, there were 12 Southern plywood facilities, led by Georgia-Pacific with three (two plants at Crossett, Ark. and the one at Fordyce); Boise Southern (at Florien and Oakdale, La.) and Weyerhaeuser (Philadelphia, Miss. and Plymouth, NC) with two apiece, plus single plants operated by Kirby Forest Industries (Silsbee, Tex.), Louisiana-Pacific (Lufkin, Tex.), Southern Pine Plywood (Diboll, Tex.), Santiam Southern (Ruston, La.) and Scotch Plywood (Fulton, Ala.).

Counting the new plants in the South, the U.S. plywood industry in 1965 featured 173 active softwood mills—161 in the West and 12 in the South. Total capacity of 14.3 billion SF was overwhelmingly in the West, but the South would quickly catch up.

Making the biggest splash by far in the Southern plywood market was GeorgiaPacific, which by 1965 was making plans to build more than a dozen new (and would build 18 total by 1996) southern pine plywood mills—and by 1970 11 were in operation.

“Fordyce was the ‘guinea pig’ we used to make sure the product was okay,” remembered Pamplin. “But we moved ahead with the other mills right away because many other companies were right on our heels and we knew the market was right.” Indeed Georgia-Pacific, during a two-year span, would order lathes and dryers for 15 plants from Fields and Coe. Yet the fast expansion and quick success Georgia-Pacific enjoyed created a backlash: Thanks to the company’s aggressive acquisition of small timber companies and timberlands and its strategic placement of plywood plants and distribution centers to support its growing lineup of plywood plants, Georgia-Pacific 10 P A N E L A G E 5 0

became the subject of complaints by other forest operators.

Pamplin recalled, “We raised the price of timber in doing all this and the small operations started complaining that we had run the price up and were putting them out of business. The FTC reacted to that. They claimed we tied up all of the good locations in the South for plywood plants.”

According to complaints filed with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the late 1960s and 1970, the southern pine plywood innovators at Georgia-Pacific were too successful and had created a monopoly. In early 1970 Pamplin received a subpoena from the FTC claiming just that.

The federal agency proposed that the company divest itself of certain assets and timber rights and refrain from acquisitions in the region for an indefinite period.

According to a later account by former Louisiana-Pacific CEO Harry Merlo, who headed up Georgia-Pacific’s Western operations at the time, initially company officials felt the complaint had no merit: The company owned a minimal percentage of Southern timberland, while others such as Weyerhaeuser and International Paper owned more.

But fighting the FTC finding quickly proved to be a losing battle, and GeorgiaPacific’s Pamplin came up with a remarkable plan to divest G-P of 20% of its assets, including only three southern pine plywood mills, two particleboard plants, a half-million acres of timberland, numerous sawmills in the West, a half interest in a pulp mill in Alaska and 6,000 employees. The divestiture would also create a new company, called Louisiana-Pacific, which not too many years down the road would provide the industry with an innovation comparable in scale to G-P’s expansion in plywood.

Pamplin offered Merlo the opportunity to serve as President and CEO of Louisiana-Pacific—an offer Merlo accepted before Pamplin could finish asking the question, Merlo later wrote in his autobiography.

U.S. researcher Armin Elmendorf first referred to the use of wood strands in 1949 in the context of utilizing veneer wastes, and in the 1950s researched the use of oriented wood strands in structural particleboard. In 1965 Elmendorf received a U.S. patent for Oriented Strand Board (OSB).

He formed the Elmendorf Manufacturing Company in Clairmont, NH, and built a small pilot plant in the early 1980s, but demands for capital meant the operation never moved into full-blown commercial production. The plant was purchased by Temple-Eastex in 1983.

Oxboard from Potlatch in Bemidji, Minn., which started up in 1981, was the first true OSB product manufactured in North America with the intent of producing it commercially. It employed a similar manufacturing process as waferboard; however, with several important differences. Oxboard was produced using strands of wood rather than wafers. The second difference with Oxboard was the use of strand orientation to improve the mechanical and dimensional stability properties of the board. Where this product differed from Elmendorf’s original patent for OSB was its three-layer design. The strands on both surfaces were aligned parallel to the machine direction and the strands in the core layer were aligned perpendicular to the machine direction.

Oxboard (originally called Stranwood) was first produced at a pilot plant in Lewiston, Id. The Bemidji facility was sold to Ainsworth Lumber in 2004 and closed permanently in 2009.

Another early OSB producer was Pelican Spruce Mills in Edson, Alberta, which started up a 240MMSF plant in 1983. In 1987, Weyerhaeuser became a partner in the plant with Pelican and a year later took full ownership of the mill.

By then, the Edson OSB mill had increased its production capacity to 306MMSF annually. The plant celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2008.

OSB Revolution

It’s true that the rapid ramping up of Southern U.S. plywood production and Georgia-Pacific’s increased market penetration in many ways directly led to the creation of major forest products producer Louisiana-Pacific. But it was a routine visit to a National Assn. of Home Builders (NAHB) event by L-P CEO Merlo in 1978 that sparked a structural panel revolution.

A major purchaser of U.S. Forest Service timber sales, Louisiana-Pacific and Merlo had become increasingly con-

Today’s structural panel markets are led by oriented strandboard (OSB) and plywood. For 95 years plywood had ruled the structural panel market until being surpassed in output by OSB in 1999.

The origin of OSB as it’s known today doesn’t have a singular birthright: Multiple individuals and companies worked to develop structural boards from flakes, wafers and strands within the same time frame with varying degrees of success.

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cerned about the movement toward more designated wilderness areas and timber set-asides putting a crimp in federal timber sale programs (though there was still a good decade left of high harvest levels before the hammer came down in the late 1980s, leading to a court decision in 1991 that reduced harvests in Western U.S. public forests by 80%).

With those thoughts in mind, Merlo and one of L-P’s vice presidents, Jim Eisses, were drawn to a NAHB show display touting “waferboard,” a product first developed in Sandpoint, Id. in the 1950s with little market success. In the 1960s MacMillan Bloedel in Canada had some success with the product by producing a version that included an exterior resin, making it suitable for sheathing applications, and did well in some regional U.S. markets.

But what drew Merlo to waferboard was its raw material requirements.

Unlike plywood, which needed expensive, large diameter logs (ideally) for veneer peeling, waferboard could be produced using readily available, low quality and inexpensive trees such as aspen and other “soft” hardwoods, or lower cost pulpwood-size softwood.

The concept intrigued Merlo greatly. “We wouldn’t have to own an acre of timberland to produce it…and the cost of manufacturing it was lower and less labor inHarry Merlo tensive than plywood,” Merlo recalled. In fact, Merlo and Eisses were on the L-P company jet that afternoon, headed to Canada to tour several waferboard plants.

Two innovations Merlo quickly identified for waferboard to become more efficiently produced and accepted as a structural building product were the need to make the panels sturdier by orienting the wood grain of the wafers in different layers as the product was being manufactured, similar to how plywood veneer sheets are oriented during layup, and also the need to produce large panels that could be broken down into standard 4x8 structural panels during the manufacturing process. (He would turn to German machinery manufacturer Siempelkamp for help in designing and producing forming equipment that would do the job of building oriented layers of wood wafers.)

In 1978, L-P started up the first commercially successful U.S. waferboard plant at Hayward, Wis., a project so successful that the company immediately set about building its second plant, this one in Houlton, Me. L-P named its product, Wafer-

wood, and later renamed it “oriented strand board” and introduced its highly successful Inner-Seal sheathing and subflooring line. The company advertised the new OSB product as “the smart man’s plywood.”

With the advent of OSB as a viable plywood alternative for many applications, overall plywood capacity began declining almost immediately. In 1964 the OSB/waferboard industry consisted of one plant with a 71,000 cubic meter capacity.

Five years after L-P started up the first U.S. waferboard plant, the North American OSB industry was producing 1.2 billion SF—and 10 years later, in 1988, production had jumped by more than 300% to 4.3 billion SF being produced by 40 plants in the U.S. and Canada.

The rise of OSB in the market and its lower manufacturing costs led to an interesting interplay with plywood that continues to this day.

Plywood had the advantage of being an established, familiar product with structural properties that many considered superior on a panel-to-panel basis, especially plywood’s resistance to thickness swelling. On the other hand, a lower-priced product that meets structural code specifications will sooner or later find its own significant market share, and that’s exactly what happened. During the past quarter century, most of the North American structural panel production capacity increases can be attributed to new OSB plants, while most of the losses in structural panel capacity are the result of plywood mill closures.

Plywood had been more dependent on larger and higher grade logs, and declining availability added to plywood manufacturing costs and reduced competitiveness with OSB. Plywood producers adapted, using faster charging and peeling to maintain production in smaller logs, while finding new markets. Southern U.S. plywood producers have been a bit more competitive due to lower log costs primarily, and have been able to hang on to a higher percentage of the region’s production capacity since OSB became a competitive force in the 1980s.

Early 80s Downturn The housing downturn that began in 2007 was unprecedented, but before it, the worst post-war economic downturn

was the “Great Recession” of 1980-82, when interest rates soared above 20%, leading to a wave of mill closures and consolidation across all segments of the forest products industry. Inflation was at a staggering 13.5%. The impact on the structural panel industry was huge, as the number of average housing starts dropped to 1.15 million/yr. in the period from 1980-82, down from averaging 1.69 million a year from 1975-79.

“Our hopes for a gradual resurgence in demand were abruptly ended by the rapid escalation of interest rates through the summer and early fall,” said APA Executive Vice President Bronson Lewis in an early ’82 market report looking back at the previous year. In the report, Lewis noted that the downturn had meant layoffs for 6,000 Western plywood plant employees, and 3,000 Southern plywood production employees. One particular low point was the week ending December 5, 1981, Lewis said, noting that of 176 mills nationwide producing structural panels, 65% (114) were either closed or operating on a reduced shift basis, including 36 shut facilities and 68 plants limping along.

Yet by mid year production drops reversed, and by the time of APA’s annual meeting that fall, officials were touting signs of recovery, and APA had revised its 1982 production forecast upward from 16.2 to 16.5 billion SF of plywood.

At APA’s 1982 annual meeting, retiring board chairman Bruce Fulton noted the recessionary plywood production of 1982 was only 17% below the all-time record production year of 1978—even though housing starts for the year were down almost 50%. Non-housing markets, Fulton said, have a very stabilizing effect, and he urged APA members to step up their research and promotional efforts to bolster non-housing markets.

As housing markets returned in the ’80s, the stage was set for “waferboard” (not yet universally called OSB) to begin truly eating away at plywood’s share of residential construction markets.

At a meeting in late 1982, Norm Voss, Champion International director of product planning and development for reconstituted wood products, noted that while the reconstituted, “structural board” segment’s production capacity had more than quadrupled since 1978, the products had gained only 2% more market share during that time. During the recession, waferboard and similar type structural panel plants operated at a lower capacity on average than plywood mills—and just generally hadn’t lived up to their potential, he said.

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promoted the construction of the many facilities that are now or soon to be in production?” Voss asked, adding that according to market research, reconstituted structural panels had a 4.3% residential construction market share in 1980.

Georgia-Pacific answered those questions the following year, announcing a multi-year plan to expand or build 10 new OSB/waferboard plants in strategic locations east of the Mississippi, starting with a doubling of capacity at its Dudley, NC plant to 120MMSF. At the time, the company’s only other reconstituted structural panel plant was a waferboard facility in Woodland, Me. The first new G-P OSB facility announced as part of the expansion plan was the Emporia, Va. plant.

According to A.C. Stabler, G-P’s pine plywood Southern Div. manager, the company’s experience at Dudley and Woodland had opened G-P executives’ eyes

The ability to utilize various types of smaller diameter timber closer to end user markets made OSB/waferboard plants more attractive when it came to adding new facilities and more capacity, Stabler said.

And the production dynamic was on between plywood and OSB as the U.S. economy and housing markets recovered: In a strengthening market, 1983 plywood structural panel production set a new record of 20.8 billion SF, surpassing the former record of 19.9 billion SF set in 1978. (And the ’83 record was a whopping 27% increase over 1982.) According to APA, Southern U.S. plants were responsible for more than half of the ’83 total, producing 10.8 billion SF. The following year in a news release, APA noted 1984 set another structural panel production record, coming in 6% ahead of 1983’s output at just above 22

OSB provided builders a second structural panel choice.

about the product’s potential and marketplace acceptance. “We think there’ll be enough market expansion in the ’80s and ’90s to absorb the increased production in both these products (OSB and waferboard) as well as plywood,” he said, adding that much of G-P’s plywood business east of the Mississippi was heavy to specialty products, and the new plants would provide needed sheathing capacity.

Less than 20 years after G-P shipped the first Southern plywood from Fordyce, Ark., Stabler noted that while the timber base could still support a few isolated new mills and new mills would always be coming online to replace older, higher-cost plants, “Overall, in my opinion, the Southern plywood industry has peaked,” he said.

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billion SF in 1984. The plywood association noted that “veneer” panels made up 20.3 billion SF while “non-veneer” structural panels accounted for 1.8 billion SF. It was a difference that would steadily narrow until 1999, when OSB overtook plywood in structural panel production for the first time.

Why Waferboard?

Why waferboard indeed, wrote Louisiana-Pacific’s Jim Eisses, Corporate Director of Engineered Products, in 1984. Making the case in an article taken from a presentation made at a trade event, Eisses showed how OSB/waferboard was in

many ways the equal if not superior to plywood—and especially competitive in converting lower cost raw materials into a valuable product.

Noting that Lousiana-Pacific had begun making waferboard with aspen but was by then widely producing southern pine product, Eisses cited a much lower raw material and overall conversion cost for OSB versus plywood. First noting raw material and resin costs, then mill conversion costs, Eisses reported a total mill cost of $171 per MMSF for plywood versus $110/MMSF for “Waferwood” (the trade name for Lousiana-Pacific’s waferboard product). To be fair, Eisses subtracted out an estimated $22/MMSF for recovery of cores and chip sales through plywood production for a final cost comparison of $149/MMSF for Southern plywood to $110/MMSF for OSB. Eisses cited labor requirements and costs as a major factor in the difference between the two products, noting that in Lousiana-Pacific’s conventional plywood plants and Waferwood operations then operating in Maine and Wisconsin, “manpower for the plywood operations is 225 versus 90 for a similar-sized Waferwood plant.” He noted that plywood production still required labor intensive operations such as clipping, drying, grading, layup and panel repair—procedures that have since been largely automated, but still require equipment and operators.

At the time, counter to conventional strategy, Eisses said, Lousiana-Pacific was pursuing an approach that emphasized smaller plants to serve regional markets and low production costs above all else.

“When our competition was building the $40-$60 million plant, our investment was less than half, yet the production capacity is close to 75% of their operation,” Eisses said. “During a good market, large plants show good conversion costs due to greater volume, but what happens at lower volumes?”

Laying out Lousiana-Pacific’s Waferwood strategy, Eisses cited the lower raw material costs associated with smaller plants, which also reduced hauling costs and allowed mill operators to be more selective with raw material specifications.

“You can be more selective and buy quality wood, which will improve the yield per cord, and the quality of wafers produced, thereby reducing the need for high resin usage,” Eisses said. “Consequently, we produce a higher quality waferboard at lower densities, and therefore, at lower cost.”

While enjoying the obvious benefit of lower, non-union labor costs, these smaller Waferwood mills would also benefit

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from proximity to the market, lowering transportation costs. “The further we ship a product, the lower the mill return.

Therefore, for the maximum return from a small volume plant, we concentrate sales in the immediate area,” Eisses said.

“Regional plants allow you to do this more easily than the large plants that need the entire U.S. for the marketplace.”

The strategy was especially suited to the U.S. West, Eisses said, noting that Lousiana-Pacific was targeting California, Arizona and the Northwest, with two plants in Colorado and one in Idaho at the time, plus a California Waferwood plant under discussion.

In the same issue, Lousiana-Pacific Waferwood Sales Manager Bill Jacob penned a short article claiming that, “From a salesman’s point of view, Waferwood comes close to being the ideal product.”

He noted that Waferwood met ANSI performance standards, Council of American Building Officials, carried APA Sturd-IFloor or Rated Sheathing stamps—and conformed to HUD/FHA requirements.

But What Is It? While plywood had been a recognizable, familiar and well-known product for decades, as of the early ’80s the new generation of structural composite strand- and waferboards were still seeking a common product reference in the marketplace. Descriptions of the product varied, from the academic-sounding “structural” or “reconstituted” composite panels to more commercial terms like waferboard, strandboard or even the original flakeboard.

Well-known industry figure Tom Maloney at Washington State University’s Wood Materials & Engineering Laboratory tackled the topic in an article in Panel World magazine in late 1983: “The nomenclature concerning (strandboard and waferboard) is becoming quite confused. The original patents and publications on waferboard state that a wafer is essentially a square. Thus, it is virtually impossible to orient or align a wafer.

“In recent years one hears of oriented strandboard, by which it is meant boards with long narrow flakes,” Maloney continued. “This is, of course, oriented strandboard. Now, we have oriented strandboard with wafers on the faces.

However, it’s being called waferboard.”

In the article, Maloney emphasized, “No matter what one calls the product, they are all versions of flakeboard.”

By 1984, Potlatch was running ads with the theme of “Oxboard is not waferboard.” Oxboard was Potlatch’s trade 14 P A N E L A G E 5 0

name for OSB, and according to the news item, “Confusion over the differences between Oxboard and waferboard, particularly in the critical areas of strength and durability, is the primary reason for the Potlatch campaign.”

Ralph Gage, former longtime Coe Mfg. executive who was closely involved in all phases of the panel industry and was in the thick of the early 1960s Southern plywood startups, says he believes Louisiana-Pacific was the first major producer to fully adopt the “OSB” product name across the board for its non-plywood structural panel products.

Independents also joined the OSB march, with Langdale Company opening the first OSB plant in Georgia in 1988, then doubling the facility’s capacity in 2004.

Meanwhile, Martco opened the first Southern OSB plant to utilize bottomland hardwood in 1983 at Lemoyen, La. Almost a quarter-century later, in 2007, Martco opened a state-of-the-art greenfield OSB plant at Oakdale, La. Family-owned J.M. Huber built an OSB plant in Commerce, Ga. in the late 1980s, implementing new technology with long log waferizers. It was the company’s second OSB plant, with three more to come by 2005.

Plywood Erosion In the mid 1980s Maloney reported on a recent conference, “Structural Wood Composites: Meeting Today’s Needs and Tomorrow’s Challenges,” that probed the structural panel industry and market, particularly in respect to the dynamics between longtime structural market leader softwood plywood and the new generation of non-veneer structural panels, plus trends and opportunities affecting all players in the market.

Perhaps the biggest trend, Maloney said, was the slow but ongoing erosion of plywood market share in structural products. Non-veneer structural panels made up 7%-8% of production in 1984, with projections to rise to 12% by 1988. He added that in Canada, non-veneer panels already had about half the structural panel market.

Maloney noted that much of the nonveneer structural panels were being substituted for plywood, calling a fair amount of the industry’s growth market substitution instead of market expansion.

He added that serious competition among non-veneer board producers requires consistent high quality, and any product that doesn’t measure up is quickly marginalized in the market.

Noting that even with the non-veneer

structural panel sector’s growth, softwood plywood still remains the structural panel market’s primary product, Champion International’s Richard Enlow discussed the spreading digital upgrades in the plywood industry, along with new technology like centerless lathes, that were boosting recovery and quality.

“Performance-rated standards are leading to increased flexibility for innovation with the softwood plywood products,” he said. “Thinner panels have already been approved for traditional uses in residential construction, and soft hardwoods are now being used in performance-based panel construction.”

In 1986, the issue of performance-based grading standards was borne out when Georgia-Pacific shipped the first “A-grade” OSB load from its Grenada, Miss. plant to Arkmo Lumber & Supply in North Little Rock, Ark.—the same company that had taken shipment of the first load of Southern plywood from G-P’s new Fordyce, Ark. plant in 1964. The Grenada plant started up in 1985, G-P’s second OSB facility and one of the large group of planned plants announced in 1981.

By the end of 1986, the forest products industry was enjoying record consumption of both lumber and panel products, as housing observers projected almost 2 million housing starts for the year. Domestic lumber and panel production were both up around 12% for the year, according to officials with the Western Wood Products Assn. and APA. Meanwhile, a 1986 market report by Random Lengths stated that non-veneer structural panel production would exceed 5 billion SF, 19% more than the 1985 output. In addition, the report said, waferboard and OSB accounted for more than 20% of the North American structural panel market. According to the report, waferboard/OSB capacity would increase to almost 7 billion SF by the end of 1987, and over the next two years, two-thirds of new structural panel capacity would be in OSB production.

LP Missteps In the area of manufacturing costs, OSB had significant advantages over plywood. Yet in the rush to position itself as the top OSB producer and maintain ultracompetitive product pricing, the historical record shows Louisiana-Pacific made several blunders in the 1980s and ’90s.

The impact was a triple whammy of environmental fines, class action lawsuits and a federal indictment for criminal Clean Air Act violations and product fraud. In

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the late 1980s federal Environmental Protection Agency officials began investigating L-P for “systematic” violations of the Clean Air Act, including underestimating overall pollution levels and failure to obtain permits for plant expansions that would increase emission levels. This led to what was then the largest civil fine ever imposed by the EPA—$11.1 million in fines for Clean Air Act violations at 14 plants, announced in 1993. But that was nothing compared to what was coming: In July 1995, a Denver federal grand jury returned a 56-count indictment against L-P for tampering with emissions control equipment, improperly documenting emissions records, and fraudulent board certification to deceive both industry inspectors and customers. The indictment said the plant had pursued a scheme from 1989 to 1994 where personnel would submit products for certification to APA officials that had higher resin contents and longer cure times than standard production boards.

Meanwhile, several large product liability lawsuits across the U.S. had been consolidated into a major nationwide class-action lawsuit concerning the performance of L-P’s Inner Seal siding product. Since 1985, L-P had already paid more than $40 million in product claims,

though the company maintained the problems were mostly due to improper installation and maintenance.

By mid-summer 1995 the L-P board announced the resignation of its original CEO, Merlo, and his leading lieutenants.

Soon, International Paper executive Mark Suwyn was brought in as the new CEO, and he set about renewing and transforming the company, selling unprofitable assets to service the legal claims and promoting innovation and development of engineered wood products. Later, Rick Frost took the helm in 2004, sold timberlands, modernized the company culture and guided the company through the ensuing devastating recession, even though more than one industry “expert” said L-P and its heavy commitment to OSB wouldn’t make it through the housing crash. But survive LP did, today with Curt Stevens succeeding Frost in the top post. In 2013, the company began startup of a shuttered OSB plant in Alabama.

OSB Gaining By the mid 1990s forest products industry researchers Henry Spelter and David McKeever published an article, “A Look at

the Road Ahead for Structural Panels, ” in which they compared the situation of the OSB industry in 1996 to that of the MDF industry in the 1970s: The MDF industry experienced a major upheaval in the 1970s when an economic slump hit the U.S. right when the industry had added a significant amount of capacity.

In the article, Spelter looked at whether the OSB industry was in danger of adding too much capacity. While the OSB industry’s capacity additions at the time were similar to those of the MDF industry’s growth in the 1970s, the economic conditions in the late 1990s led the author to conclude that the OSB industry, at least in the near future, would probably not have the closures like those experienced by the MDF sector in the ’70s.

By the end of the decade the inevitable occurred: OSB caught and overtook softwood plywood in North American structural panel production in late 1999. According to figures released by APA—The Engineered Wood Assn. in January 2000, OSB production for the year prior stood at 20.325 billion SF while plywood production landed at 20.275 billion BF. During the 1990s, OSB production increased 254%, while plywood output dropped 17%. Capacity for both products

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also reflected the growth of OSB at the expense of plywood: From 1990-99, OSB capacity increased 192% while plywood capacity dropped 23%.

Coming from an all-time North American high of 25.4 billion SF in 1987, plywood output trended almost straight downward ever since, with a handful of uptick years along the way. Yet despite increased competition from OSB, plywood production held mostly steady through the 1990s, averaging more than 20 billion SF each year.

In early 1996, Martin Companies (RoyOMartin), started up a large greenfield softwood plywood plant at Chopin, La., the first to be built in the U.S. since the early 1980s. (A decade later, Martco build a second plywood plant at Chopin, and the site is undergoing yet another major expansion in 2013, which also marks the company’s 90th year of operation.)

At the turn of the century, plywood production held firm, averaging more than 17 billion SF from 2001-2005. According to the Forest Products Lab study “Status and Trends: Profile of Structural Panels in the United States and Canada” released in early 2006, North America’s top plywood capacity ownership included Georgia-Pacific, 31%; International Paper, 9%; Wey-

erhaeuser, 8%; Boise Cascade, 7%; Roseburg, 5%; and Tolko and West Fraser, both 4%. These companies represented more than two-thirds of North American plywood production at the time.

Board plant entrepreneur John Godfrey, who has owned and operated several OSB plant ventures and was building Chatham Forest Products in Ogdensburg, NY at the time OSB overtook plywood, noted the surpassing as “a continuation of what started 20 years ago as OSB replaced plywood to a certain extent and filled almost all needs for expansion in the structural panel market.”

But who was worrying? The 1999 output for OSB and plywood combined was 40.6 billion BF, an increase of 5% over 1998—and the eighth consecutive record production year since 1992, when the combined production was 30.6 billion BF.

Structural Panel Advocate Looking at the past 50 years of APA— The Engineered Wood Assn. closely reflects the past half-century of the North American forest products industry in general: the rise of Southern timber resources as a component of overall supply and

new panel products; the development of new and highly successful products like OSB; and the overall expansion of markets and global commerce.

From its founding as the Douglas Fir Plywood Assn. (DFPA) in 1933, APA— The Engineered Wood Assn. has developed into a model industry trade organization, spanning widely varying eras in terms of product quality and acceptance and market structure and development during the past 80 years.

The association was initially formed in anticipation of federal legislation that would have forced adoption of certain trade practices. Though such legislation was deemed unconstitutional, the first regular meeting of the DFPA was held in Tacoma, Wash. in 1933.

As the industry grew through the end of the Great Depression, plywood continued to prove its product quality and value— then was fully tested in World War II. The industry had 31 plants as the war began, and all 31 were deemed critical to the war effort. As the war wound down, the plywood industry was geared up to do its part in the great postwar boom years and expansion of the U.S. economy as the demand for plywood grew and its applications widened. The industry that produced

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400MMSF in 1934 was producing April 1994, APA further empha4 billion SF 20 years later in 1954. sized its commitment to structural With its products becoming inpanels and related products when creasingly diverse, with a growthe APA Board of Trustees aping membership from mills in proved the second name change in Canada, and with Southern U.S. the association’s history. The new plywood production on the verge name: APA—The Engineered of exploding, the DFPA’s board Wood Association. According to of trustees approved an associaan association announcement, the tion name change in 1964, and new name was designed to retain the group became the American the positive image built up over Plywood Assn. (APA). As the indecades in the marketplace with dustry continued to expand, APA “APA” stamped products, while made a huge investment on the also acknowledging the associapart of its membership in 1969 tion’s broadening representation with the opening of a new milof not only structural panels but lion-dollar 37,000 sq. ft. research also support products and engicenter in Tacoma. neered wood systems.

Meanwhile, the structural One of APA’s greatest services panel industry continued to exhas been its annual safety proDouglas Fir Plywood Assn. became American Plywood Assn. in 1964. pand its scope in terms of utilizagram and the recognition awards tion, quality and performance. One par(AWS), to provide services to manufacit presents to producer and mill representicular reflection of industry’s developturers of glued structural wood products tatives at the annual APA meeting. ment were the engineered wood products and systems, such as glulam timber and The 100th anniversary of plywood in and building systems making more inwood I-joists. The AWS program began 2005 featured a major APA—Engineered roads in building markets. in 1991, with AWS member products Wood Assn. event in Portland where the In 1990, after extensive deliberations carrying an APA-EWS trademark. Amerfirst plant was located in 1905. The celeover several months, the APA Board of ican Wood Systems later became Engibration included placing a commemoraTrustees voted unanimously to authorize neered Wood Systems and subsequently tive plaque at the site by APA Chairman creation of a related APA nonprofit cormerged with APA. John Murphy and Plywood Pioneers L poration, American Wood Systems Several years after starting up AWS, in President William Bennett.

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Career Spanning Seven Decades EDITOR’S NOTE: Starting at age 19 Dick Baldwin followed his dad into the Cascade Plywood mill in Lebanon, Ore. in 1957. Through the years he laid core, rustled stock, supervised production personnel and worked as an industrial engineer, general superintendent and operations manager. He was named vice president for Champion International’s Southern manufacturing operations. He became president and CEO of several forest products companies. Today, he’s the Executive Vice President of Wood Resources for Atlas Holdings, which operates plywood plants at Chester, SC and Moncure, NC (and recently entered into an operating agreement with a native American-owned plant in Omak, Wash.). He has written five books on the industry and is nearing completion of a sixth book. Here are some of Baldwin’s industry insights: he Lebanon mill was reputed to be the largest (under one roof) and most modern plywood plant in the world for its time. Its typical log furnish was Old Growth #1 and #2 Peeler logs.

The mill, with two lathe lines, at least six veneer dryers, seven glue spreaders and six hot presses (as I remember) made everything but sheathing—almost.

A. E. (Al) Anderson was the General Manager; he was noted for running a “cutting edge” mill with continuous innovation in equipment, process and people development. For example, no college trainee was recruited into the mill without having to spend at least one year rotating through hourly positions. The gathering of statistics and technical data was unmatched for its time.

Al was a no nonsense guy at CPC which was the culmination of a long and storied career within the plywood industry.

He made an impression upon a young 19year-old stock rustler in the swing shift glue room on a Thursday afternoon, when veneer was short and orders were piecemeal. I heard the call over the PA system, “Baldwin, come to the glue room!” in a gruff voice when I was searching for veneer components in the veneer storage room. I found the needed veneer, took off and slid to a stop in front of a spreader (which was down waiting for stock).

The year was 1958, I was the stock rustler, and Anderson’s brief and salient reminder of not letting a machine go down was both an embarrassment and a lesson not to be repeated, and I have

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never forgotten the lessons provided by A. E. Anderson. Over the years CPC provided a steady stream of plant managers and general managers to the industry. It was common knowledge that CPC was “Plywood U,” and if you survived the education provided by the Al Anderson environment, you had to be pretty good.

But the industry was entering a major era of change. As peeler grade old-growth logs became harder to obtain, the industry began shifting to the second-growth logs, and then sheathing became the product of choice. It required fewer skills and equipment to manufacture; and the costs were decidedly lower. With the resulting shift (of plywood) to a basic commodity product, lowering costs became ever more important. An industry that previously had been driven by the overall economy became an industry driven by the housing demand cycle.

Since the 1990s, there has been little installed major innovation within the plywood industry. Improvements have mostly been in existing equipment refinements, with lots of electronic innovations. Research and development have fallen on hard times as the Fortune 500 companies have exited the industry, and wood technology courses in colleges and universities are mostly feeling hard times and budget pressures. With plywood viewed as a declining industry, there has been little incentive for developing careers in plywood.

What do I see as the future of the industry? Well, OSB has “gobbled up” the residential market for sheathing, but plywood continues to have 10,000 uses. A 30-plus year veteran plywood sales manager was recently asked by an investment professional how the plywood is used. He replied, “Well, I can tell you the major categories for its use, but people continue to buy it, and I have no idea where all of it is used!”

My bet is that plywood is returning to its pre 1955 roots. Mills that cater to the customer’s needs, and sell on the basis of plywood’s unique structural, machining and appearance characteristics, will have a market they can make money at—if they are a low-cost producer. The Great Recession demonstrated that the plywood industry continued to sell and ship about 10 billion square feet (3/8 basis) even during the worst of the downturn years while OSB capacity was taken off line.

Plywood is not a “buggy whip” industry. It is an end-use specific industry, and no longer functions in a role of a conversion option for a Fortune 500 company.

The innovative and resourceful producer who caters to his customers—and is a low cost producer that can produce a mix of products—will be successful in the years ahead. How successful will depend on the economy, access to affordable raw material and the resourcefulness of the L plant operator and the team.

Dick Baldwin: Plywood caretaker through up and down cycles

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II

Composite Panels: Innovative Products For New Markets he last 50 years of the composite panel industry begin with a product poised to expand its market share in both structural and non-structural applications. And the beginning of the past 50 years of the composite panel industry also coincided with developments in liquid adhesives and resins that made the products more viable in the marketplace and successful in new applications: Resin curing times were reduced to enhance productivity, and technological advancements to improve overall board quality boosted the industry.

Tom Maloney, director emeritus and emeritus professor of Mechanical and

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Materials Engineering, Composite Materials and Engineering Center at Washington State University, cites early post-war composite panel plants such as Southern Box and Lumber Co. in Wilmington, NC and the Hu-Wood plant in North Sacramento, Calif. as early commercial particleboard manufacturers in the U.S. after World War II. They were followed by operations such as Long-Bell Lumber Co. in Longview, Wash., and U.S. Plywood in Anderson, Calif., which was making the Novoply board under license from the Fahrni Institute in Switzerland.

Most of the early composite board plants used “flakes” produced from

roundwood or lumber residuals. Board plants utilizing planer shavings inevitably began working with sawdust residuals, and in time the product known as layered particleboard came into being.

Pack River Lumber of Sandpoint and Dover, Id. was an early producer of commercial structural particleboard in the 1950s, using large flakes called wafers.

The attempt to sell into the structural market was ahead of its time, Maloney says, noting that low-cost sheathing grade traditional plywood was plentiful during the time period.

Leading into the decade of the 1960s, developments in board production and resin technology enabled the industry to produce much smoother boards and gain production efficiencies. This in turn made composite panel products more competitive and helped open new markets in the 1960s and beyond as the industry began a huge expansion.

Technological developments in refining and blending and forming also led to a higher value product, which featured fine particles on panel surfaces and coarse particles in a core layer. In 1960, Willamette Industries built what many consider the first modern particleboard plant producing this type of board at Albany, Ore. at the Duraflake plant now owned and operated

by Flakeboard (Arauco).

According to a paper from the WoodBased Composites Center, another early structural particleboard operation was Wizewood Ltd., in Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan. The plant started up in 1961 and began marketing its product under the name Aspenite the following year. The wafer-particle facility utilized roundwood, and incorporated waterproof phenolic resins in its production process.

The plant was sold to MacMillan Bloedel in 1965, and the new owner continued its development of wafer-based panels.

Alan Goudy, former president of Collins Companies who served as National Particleboard Assn. president in 1969, was also Collins’ point man in starting up the company’s Chester, Calif. particleboard plant in 1959. He notes that the Collins plant and the Pope & Talbot plant at Oakridge, Ore., which had started up a couple of years earlier, were “stealing employees from each other” in looking for personnel with experience in such a young industry.

Collins sought to create a value-added product from mill residuals, which were being burned in a boiler on site or sent to a paper mill. The plant was the first to use the Western pine species in particleboard, as opposed to U.S. Plywood, Pope & Talbot and Willamette plants in California

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and western Oregon that were using 100% Douglas fir.

Goudy remembered the plant as somewhat experimental when it first started up, and that Collins built a lab on site to research the process, which involved feeding paper mill chips and other residuals to two Pallmann flakers. “There was a lot of study...because we didn’t know much about it,” Goudy said, describing the early industry as “a pretty tight knit group, because we were all trying to make the darn (plants) go. And the resins and adhesives manufacturers were in the middle of it trying to get resins that would work with the different species and various sizing agents.”

Maloney remembers the first composite board plants were flakeboard producers—with the conventional wisdom being planer shavings were inferior. But on the West Coast, Maloney said, producers began working with planer shavings because there were tons of them being underutilized due to the lumber planing practices of the era. One big benefit, he remembered, is that Douglas fir raw material was found to work very well with urea formaldehyde resins.

Composite Advocate In 1960, representatives from Eastern and Western U.S. suppliers of particleboard and flakeboard met in Chicago to form an association to nationalize a relatively new product made from mill residuals such as sawdust and planer shavings blended with resin. In January, nine mill representatives met to develop a unified approach to national product standards, international trade issues, industry communications and work with federal agencies on commerce issues.

“One of the reasons it behooved us to put an association together was that we had to have some commercial standards for the use of particleboard within home construction as floor underlayment, for example,” said Ralph Peinecke, one of the founding representatives of what became the National Particleboard Assn.

(NPA) that eventually evolved into the Composite Panel Assn. that represents particleboard and fiberboard manufacturers in the marketplace and with regulatory authorities.

Previously producers had believed the particle- and flakeboard suppliers needed separate associations, but those who met in Chicago thought “This is getting too fragmented. We better just put it all together and call it the particleboard association,” said Peinecke, who was in charge

of starting up first- and second-generation and groundbreaking particleboard plants for Pope & Talbot in Oak Ridge, Ore. and Boise Cascade in LaGrande, Ore. He ended up spending 25 years with Boise Cascade before retiring in 1987. He served as NPA chairman in 1977.

Even though the association brought East and West U.S. producers together, those early meetings were contentious, Peinecke remembered. “We were talking product standards, and there were some issues, and it took a while for the East and West factions to blend.”

When the U.S. Dept. of Commerce updated its 1960 particleboard commercial standards in 1966, NPA began developing a grade mark program for product testing and certification. The organization also sponsored the first “voluntary” industry standard for MDF in 1973, and the first MDF ANSI standard in 1980.

In 1997, the Canadian Particleboard Assn. merged with NPA, and the group was renamed Composite Panel Assn., with offices in Maryland and Montreal.

The CPA expanded its reach twice in the early 2000s, consolidating the American Hardboard Assn. and Laminating Materials Assn. into its membership rolls in 2002 and 2004, respectively. CPA looked to further expand in 2006 after adopting a plan to integrate Mexican board producers into CPA, giving the group full representation of the North American composite panel industry.

early 2013. Roseburg’s Dillard plant continues as a major producer today, one of Roseburg’s four particleboard plants that produce 1.3 billion SF annually.

In a 1974 article in Furniture Production magazine, R.F. Seeburger of distributor R.F. Seeburger Co. in Indianapolis, Ind., reflected on the development of the particleboard market: “In 1960, particleboard had gained widespread acceptance as a substrate for high pressure laminates.

Most industrial production of that era also required the application of backer sheets and some form of edge-banding or T-Mold. Particleboard was thus totally

Composite Markets According to a research paper from the Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory, particleboard and hardboard usage in North American furniture production grew rapidly from 1960 to 1972, with particleboard usage increasing by more than 800% from 120MMSF to 970MMSF. Hardboard usage also increased during the same time by roughly 60%, going from 450MMSF to 720MMSF. Two key plants from the 1960s era of particleboard were started up in 1965: Roseburg’s massive 640x300 ft. particleboard complex at Dillard, Ore., which was the largest in the U.S., and United States Plywood’s $5 million Gaylord, Mich. plant, billed as the largest east of the Mississippi. Soon after, U.S. Plywood merged with Champion Papers, and G-P purchased the Gaylord mill from Champion in 1987. The plant produced particleboard under the Novoply name until G-P closed it permanently in 2006 and was planning to demolish the facility in

Composite panel end-uses continued to expand.

hidden, and was sold fundamentally on a basis of price and or physical properties.”

The mid 1960s marked the development of more sophisticated boards such as 100% pine particleboard and MDF, Seeburger wrote. “This offered sufficiently improved surface, edge integrity and machining characteristics” and led to processes that could omit edge-banding while adding grain-print finishing systems, Seeburger noted.

“Today, nearly every basic component for furniture or cabinetry is subject to a particleboard application,” Seeburger wrote. “Designers now recognize that ‘substituting’ particleboard for a given component is less meaningful than designing a totally new product to accommodate both the advantage and disadvanP A N E L A G E 5 0 25

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tages of particleboard.

Seeburger explained that while furniture producers believe particleboard isn’t an automatically desirable plywood component substitution in all cases and situations, what really had them excited in 1974 were the new polyester surface-filled (and ultraviolet cured) particleboards— combined with advanced board engineering and improved board properties— which had the potential to help create completely new uses for particleboard in the kitchen cabinetry market, for example.

Of special interest in the issue was coverage of a survey that Furniture Production mailed to particleboard/hardboard manufacturers, and 41 responded.

Of those, 29 plants were making particleboard, nine were making both particleboard and medium density “hardboard,” and three were making hardboard.

According to the survey, three-fourths of the producers called their product particleboard, while 17.5% of producers called their product flakeboard. According to the survey, 62% of particleboard output was going to the furniture industry.

Looking at reasons to use composite panel products, the two most cited by furniture manufacturers were the lower cost than plywood or lumber and better availability than plywood or lumber.

New Product: MDF Meanwhile, as particleboard surged through the 1960s and early ’70s, medium density fiberboard (MDF) was invented by Allied Chemical, which stumbled onto the product in the mid 1960s when trying urea formaldehyde on particleboard, then decided to make a fiber-based product instead of one utilizing particles.

The initial small MDF pilot plant was at Deposit, NY, and the facility has been owned and expanded by several different companies since. Its last panel industry owner was Norbord, which sold the facility to New England Wood Pellet in 2009.

It has now been converted into a fuel pellet plant.

Longtime composite panel industry consultant Leonard Guss remembers the original MDF product out of the Deposit, NY plant was called “Baraboard” and was marketed to the furniture industry as an alternative to hardwood lumber or lumber-banded particleboard.

“I saw it in the late 1960s when I was with Weyerhaeuser, which sneered at it,” Guss remembers. “Then MDF grew for two or three years before anyone thought to join in!”

One company that was closely in26 P A N E L A G E 5 0

MDF production at Deposit, NY, before its sell-off in 2009

volved in early MDF expansion was Integrated Wood Components Inc. (IWCI), which was called Deposit Lumber Co. when the Kamp family moved its lumber and wood furniture operation to a Deposit, NY dairy barn in 1956.

Working with the local MDF plant, the company was one of the first furniture operations to begin incorporating MDF into its designs. IWCI was one of the first companies to cut and machine MDF components and ultimately developed into a major furniture component supplier of painted MDF cabinets, painted MDF sheets and other panel component solutions for furniture producers.

By the mid 1970s, particleboard plant capacity had grown quite rapidly since the emergence of the industry in the U.S. during the mid 1950s. According to a 1976 research paper from the Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory that looked at capacities of particleboard and MDF producers, by 1976 total capacity for the mat-formed and extruded board segments of the industry had reached nearly 4.5 billion SF (3/4 in. basis) annually. Medium density fiberboard capacity in 1976 was difficult to estimate, the report said, since the product had been variously classified in its first 10 years of existence. Modifications of equipment at existing plant locations were expected to boost capacity to well over 700MMSF (3/4 in. basis), but actual 1976 capacity was about 525MMSF. By 1987 U.S. producers of particleboard and MDF set a production record for the second year in a row—the first back-to-back production records since 1978. According to the National Particleboard Assn. (NPA), particleboard and

MDF manufacturers produced 4.6 billion SF in ’87, surpassing the 4.4 billion SF produced in 1986.

The numbers reflected 45 mat-formed U.S. particleboard plants and 15 U.S. MDF plants. The MDF segment was continuing to grow, setting a 899MMSF production record in ’87. According to NPA, MDF output had grown 15% from 198687 and almost 50% since 1983.

Formaldehyde Fight The toughest issue facing the composite panels industry—going back 40+ years and threatening the product’s sheer viability in the marketplace—is no doubt formaldehyde emissions from finished boards.

The issue initially popped up as a technical question about shipping, back in 1970.

Former National Particleboard Assn.

(NPA) and Composite Panel Assn. (CPA) legal counsel Bill Ives received a call one day more than 40 years ago from Charles Morschauser, NPA technical director at the time, who wanted to know if association member companies should be concerned about off-gassing of formaldehyde in the context of shipping, and whether industry’s use of formaldehyde may fall under federal chemical shipping regulations.

Ives said he responded that it might, but he wasn’t sure the association needed to take a stand on it at the time. “We sent out a notice to all the companies that this may present an issue and they had to decide how to handle the situation,” he remembers. “We knew there could be a marginal problem at that stage. We had no idea it would develop into what it has.”

The formaldehyde issue took hold in the

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1970s, after comformaldehyde emisplaints from manusions for composite factured home occupanel products, EPA pants resulted in large conducted a 1995 lawsuits. In addition, study that found the a 1979 study by the amount of formaldeChemical Institute of hyde released from Technology said that particleboard prodhigh levels of inhaled ucts in a newly conformaldehyde caused structed test home cancer in lab rats. An was well below levinvestigation by the els of concern. The Consumer Products study tested three Safety Commission different loadings of (CPSC) into proburea-formaldehydelems with urea bonded wood prodformaldehyde foam ucts in a test home in insulation generated Maryland. In the widespread, mostly house as a whole, misleading and inacformaldehyde concurate media covercentrations did not age, and also added to NPA’s Morschauser was first to address exceed .070 PPM, the formaldehyde and the highest level formaldehyde as an environmental issue. frenzy. was .076 PPM which The U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban occurred in the kitchen. After 30 days, the Development (HUD) was the first federconcentrations in the house fell to less al agency to adopt a formaldehyde prodthan .045 PPM. An EPA formaldehyde uct emission standard in 1985 that covexpert commented that the results showed ered only particleboard and plywood formaldehyde levels were lower than used in manufactured housing. The EPA models had predicted. agency also was considering adding According to former NPA executive MDF to the standard. vice president Rich Margosian, “We gave In December 1985 the Occupational close to a half-million dollars to the EPA Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) to build a house, basically a laboratory, to published a revision to the workplace test different exposure scenarios and moniformaldehyde exposure standard, lowertor it very closely.” However, he added, ing levels allowed by more than 50%—a “While the results of the study were good move supported by NPA. from an industry perspective, it didn’t realBy the mid 1980s at the state level, ly budge EPA off their position.” only Minnesota had a formaldehyde As the federal effort to grapple with emission product standard in place, one formaldehyde emissions turned into a bumatching that enacted by HUD. reaucratic slugfest with a variety of legAccording to NPA Executive VP islative and agency initiatives promoted William McCredie in a 1986 article, “A by numerous interest groups on all sides major debate has been going on for more of the issue, the California Air Resources than five years among health scientists, Board (CARB)—ultimately in charge of regulatory agencies and industry about regulating formaldehyde emissions in one what are safe levels of formaldehyde in of the world largest particleboard and indoor air.” Yet by then consumer comMDF markets—made significant moves plaints to the CPSC had dropped signifithat contributed to today’s national cantly, McCredie noted, in large part beformaldehyde emissions standards. cause of research and development in the Formaldehyde was designated as a toxic composite panel and adhesives industry. air contaminant (TAC) in California in Working on their own, composite board 1992 with no safe level of exposure. State producers and resin suppliers developed law required CARB to take action to renew resin technologies and also process duce human exposure to all TACs. The desdevelopments that had reduced finished ignation led to a long and arduous ruleproduct formaldehyde emissions by more making process that in 2007 culminated in than 75% since 1980.

CARB approval of an airborne toxic conSome of the composite panel industry’s trol measure (ATCM) to reduce formaldetest methods and equipment for measuring hyde emissions from composite wood formaldehyde emissions were adopted by products including hardwood plywood, regulatory agencies themselves. particleboard, medium density fiberboard, After almost a decade of looking at thin medium density fiberboard and also “worst-case scenarios” involving furniture and other finished products made 28 P A N E L A G E 5 0

with composite wood products.

The ATCM was approved in 2008 and went into effect in January 2009. Once that happened, the momentum for a national standard built quickly, and in June 2010 both the U.S. Senate and House passed legislation—the Formaldehyde Standards for Composite Wood Products Act (FSA)—to regulate formaldehyde emissions from hardwood plywood, medium density fiberboard and particleboard that is sold, supplied, offered for sale or manufactured in the U.S. and finished goods produced from these composite wood products.

In 2010 before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, CPA President Tom Julia testified that 100% of the group’s members were in compliance with CARB’s Phase I deadlines, and many were in good shape to meet Phase II requirements.

“None of this happened by accident,” Julia said. “It took a long term commitment to lowering emission levels, a major capital investment in technology, and an early commitment to the CARB rule and to meeting its deadlines.

“For decades CPA has operated the largest and most stringent third party testing and certification program for composite panels in North America, including monthly audits and random testing to assure compliance with emission requirements and well as physical properties,” he said.

The move toward a national standard built after California had done the heavylifting of public policy with its proposals, notices, public hearings, etc. and ultimate-

Industry didn’t shy away from legislation.

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ly adopted standards. The federal rulemaking process was such a lengthy snarl, and adopting CARB’s rules would give clean air advocates California’s tough emissions rules on a nationwide scale, while simultaneously providing industry a measure of certainty—especially since board manufacturers will have to develop California-compliant products anyway.

“We said yes, fill the void and establish a national standard,” Julia told the committee. “We said base it on the work done

by CARB over the past seven years—no more, no less. We said resist the urge to go down the path of a complex (federal) rulemaking approach and find a better way. We said this is a moment in history when industry, environmentalists, labor and health care groups can come together and all support the same approach.”

In 2009, CPA had opened a state-ofthe-art International Testing and Certification Center in Leesburg, Va., a 5,500 sq. ft. lab dedicated to testing and developing low-emitting panel products. The facility offers several test chambers and related equipment to respond to member testing needs quickly. The independent lab provides formaldehyde and physical/mechanical property certification, conformity assessment and research testing needs for the North American composite panel industry and particleboard, MDF and hardboard producers.

Straw, Urban Boards Since the start of the composite board industry, companies and individuals have sought to utilize alternative raw materials in an effort to lower board furnish costs and develop innovative new products. Materials experimented with included pine bark, rice

hulls, cotton carpel, vineyard pruning waste and more. Two of the most common raw materials that made it to the commercialized, high volume production facility stage were wheat straw and urban wood waste.

Historical records show that at the turn of the 20th century in Canada, 305,000 tons of rye, wheat and oat cereal straw were used in what could be called a pressed board product—but lack of effective and inexpensive binders and adhesives for straw kept the product on the sidelines.

Yet research at Oregon State University in the 1970s demonstrated that polyisocyanates (MDI) could bond straw and grass furnish to produce suitable particleboard substrates provided the resin could penetrate the straw surface layer, and identified the surface wax layer of straw as a barrier to water based resins such as urea formaldehyde (UF) and phenol formaldehyde (PF), inhibiting their bonding capabilities.

The OSU research demonstrated that binders could be used with straw residues to produce panel products. In particleboard form, straw has a finer face and core than wood particleboard. When refined for MDF purposes, a straw flake is much more brittle than a wood chip and requires a much gentler refining process to produce an MDF-like fiber. However, due to its fragility, straw can be more thoroughly refined.

More developments occurred in Canada in the 1980s through efforts to utilize massive amounts of wheat straw waste in the western provinces. Additional R&D in Saskatchewan added to chemical and equipment refinements.

At about the same time in North Dakota, cabinet manufacturer Ed Shorma was worried about finding a consistent, lowcost supply of raw materials for his operation. He eventually built the first wheat

Isobord built a large straw board manufacturing facility in Elie, Manitoba.

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straw board facility in the U.S.—the $15 million PrimeBoard plant that started up in 1995.

The manufacturing equipment was designed and built by a Swedish company.

The product was layered like particleboard, with fine particle size on the surface and coarser particles in the core and used a non-formaldehyde methyl-diisocyanate (MDI) resin. The plant’s production—30MMSF annually—was marketed as WheatBoard. The facility was sold to Masonite in 2006 and most of the facility’s production was interior door stock for other Masonite products.

Isobord Enterprises of Elie, Manitoba was founded in 1993 to make premium engineered panels from wheat straw and isocyanate binders, producing its first product in conjunction with the Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota and with Alberta Research Council. The first 4x8 samples were produced on campus at Duluth, using baled Manitoba wheat straw.

In 1996, Isobord and Kvaerner Panel Systems GmbH received a U.S. patent for the process technology of making a straw-based engineered board with isocyanate. At a total cost of $150 million, the 215,000 sq. ft. plant at Elie, Manitoba was running in 1998 with an annual capacity of 130MMSF. The facility had support from the provincial government for its job creation and value adding potential, as well as the promise of offering farmers a new market for their straw.

A 350-member farmer’s cooperative was formed to take on the task of organizing the collection of the plant’s ultimate goal of 200,000 tons of straw annually (85,000 tons were supplied in 1997).

Plant officials claimed a sizable amount of production had been pre-sold, that con-

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sumers were truly excited about the new “green” straw board panels. Yet by December 2000 Isobord was already fighting for its financial life, as a major Canadian bank sought to put the plant into receivership.

Problems had indeed arisen, as fires struck straw storage areas twice in 2000.

Isobord officials weren’t saying much besides citing low demand, but word among the straw suppliers was the plant was having technical problems as well and running at only 60-65% capacity when 70-75% capacity was the break-even rate.

Layoffs began in 2000, and a year later the plant closed its doors for the first time. That same year, it was bought by Dow Chemical Canada, which renamed it Dow BioProducts, and kept it running at a loss until December 2005 when it was closed and later liquidated.

While Isobord sought to utilize mountains of wheat straw in a rural area, CanFibre’s plan was to produce boards of recycled wood products taken from the endless steam of urban wood waste in the Northeast U.S. and southern California.

CanFibre’s AllGreen concept was hatched in 1994, when Ken Swaisland, CEO of CanFibre parent company Kafus Environmental Industries, approached CanFibre executives about developing “green” businesses using recycled products to take advantage of growing environmental concerns in the marketplace.

Early plans called for five AllGreen MDF plants to be built over the next four years, according to an investor’s profile from early 1998. Timber Products Co. was contracted to distribute the AllGreen product, and an agreement with Home Depot to market the 100% post-consumer recycled board in a nine-state Western region was announced. One CanFibre official claimed years of production already “pre-sold.”

Extensive R&D followed in conjunction with the Alberta Research Council, which helped evaluate the patented steam injection pressing technology developed by Canada’s Forintek. When the concept of using 100% post consumer urban wood waste proved feasible in the lab, the project was greenlighted, financing gained in July 1997, and the first plant in Riverside, Calif. held a groundbreaking that August.

The $120 million plant was scheduled to produce some 70MMSF annually of AllGreen MDF, using post-consumer wood waste from the greater south central Los Angeles area and phenolic-based resin. (The California and upcoming New York plant would each consume more than 160,000 tons of wood waste annually, officials said.)

The plant started up well enough in 1999 but never gained its footing. An investor’s 32 P A N E L A G E 5 0

report from mid 2000 stated the following: ● Production has averaged approximately 55% of capacity. ● Sales have not kept pace with production, resulting in finished goods inventories valued at approximately $2 million having accumulated. ● Until very recently, quality of the product has been inconsistent with both excellent quality and poor quality being produced on a somewhat random basis. ● Production costs to date have been considerably higher than originally forecast primarily due to a combination of fixed costs being spread over smaller production volumes and resin and power usage per unit being higher than projected.

According to a CanFibre statement a few weeks later from August 2000, CanFibre continues to “experience a critical cash shortage with losses being incurred from operations before interest, taxes and depreciation…and will require additional investment in the facility...and such investment continues to be sought. CanFibre has not planned to receive any additional investment from its parent company, Kafus Industries Ltd.” Meanwhile, CanFibre’s second plant, an 80MMSF facility at Lackawanna, NY, started off in a rocky fashion when the construction company building it went bankrupt halfway through the project (the same company was also taken off the Riverside project). CanFibre management completed contracting for the plant’s construction, and first-board startup happened in late 2000. The team there made numerous process improvements using lessons learned from the Riverside plant, improved and refined the steam injection press system and were producing a full range of premium product in less than a year.

But bigger problems than plant systems persisted: In mid 2000, CanFibre parent company Kafus Industries went into receivership, then Riverside plant bondholder Enron imploded, and in October the Riverside plant subsidiary filed for bankruptcy.

By 2002, despite making a quality product, the Lackawanna facility was struggling with cash flow and raising additional capital. At the end of the year, talks with creditors failed, and the plant was foreclosed on by its lenders.

Soon after, a new investment group purchased the plant. Great Lakes MDF, LLC bought the plant in early 2003, with plans to invest as much as $5 million in the facility by 2005 and raise plant capacity to 120MMSF annually.

The plant ultimately returned to traditional wood raw materials, then went under in 2008, citing debt concerns. The facility was acquired by a Colorado-

based commercial real estate firm that sought to find an operating buyer, but had soon turned to liquidation.

Market Expansion By the late 1990s, composite panel markets had expanded to a record production year, according to the CPA. “1998 proved to be a record-setting year for North American particleboard and medium density fiberboard producers, exceeding early expectations of shipment volumes,” said Rich Margosian, president of CPA. “Markets have absorbed a significant portion of the new MDF capacity, and industry is generally optimistic about the future as demonstrated by increased capital investment in process and product improvements and in pollution control equipment.” Margosian identified the Clean Air Act MACT development as a major issue that CPA was monitoring closely.

“Clean Air Act implementation and the development of EPA’s MACT (maximum achievable control technology) rule will have major long-term impact on the health of the PB/MDF industry,” he said.

“CPA is working primarily through industry coalitions to assure technically sound regulations.”

Meanwhile, thin MDF production for laminated flooring had taken off: The world market for laminated flooring jumped 58% from 1999 to 2000, with Europe accounting for 69% of sales. From 1996-2001, laminated flooring sales in the U.S. grew from 120MMSF to 445MMSF, impressive but still less than 2% of total flooring market in the U.S. Much of the expansion had a European influence, as experienced offshore producers entered the U.S. market. An example was Germany-based Homanit’s THDF plant that started up in 2002 in Mt. Gilead, NC. The $105 million plant started with a 140MMSF capacity. The plant was sold to Unilin, another European flooring producer, in 2003.

The international flavor of the market expansion was also reflected at Germanybased Uniboard’s $160 million, 226MMSF MDF/HDF plant at Moncure, NC that opened in 2010, part of a “mega” panel complex that included a particleboard plant and thermo-fused melamine panel operation.

Big W, Little W As the composite board industry gained momentum into the 21st century, one company that kept shuffling its com-

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posite board deck was Weyerhaeuser. In 1999, the company sold its composite panel business, mostly to SierraPine. But even as it was selling all of its composite panel mills, Weyerhaeuser was beginning what would become one of the largest “hostile” takeovers in American business history, which would quickly put Weyerhaeuser back into the composite panel industry and on a much larger scale.

Weyerhaeuser’s acquisition of Willamette Industries was the most enticing buyout in the past 50 years of the forest products industry. It actually started when Willamette CEO Steve Rogel left there for the leadership position at Weyerhaeuser. And actually it started before that, when Rogel was still at Willamette, when Willamette entertained the idea of purchasing Weyerhaeuser. Smaller companies purchasing larger ones had become somewhat of a trend in the 1990s.

But once Rogel was in place at Weyerhaeuser, it wasn’t long before Weyerhaeuser set its sights squarely on Willamette, one reason being that everybody knew Willamette’s mill engineering and manufacturing excellence was superior to Weyerhaeuser’s, while Weyerhaeuser had a larger customer base and timberlands portfolio. Willamette’s assets includ-

Willamette built new particleboard and MDF plants in Bennettsville, SC.

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ed 1.7 million acres of timberland (mostly in the Southern U.S.), six particleboard pants, five MDF plants, seven engineered wood products plants, seven plywood plants, one OSB plant, nine sawmills, five brown paper plants, 38 corrugated containers and sheets plants, four kraft bag plants, two pulp mills, four white paper plants and 15,000 employees (compared to Weyerhaeuser’s 47,000 employees).

In November 2000, Weyerhaeuser made an unsolicited offer of $48 a share, plus assumption of debt, for a total offer price of about $7 billion. The negative response from throughout the industry was enormous. Most of the industry, even competitors, liked Willamette Industries and its people, and the way they ran their operations. Nobody wanted to see the spirited Willamette culture swept up into Weyerhaeuser’s stoic approach.

Willamette executives reacted harshly, and employees wore buttons that read “Just Say No WEY.” Weyerhaeuser employees countered with their own button, “Where there’s a WLL, there’s a WEY,” with “will” spelled as WLL, the Willamette stock exchange symbol.

The Willamette board rejected the initial offer. It released a statement: “We understand that there have been contacts

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by Weyerhaeuser or its representatives with our customers, labor union, shareholders and political officials in communities where we operate. We are disturbed by the process Weyerhaeuser has chosen to follow.”

Willamette President and CEO Duane McDougall also commented, “If you look at their stock price this year before the proposed transaction was announced, Weyerhaeuser’s was down 40% for the year. Our stock was down 15 or 20% for the year. So maybe they need to take care of their own house before they try to clean up ours.”

Weyerhaeuser soon increased its offer to $50 per share, which was also rejected.

Certain provisions prevented Weyerhaeuser from buying Willamette until the Willamette board of directors agreed, which prompted Weyerhaeuser to begin nominating candidates to Willamette’s board of directors who would be open to the offer, and Weyerhaeuser was successful in putting three on the Willamette board.

When Weyerhaeuser increased its offer to $55.50 per share early in 2002, the pressure on the Willamette directors to go for the deal became increasingly intense.

Still trying to sidestep the deal, however, Willamette even began negotiations with

Georgia-Pacific for a possible merger, but ultimately Willamette settled for the Weyerhaeuser offer, which amounted to $7.9 billion, or about $900 million more than the first offer.

Suddenly Weyerhaeuser was back in the composite panel business, but only for a few years. In 2006, Weyerhaeuser once again sold its composite panel properties—six mills in the U.S.—to Flakeboard Company. Industry people applauded the deal because Flakeboard’s culture seemed to mesh with the former Willamette culture.

Then in late 2012, Flakeboard sold those mills to South American panel producer Arauco, meaning that in a span of 10 years, workers at some of those mills received paychecks signed by four different owners—Willamette, Weyerhaeuser, Flakeboard, Arauco.

Arauco had also purchased the Uniboard composite board complex at Moncure, NC, and thus with the addition of Flakeboard, Arauco had suddenly become a composite panel powerhouse in North America. Arauco cited Flakeboard’s strong mill management skills and the company’s overall positive employment culture among the reasons for L the purchase.

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Helping Birth An Industry EDITOR’S NOTE: The Emeritus Professor of Mechanical & Materials Engineering at the Washington State University Materials and Engineering Center, Tom Maloney has as much knowledge as anyone in the industry concerning technical developments in composite and structural panels and engineered wood products. A longtime employee of Washington State, Maloney graduated WSU in 1956 in industrial design, worked at the wood products lab in the department of engineering until 1972, was an associate and professor in wood technology and materials science and engineering from 1972-1986 and director of the WSU Wood Materials and Engineering Laboratory from 1986 to 1995. Maloney spearheaded the university’s wood composites annual symposium, begun in 1967, as a great catalyst for spreading information and technology transfer.

During his career, Maloney received multiple major awards, including the Bronson J. Lewis Award at the 70th annual meeting of the APA in 2007; the International Nondestructive Testing of Wood Symposium Distinguished Service Award in 2007; named a Weyerhaeuser Distinguished Professor of Wood Science in 1995; received a Faculty Service Award for Outstanding Contributions to Continuing Education in 1994; and was recognized for Dedicated Service to the Particleboard and MDF Industries in 1993 by the National Particleboard Assn.; plus a host of other awards and honors. His book, “Modern Particleboard and DryProcess Fiberboard Manufacturing,” is considered the bible for particleboard and MDF manufacturing. Now age 82, here is Maloney in his own words. was fortunate to start in the industry in 1956 at the age of 25 when we really did not know the fundamentals of the dry process industry. Companies would come into our laboratory with consultants and the “magic formula” for making acceptable board. None of these worked as no one knew the fundamentals. Our laboratory could serve as a small pilot plant that included a lot of commercial equipment. And doing research in it involved a lot of hard physical work. We had the machinery but a lot of conveying was done by physical force, not from the normal conveyors found in a regular plant.

I was, at a relatively young age, one of the pioneers of a new industry. Most of us were fairly young. We did not have to bow

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main species available was Douglas fir, and fortunately was one of the best species that was compatible with the urea formaldehyde resins of the time. The pH level was perfect.

The “experts” at the time looked down on the planer shavings. But the overall cost of the material to the plant was much less than flakes. Even including freight costs, the cost of delivered board to the East was very much lower. So, one of the most important developments of the past 50 years was learning how to use the vast previously wasted raw material resource of shavings, sawdust, chips, and little used species such as aspen.

The real work after making good board was to open up the markets as particleboard was a new player. They had to supplant the solid wood that was used in the furniture industry. With this success, the industry then exploded.

The West Coast shavings were ideal for board. Research was needed and was accomplished to find ways to make the UF resins compatible with the Inland forest material in the West and the southern pine shavings in the South. With these advances the industry quickly advanced to a mature one.

All our fundamental research also ap-

to any elders who knew better. We were on our own to progress or fail. There was a great group of pioneers and naming them all would mean missing some of them. I believe we have honored all of them in our Wood Composites Hall of Fame. Almost all of them have passed on leaving just a small group left. There are over 100 individuals I worked with over the years.

We were fortunate at the time to have funds for basic research. We shut the laboratory down for about a year to learn the fundamentals of making dry process board. We conducted research on species, species pH levels, particle geometry, resins, resin application in blending, the use of wax, layering of particle size in boards, board specific gravity, mat moisture content, pressing techniques, and other parameters. What became known as the Maloney Spider Web showing all of these parameters and their interactions became a popular tool when trying to understand all of the things one needed to know about board manufacture of all types. This spider web is on page 159 of my book.

We were very successful in all of our basic research and had a good understanding of the problems in making a good board.

At that time, we started performing a lot of research for Columbia Engineering, which was becoming prominent in building the large plants starting in the late 1950s and into the ’60s. Columbia steered many projects into our laboratory to assess the problems various customers would have to solve to Tom Maloney, left, presents Distinguished Service Award to Fred Fields of Coe at 1992 composites symposium. build a plant with the wood resources available to them. We were plied to MDF, dry process fiberboard, so overrun with projects that we could waferboard, OSB, OSL and the many hardly keep up. I was running to the airport composites made up of these materials constantly shipping out reports and sample and non-wood materials. The fundamenboards to many different customers. Many tals have not changed but the machinery of the large new plants built at that time recompanies have made great advances in lied on our early research. all parts of a board plant. Some of these The main thrust at that time was to use advances did not seem possible when we the vast waste material, planer shavings, started 50 years ago. available in western Washington and OreIn the area of waferboard and OSB, we gon. All of the plants up to that time were helped APA develop the Performance based on flaking logs. In comparison, the Standards by producing about 500 4x4 planer shavings were already cut, most panels of various properties for their testwere from dried lumber, and were easily ing program establishing the Performance transported to a particleboard plant. The Standard program. The first work on the

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Formaldehyde emission test methods was one of the topics during the 25th International Particleboard/Composite Symposium chaired by Tom Maloney in 1991.

I-joist and the nondestructive testing development for evaluating the strength of the veneers used for the LVL part of Ijoists was done in our laboratory.

What has happened over the past 50

years or so is the development of a major industry worldwide producing billions of square feet of material all based on wood particles. I feel very fortunate in having a major part in this development as we

saved enormous amounts of the forest resource and found ways to use otherwise “waste species.”

In the early days, we worked closely with many innovative engineering and machinery companies, and great plant people.

We could go into a plant and run a whole shift working on our research developments. Now, with the mature industry we have and the large corporate plants make a completely different scenario. As I was retiring, we found much of our new efforts stymied because we had to go through a lot of corporate review and rarely could talk to the ones making the final decision.

Back when I first started, the university was always (as it does today) showing off our work. I was asked to set up and press a board for the governor who was visiting campus. I did so and had a mat ready to go into the press for the visit. The governor, our university president and other dignitaries were driven right to the lab in a limousine. They gathered around the press (a 50 by 50 in. size) watching this new procedure. When I opened the press to show the finished board, it blew up with a mighty explosion. The President and my boss were mortified for this failure. For once, I was quick to respond, saying, “That shows why L we need research!”

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III EWPs: Engineering The Future Of Forest Products Capabilities hile plywood may be the original engineered wood product with its 100+ years of commercial production and first U.S. patent way back in 1868, a newer generation of engineered wood products (EWPs) in many ways represents the future of the industry.

Indeed, the singular ability of EWPs to utilize almost any segment of the timber resource, and EWP manufacturers’ capabilities to implement technology and engineering to create products that go way above and beyond structural capacities of traditional solid sawn forest products,

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combine to create an almost limitless potential to provide products for virtually any wood construction application.

Glulam is the original EWP, and one of the earliest still-standing glulam roof structures is generally acknowledged to be the assembly room of King Edward VI College, a school in Southampton, England, dating from 1866. Glulam’s first industrial patented use was in Weimar, Germany, where Otto Hetzer set up a steam sawmill and carpentry business. His patent dated 1906 describes vertical columns that transitioned into curved

glued laminated eaves zones, and then became sloped rafters, all in a single laminated unit. Each component, bonded under pressure, comprised three or more horizontally arranged laminations.

The technology arrived in North America in 1934 when Max Hanisch, Sr., who had worked with Hetzer at the turn of the century, formed a firm in Peshtigo, Wis. to manufacture structural glued laminated timber.

A significant development in the glulam industry was the introduction of fully water-resistant phenol-resorcinol adhesive in 1942. This allowed glulam to be exposed in exterior environments without concern of gluline degradation. The first U.S. manufacturing standard for glulam was Commercial Standard CS253-63, which was published by the Department of Commerce in 1963. According to a 1964 paper from the Georgia Institute of Technology, in certain regions of the U.S. at the time, 75% of new churches and 25% of all new community buildings used glulam structures or components.

The glulam market in the U.S. amounted to over $10 million in 1947, $24 million in 1954, $37 million in 1958 and was estimated to have been approximately

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$60 million in 1962. According to the Georgia Tech paper, in 1964, 45 establishments specialized in producing glulam members, and a majority of the plants were in the Western U.S. Washington state had 10 plants, Oregon and California each had four, and South Dakota and Montana each had three while six states had two each, and nine states had one plant each.

The roster included well-known names such as Boise Cascade, Potlatch and Weyerhaeuser and also the not so well known such as Laminated Rafters (still in business) and Fabribeam in Indiana.

Early Producers When it closed its doors in 2011, Standard Structures in Windsor, Calif. was the oldest glulam manufacturer in the U.S. operating under its founding ownership and name. A highway builder and pioneering post-war boom modular home designer, Carlo Caletti founded Standard Structures in 1947.

Following its early work with custommade complex glulam beams and arches, Standard Structures developed into a major supplier of EWPs for commercial and multi-family home construction. The company acquired a 300,000 sq. ft. production facility in Windsor, and in 1972 began developing and offering market alternatives such as the Mini-Lam and the XL Joist. In the early 1980s Standard introduced an I-joist product, and then in the 1990s responded to the industry’s need for long span and heavy loaded designs by creating an Open-Web Truss called “SST.” In 2003, Standard developed a wood-tube open truss to complement its total product line of commercial wood products.

Another early entrant into the glulam market on the West Coast was Rosboro Lumber of Springfield, Ore., which had built a veneer mill in 1959 and began manufacturing softwood plywood. The company introduced its glulam operation in 1963, a development that helped distinguish Rosboro as one of the first fully integrated forest products operations.

According to Rosboro’s history, the glulam plant built in 1963 was the first in the industry to utilize a continuous preglued finger-jointing line, stress wave machine-graded lumber and radio frequency beam curing equipment.

When the glulam plant was expanded in 1973, a beam press and supporting equipment was installed which doubled the production capabilities. In 1992 Rosboro increased production capacity by adding a Dimter beam press and second production

line. The purchase of the Vaughn, Ore. glulam facility in 2005 from Weyerhaeuser increased Rosboro’s capacity and introduced custom glulam capabilities.

Bohemia was another early glulam and panel industry producer, assuming control of Cascade Fiber’s ailing Eugene, Ore. particleboard plant in the mid ’60s through a management contract and eventually acquiring it outright. Expansion continued in 1969 when it began construction of a laminated beam plant in Saginaw, Ore. Completed in 1971, the plant could produce 50,000 board feet a day using wood stock the company had previously supplied to other laminated beam manufacturers. The company added another glulam plant in Vaughn, Ore. Ultimately, laminated beams became Bohemia Inc.’s mainstay product, and the company was North America’s largest glulam producer by the late 1980s.

In 1990 Willamette Industries acquired Bohemia’s assets, including the glulam plants that eventually passed to Weyerhaeuser’s ownership in 2002. In 2005, Rosboro purchased the Vaughn glulam plant from Weyerhaeuser and continues to run it. The company produces its innovative BigBeam glulam product there, featuring custom beams that incorporate pine lumber and LVL. Anthony Forest Products started up one of the first high-volume Southern glulam plants in 1965 at El Dorado, Ark. Some 30 years later, the company added a second glulam plant at Washington, Ga. Anthony also partnered with Eacom Timber in an I-joist manufacturing plant in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada.

Trus Joist: EWP Giant At the dawn of the EWP industry’s last 50 years, native Idahoans Art Troutner and Harold Thomas started what was to become industry giant Trus Joist as Trussdeck Corp. in 1960. While Thomas supplied capital, salesmanship and marketing skills, Troutner had the ideas and concepts for revolutionary wood products.

Troutner had developed a truss in the 1950s that featured an open web design, with 2x4s fastened to overlaid steel tubing. This open-web truss used machine stress rated timber as top and bottom chords. These chords were connected by steel webbing. This new product carried more load per pound of its own weight than any other structural product then available.

He offered the design and product to Idaho companies Boise Cascade and Potlatch but they didn’t go for it. After changing some of the glues and pres-

sures, Troutner tried to sell it to Weyerhaeuser, but to no avail.

Instead of selling out, the two decided to go into business themselves, in a rented barn that cost $30 a month. Troutner moved his tooling in and oversaw operations and manufacturing. Thomas, who had been in wholesale lumber sales, was salesman and general manager.

The company’s story took an interesting turn at the beginning. Seeking startup capital and looking to expand with no real assets or track record, Trussdeck offered franchise manufacturing operations.

Between 1962 and 1964, the company set up four manufacturing franchises: Investors paid for the plant and equipment, designed by Troutner, and gained a license to produce the patented product.

Meanwhile, Trussdeck retained 66% ownership of each operation.

The move allowed Trussdeck to gain almost a half-million dollars in new funds (a tidy sum in the early ’60s for a small company), but the franchise concept proved unwieldy. Troutner and Thomas were buried in paperwork, and one of the franchises (in Portland, Ore.) began failing and had to be purchased outright. Thomas later told Forbes magazine that the franchise configuration and poor management made the company less profitable than it should have been through the mid 1960s.

In 1969 the company moved to merge its franchise operations into a new corporation, named Trus Joist. Troutner and Thomas each took 20% of the company, the franchise investors took 40%—and new investors got 20% of Trus Joist Corp. for $200,000.

Annual revenues had grown to $11 million by 1970, but the company was having trouble finding the quality solid sawn lumber it needed for truss and joist products. Troutner went back to the drawing board and invented Microllam—an LVL product that could be produced in lengths up to 80 ft.

At the end of the 1970s, Trus Joist employment had grown to 1,000. Sales had more than quadrupled from the beginning of the decade to $56 million in 1977— then hit $80 million in ’78 and $102 million in ’79.

After a sluggish few years in the early ’80s recession, Trus Joist continued growing through the decade, opening a dozen new manufacturing plants, adding more than 130 sales offices and growing overall employment to 2,600. Following the acquisition of major window manufacturers Norco Windows and Dashwood Industries, Trus Joist restructured as TJ International.

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Laboratory in Madison, Wis., four LVL producers had obtained code-approved stress values for their products: ● Trus Joist Corp. and its Microllam product had received a Council of American Building Officials National Research Board approval. ● McCausey Lumber Co. in Detroit, Mich. was marketing a European product called Basterplank in the U.S. market, which had gained approval as a framing system from the Southern Building Code Congress International. ● Weyerhaeuser had gained approval for its Lamineer LVL product, which was produced on conventional plywood equipment. ● MacMillan Bloedel had received approval for its Parallam engineered lumber product for use as structural beams or joists.

Facing increased competition from large corporate EWP manufacturers such as Weyerhaeuser and Boise Cascade, TJ International entered a joint venture with MacMillan Bloedel in 1991, putting both the Microllam and Parallam products under the same corporate umbrella called Trus Joist MacMillan.

Thanks to international sales growth, increased domestic demand and the opening of new manufacturing plants, Trus Joist MacMillan’s sales expanded to $577 million by the mid 1990s. In 1999, longtime EWP competitor Weyerhaeuser acquired MacMillan Bloedel, and weeks later acquired the outstanding shares of TJ International, making Weyerhaeuser the industry’s largest EWP producer under the Trus Joist brand.

It was a natural for LVL marketing to lean toward I-joists, I-beams and headers.

Contemporary designs, first made popular in the 1970s, demanded open floor plans that required long clearspans. Lumber joists longer than 20 feet were expensive, hard to find and lacked the load-carrying capacity required for long spans. Early versions of EWP I-joists were also expensive, but they were straight, lightweight and achieved the desired performance.

Stable pricing and availability have made EWPs more attractive to many builders.

In his 1995 book Plywood & Veneer Based Products Manufacturing Practices, plywood industry veteran Dick Baldwin wrote that LVL solved issues that truss manufacturers would have with stressrated lumber supplies and volatile prices.

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noting that I-beams, trusses and headers constituted more than 70% of U.S. LVL production by the mid 1990s.

According to a 2000 publication from the University of Massachusetts by Paul Fisette, The Evolution of Engineered Wood I-Joists, “Another watershed event in I-joist technology was the switch from plywood to oriented strandboard web material.

This occurred in 1990. OSB was less expensive, more available, and stronger than plywood in shear because all the strands interlocked. Trus Joist once again led the charge. Today virtually every I-joist manufacturer uses only OSB webs in their residential and commercial product lines.”

At the end of the 1990s, Fisette wrote, “Exact market shares are closely guarded, but it is safe to say that five manufacturers sell 80% of the I-Joists. Trus Joist clearly leads with about 55%. Boise Cascade, Louisiana-Pacific, Willamette Industries and Georgia Pacific equally share 20%-25% of the annual U.S. sales volume. There are a growing number of smaller companies fighting hard for market position. And it’s the builders who are winning. Many smaller manufacturers offer great products at low prices.”

In 2008, Atlas Holdings, a private equity group with several forest products holdings, acquired the Trus Joist commercial division originally founded by Thomas and Troutner from Weyerhaeuser. In 2009 Atlas launched RedBuilt LLC (named after Thomas’ nickname “Red”), with headquarters in Boise, Id., and manufacturing facilities in Hillsboro and Stayton, Ore.; Chino, Calif.; and Delaware, Oh. Continuing to acquire assets from old-line glulam manufacturers, RedBuilt purchased some of Standard Structures’ closed facilities in 2011 that are now operated as a design center.

grown rapidly, and sales are predicted to increase by 50% in the next four years.”

One of the biggest market share issues for I-joists was product standardization.

Each manufacturer provided specifications and span recommendations and sought to market a proprietary building “system.”

Meanwhile, major trade group APA—Engineered Wood Assn. began promoting a uniform standard for all I-joists in the mid 1990s. APA’s Performance Rated I-Joist (PRI) standard was introduced in 1997. According to the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing report, only 20% of I-joists manufacturers were following the standard in 2000. The report noted that according to research nearly 100% of build-

I-Joist Issues

Roseburg plant at Riddle, Ore.

As EWP I-joists sought to increase market share through the 1990s, a 2000 report from the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing noted that “High prices and unfamiliarity with a new product have kept I-joists from being deployed on most job sites. Until recently, it was difficult for I-joists to compete with sawn lumber for starter homes and houses with a basic design. A recent market survey found that 80% of builders want to learn how to use engineered wood. Through training provided by manufacturers and builder associations, Ijoists are gradually becoming more familiar and builders less intimidated. During the last five years, the I-joist market has

ing officials want a uniform identification system for I-joists.

The report stated, “Some people fear that setting a standard will drive products to the lowest common denominator, and superior products will not receive the credit they deserve. A standard might remove the incentive for innovation and the development of new products. Second, many argue that I-joists are structural elements that require careful engineering. But I-joists are not direct substitutes for lumber joists. Installation of I-joists requires special consideration of point loads, offset loads, and special fastening requirements.

Standardization would not eliminate the need for technical support and design services. Builders will still need expert advice

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for structural design.”

Yet in the same report, Thomas Denig, then the President & CEO of Trus Joist MacMillan, pointed out, “If standardization homogenizes I-joists into a commodity product, reduced profit margins won’t pay distributors to maintain technical staff. And builders won’t receive the high level of service they currently receive.”

In 2013, APA share of North American I-joist production was around 70%. Most producers were still pursuing their own proprietary I-joist brand and system, but some were also adding the APA performance standard stamp as well.

In 2001, driven by CEO Allyn Ford, Roseburg Forest Products started up North America’s largest LVL and I-joist plant featuring a 90 ft. eight-opening hot press, innovative continuous layup line and an Ijoist assembly line running at 600 FPM. The $75 million facility covered 11 acres under one roof with a rated capacity of 3.3 million cu. ft. of LVL and 80MMLF of I-joists annually. The plant has since more than doubled capacity.

Boise Cascade continues to operate high capacity LVL/I-joist plants in Louisiana and Oregon, which are FSC Chain-of Custody certified.

EWP Breakthrough In 2011—the 25th anniversary of the introduction of Parallam parallel strand lumber by MacMillan Bloedel in 1986— Carlos Guilherme, Vice President of Engineered Lumber Products for Weyerhaeuser, called the invention of Parallam “One of those building material breakthroughs that happen maybe once or twice in a generation. Engineers and scientists invented a new product that took a great building material—wood—and made it even better. Parallam PSL’s high-strength and long lengths allow architects and builders to use wood framing in applications that might otherwise have been built with concrete or steel, which are more expensive and require specialized labor.”

But the story of Parallam—up to 39inch clipped strands of softwood veneer with glue applied that are oriented in parallel configuration, laid up in a mat that’s then microwave pre-heated, processed through, compressed and cured in a continuous press and ultimately trimmed and sawn into beams up to 66 ft.—begins way before 1986 and its introduction at Expo 86 in Vancouver, BC. According to a 1990 news article in BC Business, the Parallam project in its entirety from “conception to consumer” 46 P A N E L A G E 5 0

Parallam PSL, 1988

covered 18 years and $43 million before the first large scale commercial plant started up in 1986 in Delta, BC on Annacis Island. “My neck was stuck a long way out with Parallam,” said MacMillan Bloedel Senior Vice President of R&D Otto Forgacs.

The Parallam project was a world first and “unlocked a lot of doors,” Forgacs said, and “moved us into leadership in the engineered wood business.”

According to David Parker, who joined MacMillan Bloedel in 1975 as a strategic development analyst and ended up general manager of the Parallam division from 1977 until 1991, there were four individuals primarily responsible for Parallam: Forgacs, Derek Barnes, Mark Churchland—and Parker.

“When I came to MacMillan Bloedel, it was the fourth-largest forest products company in the world, and I think we had the best forest-based industrial R&D in the world, far more creative than the others— and the man who was responsible was Otto Forgacs,” Parker says of the classically trained Forgacs from an Austrian background and English education, with PhDs in chemistry and wood orientation.

With M-B an early developer of waferboard, Forgacs supported ongoing research in panel products, but also had the courage to entertain an odd product like Parallam, Parker says. “He also put someone in position to make it grow. My job was putting the team together, continuing to work on and grow it and do the planning.”

Aside from greenlighting the research, Forgacs’ biggest contributions were running interference with the board of direc-

tors and working with federal officials for financing assistance. “If he hadn’t done either one, there never would have been a Parallam,” Parker remembers.

Barnes—“a great guy who couldn’t hold a negative thought for more than 20 minutes,” Parker says—conceived and invented the Parallam product, but needed assistance in developing its manufacturing process.

Churchland developed the microwave pre-heating system for Parallam’s layup mat that provided a critical edge in production efficiency.

Both Barnes and Churchland shared the prestigious 1 million Swedish kroner Marcus Wallenberg Prize in 1987, given by the King of Sweden and the equivalent of a Nobel prize for the forest products industry.

Parker includes himself in the group of four due to his management, plus developing the veneer strand clipping concept and leading the move to convert the production approach from a batch process to continuous system.

After the BC plant started up in ’86, MacMillan Bloedel merged with Trus Joist in 1991 to form Trus Joist MacMillan. The new company introduced Timberstrand laminated strand lumber (LSL)—initially another M-B research effort—in 1991 at a plant in Deerwood, Minn. The new product utilized low value aspen and poplar logs flaked into strands 12 in. long, which were then treated with an adhesive and cured in a steam-injection press that significantly densified the wood and created boards up to 48 ft. long, 5 1/2 in. thick and 8 ft. wide.

By the time Weyerhaeuser purchased MacMillan-Bloedel and its share of Trus Joist MacMillan in late 1999, the EWP facilities acquired from the combined companies were impressive: six Microllam production plants, three Parallam plants and two Timberstrand plants.

Weyerhaeuser continues to market all three products, among others. Parker—an unabashed supporter, promoter and defender of Parallam—claims Parallam has been the most profitable of the engineered lumber products.

“It’s not as big a volume as LVL, and LVL’s total profits may be higher,” he says. But thanks to Parallam’s much higher log supply yield into final product, “If you look at a million cubic feet of output, Parallam is more profitable by a long shot,” Parker says.

A recent effort in the reconstituted lumber market is Louisiana-Pacific’s LSL plant at Houlton, Me., where the company converted an OSB plant that had started up in 1982 into a laminated strand lumber fa-

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cility that started up in 2009. The plant offers wall framing, beams and headers, truss chords and rim board.

Looking Ahead Reducing log and manufacturing costs even further while boosting raw material yield is the key to competing with solid sawn and other building products and expanding EWP market share, said Parker at the biennial Panel & Engineered Lumber International Conference & Expo (PELICE) in Atlanta in early 2012. Currently seeking financing for his own PSL plant, Strongwood Technologies, Parker noted that while ELPs have a small share of the structural lumber market, lower cost second generation ELPs may accelerate market penetration providing they offer technical superiority.

Also at the 2012 PELICE, the late Mike St. John, former vice president of sales and marketing for Pacific Woodtech, emphasized the key to increasing ELPs’ current 7% share of the lumber market is reducing manufacturing costs, and noted that ELPs’ manufacturing processes offer more cost reduction flexibility than solid sawn production.

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Murphy Company LVL in Oregon

Also, he added that a smaller environmental footprint makes ELPs more adaptable to limited wood baskets.

“The stage is set for an ELP growth spurt,” St. John said, thanks to better utilization, green certification programs making it easier for ELPs to conform than solid sawn products, plus log scarcity that will find engineers and builders looking to ELPs more often.

Again at PELICE, William Bolduc, structural engineer with Keymark Enter-

prises, cited advantages of ELPs such as greater design capability over traditional lumber, and also pointed to disadvantages such as higher cost per volume than lumber, substitution issues and construction complexities. However, growing implementation of ELPs will be directly related to building plan specifications, design problem solutions, computer software programming and ELP manufacturer reliability and support, he said.

“Engineered roof trusses and OSB both took 50% or more market share against major competitors over a 25-year time frame,” Parker noted. “The market for lumber is bigger than trusses or OSB. I think within 25 years ELPs could capture 25% of that market. If MacMillan Bloedel hadn’t developed OSB, somebody would have. It might have been delayed by a few years.

And the same will be true of ELPs.” One of the keynoters at PELICE 2012 was John Murphy of Oregon’s Murphy Company, a familiar player in the Northwest for decades in veneer and plywood, but which in early 2008 started up a LVL plant in Sutherlin, Oregon, at the site of the company’s former plywood mill that had been destroyed by fire. The LVL plant began with 4.5 million cu. ft. of anL nual capacity.

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IV Shattered Housing Market Brings Historic Retrenchment, Rebound ammered! That was the impact the 2008 housing bust had on the structural and composite panel industries, and all other wood products segments, as the housing market’s house of cards prosperity, fed by ultra-low lending rates, mortgage securitization and financial chicanery at every level of the home buying process—and greased by superlax lending standards that benefited everyone from CEOs to barely employed borrowers—finally imploded.

Of course, the panel industry had enjoyed the ride upward, as production records were set and business boomed. In 2004, it appeared the sky was the limit as housing starts soared above 2 million and OSB continued to gain market share. Producers were operating at 97% of capacity and Random Lengths noted record setting production totals for the third consecutive year. It was also the year the rate of U.S. home ownership peaked at 69.2%.

The OSB industry’s second wave of expansion was in full swing with four new OSB projects in progress and expected to add another 2.35 billion SF (3/8 in. basis) to North America’s OSB capacity. From

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that vantage point it was hard to imagine what was waiting just over the horizon.

Yet some observers had expressed concern that OSB’s meteoric growth might be flirting with over-capacity.

Nearly 14 billion SF of production capacity had been added in the previous 10 years, bringing it to 26 billion SF by the end of 2004. But there were already signs the economy might be slowing.

In fact, OSB production in the U.S. peaked a year later in 2005 at 14.9 billion SF; Canada peaked in 2006 with 11.5 billion SF. The industry followed the housing market into a deep and protracted recession. From 2005 to 2009, housing starts declined 73% and OSB production fell 41%.

“People who make forecasts are either lucky or wrong,” observed Martco CEO Johnny Martin, whose company started up a new 850MMSF OSB plant at Oakdale, La. By the end of 2009, the OSB industry had shed 2.4 billion SF net production capacity since 2007 and reduced operations at remaining facilities to 53% of capacity.

OSB production in 2009 ended at 13.7

billion SF, the lowest since 1995.

From 2005 through the end of 2009, North American softwood plywood production dropped 39%. The biggest drop came between 2007 and 2008, when North American plywood production decreased by 2.38 billion SF. On the composite side, in 2005, before the housing collapse, North America fielded 48 particleboard plants. In 2011, that number had dwindled to 30. The number of MDF plants decreased from 26 to 19. A handful of companies accounted for more than 75% of annual shipments. Particleboard and MDF shipments, which combined had pushed toward 8.5 billion SF in 2002, fell to 5.1 billion in 2012 (MDF at 2 billion plus and particleboard topping 3 billion). Some decline and settlement in capacity had improved production to capacity ratios into 2013.

A strengthening in U.S. housing starts began to drive positive trends in the industry in 2012. Most forecasts had housing starts flirting with 1 million in 2013 and 1.2 million in 2014. The resurgence stretched across all structural panels: Total North American structural panel production increased 14% since 2009, from 24.3 billion SF to 27.8 billion SF in 2012 (OSB topping 16.7 billion and plywood surpassing 11 billion, with plywood increasing 8% since 2009).

“Builders have become increasingly optimistic about conditions in local housing markets, and this report underscores that the housing recovery is well on its way,” said Barry Rutenberg, chairman of the National Assn. of Home Builders (NAHB), in December 2012. “With inventories of new homes at razor thin lev-

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els, builders are moving prudently to break ground on new construction ahead of the spring buying season to meet increasing demand.”

According to NAHB senior economist Robert Denk, multi-family housing activity is “almost back to normal levels,” and while single-family housing starts still have a ways to go, market factors are gaining momentum. “This trend could be even stronger if not for persistently tight credit conditions for home buyers, flawed appraisal values and uncertainties regarding economic policy debates in Washington.”

Related wood products sectors spiked upward as well. North America thermally fused melamine shipments totaled 1.277MMSF in 2011, up a whopping 14% from 2009. Particleboard remained the primary substrate, representing nearly 88%. Print patterns and colors in the wood grain and decorative categories represented a larger portion of the market.

Wood grains accounted for 35% of shipU.S. housing market found a pulse in 2012. ment. The vast majority of TFM panels shipped in North America were laminated late 2005 was plywood pioneer Georgiawith a decorative paper on both sides of Pacific’s transition into a privately-held the panel substrate. Uniboard, Panolam, firm, when Koch Industries purchased it Flakeboard, Funder America, Roseburg for $21 billion. The deal included, among Forest Products and Tafisa led the way in other properties, 8.3 billion SF of strucTFM manufacturing capacity at the end tural panel capacity at 24 locations (18 of 2011, though Arauco’s purchase of the softwood plywood plants and six OSB Uniboard plant in North Carolina and of plants). At the time GP accounted for all of Flakeboard in late 2012 would alter 31% of the plywood capacity in North the leadership board. Composite Panel America.

Association listed 22 TFM manufacturing Oregon’s Murphy Company, led by companies in North America in 2012.

John Murphy, rebuilt and started up a Laminate flooring also showed some softwood plywood mill in Rogue River, stabilization worldwide as well. Mohawk Ore., and a green veneer mill in Elma, Industries was one of the most active comWash., adding to the company’s existing panies with its early 2013 purchase of Pergo for $150 million.

Kronotex USA expanded its laminate flooring facility at Barnwell, SC to be able to produce products that had only been manufactured in the company’s European factories. New technologies in digital printing for flooring also emerged from companies such as Dieffenbacher and Hymmen.

Some companies had to react quickly to the sudden downturn.

Wood Resources LLC emerged in 2005 with the purchase of plywood mills at Moncure, NC and Chester, SC from Weyerhaeuser. Only two years earlier Wood Resources of Atlas Holdings had purchased the Olympic Panel Products overlaid plywood operation in Shelton, Wash., and immediately began a major expansion.

Laminated flooring hopes to ride improved housing coattails.

Another major development in

hardwood plywood plants in Eugene and White City, Ore., and laminated veneer lumber plant in Sutherlin, Ore. Always the optimist and always looking ahead to the next innovation or another way to increase efficiency and yield, Murphy, in the midst of the recession, commented that though the economic downturn “is a challenge that we’ve been given to face together, I’m more optimistic these days, and we need to remember our products are indispensable to the economic recovery.”

Coastal Forest Products surfaced during the recession to acquire the longtime plywood plant at Chapman, Ala. in 2009, immediately invested $6 million into modernizing it and in 2013 announced another $20 million expansion.

Tafisa Canada celebrated 20 years in 2012. Tafisa built the largest particleboard plant and thermofused melamine laminate manufacturing facility in North America at Lac Megantic, Quebec, measuring 11 football fields. Three years later Tafisa became part of Sonae Industria Group, and the plant received more than $400 million in operations improvements through 2012, including a second particleboard line and production capacity increase of TFM. In 2005 the company constructed its own wood recycling facility, which is now capable of recycling 244,000 tons of diverted wood each year.

The company also launched a campaign to inform customers about the carbon sink properties of wood based panels, emphasizing that wood is the only building material with a positive impact on climate change.

In 2013, Hood Industries turned 30 years old, continuing to operate and expand plywood mills in Beaumont and Wiggins, Miss., in addition to sawmill properties and a large distribution business.

Also in 2013, TECO (Timber Engineering Company) celebrated its 80th year. One of the largest wood product certification and testing agencies in North America, and with clients on four continents, TECO’s ownership transitioned to Steve Winistorfer, who had been managing the operation since 2007.

Even older was RoyOMartin, which turned 90 in 2013. It had started as a sawmill operation in Alexandria, La., but transformed into a major producer of OSB and softwood plywood, and a large timberlands owner with L nearly 600,000 acres.

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V Technology Propels Industry Through Half-Century Of Innovation ome 50 years ago, the basic processes for the primary panel product on the market—plywood— were relatively well established in terms of peeling, drying, gluing and pressing, with technology that at the time was much more efficient than the first generation of equipment in the 1920s and ’30s.

Yet the past 50 years of panel industry history have seen mind-boggling advances in the technology applied to those basic processes, followed by advances in related processes through the growth of the composite panel industry as well.

In the past 50 years in the plywood industry alone, there have been major technical innovations such as the X-Y lathe charger, powered core drive, auto spray glue line, powered roller bar, rotary veneer clipper and clipper scanner, jet dryer nozzle design, inline hot water vats, green end and dry end veneer stackers, to name only some, that have kept costs in check by increasing recovery, adding to production, and allowing the use of smaller and less-expensive raw material.

Meanwhile, composite panel producers

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have continually innovated their specialized technology for refining and drying residuals, glue blending, forming, in-line mat measurement and quality control, finishing sawing systems and sanding.

A breakthrough critical to much of the industry’s performance the past 50 years are developments in glues and resins that have benefited all panel manufacturers, from the producers of the lowest-cost plywood sheathing to suppliers of the highest end formaldehyde free composite architectural stock, as adhesive innovations have continually added to manufacturing efficiency and product performance.

Of course, super-charging each panel industry innovation and adding incremental speed and precision by leaps and bounds is the ongoing digital—and now online— revolution that has impacted every corner and nook and cranny of the global economy since the 1970s. Those gauge-and-dialreadout panel plant operators in the early 1960s would no doubt be shocked at the modern, interactive central control systems spewing volumes of easily accessible process data in today’s modern mills.

Looking at the history of plywood technology the past 50 years, one supplier that can’t be overlooked is Coe Manufacturing, which was a major basic technology supplier to the industry initially, growing into a creative innovator closely involved with the latest in panel industry technology.

Coe was also hard to overlook because its equipment was everywhere after the company supplied more than 125 veneer lathes and 175 veneer drying systems from the early 1960s to the early ’80s.

One of Coe’s innovations was the jet veneer dryer, developed through basic research in conjunction with Battelle Institute of Columbus, Oh. near Coe’s home office. In his autobiography “My Times With Coe,” Fred Fields called the technology “a complete revolution in the drying of veneer: Hot air was directed in a perpendicular direction above and below the veneer, whereas in the past a longitudinal air flow had been used.”

The new type of dryer required more horsepower to run the hot air “jet” system, but was much more productive, generally reducing drying by around 50% no matter the species. After developing the system, Coe built a commercial-size dryer at its Painesville plant for additional research in the early 1960s.

Coe further refined the jet dryer in the 1970s with the Model 72 dryer that featured improved and more efficient air flow and a new net nozzle box design that reduced drying times by 10%-15%.

Jet dryer technology competition would escalate. Fast forward to 2009-2010 when Boise Cascade started up a USNR (Coe) 10 section 80 ft. dryer with Sweed feeding and unloading, and a Raute 23 section 151

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ft. dryer at its plywood plant in Medford, Ore. Plant officials gave high marks to both, noting the user-friendly nature of the USNR dryer and controls, and the realtime, automatic speed control capabilities of the Raute unit. A year later Boise Cascade at its Oakdale, La. plywood plant was starting up a 30-year-old dryer totally stripped down and rebuilt by Westmill Industries and including 472 custom-made roll sets. What made this project unique was the hybrid heating system that converted the first dryer zone to natural gas.

Boise and Westmill did the same thing at Boise’s plywood plant in Florien, La. Meanwhile, RoyOMartin continued to change-out existing dryers and install new USNR six-deck dryers at its plywood plant in Chopin, including one that was erected off-line just 300 ft. from its final location and towed into place and connected.

The new Sweed unloader at the BoiseMedford plant in 2009 was a new design of its Right Angle Unloader, which had history dating back to when the company was called Jeddelloh Brothers. Sweed simplified the system and gave it a smaller footprint, with capability to unload more than 66 sheets per minute on a six-deck dryer.

Coe’s biggest contribution to breakthrough peeling technology, no doubt, was its involvement in early North American log scanning development and subsequent introduction of a computerized X-Y log charging system for log positioning in a lathe. When it was introduced and finally made widely available in the 1980s, the systems caught on quickly: For any mill that could afford one, adding a computerized scanning and log charging system was a no-brainer as the new technology dramatically increased veneer recovery on most lathes by up to 20%.

In the mid 1970s Coe had an agreement with Potlatch Corp. to develop a computerized log scanning and lathe charging system. The first one started up in 1977 at Potlatch’s Lewiston, Id. plant, utilizing the concepts of blocked light, camera scanning and log rotation for scan data.

According to Fields, the system was Coe’s design, developed by an in-house team, but Sun Studs in Roseburg, Ore. held a patent on a similar charging mechanism developed at its sawmill, though a veneer patent was pending. Fields and Coe Mfg. struck up a licensing deal with Sun Studs owner Fred Sohn to pay a royalty each time Coe sold a system. When Sun Studs became embroiled in a lawsuit with a software programming contractor over patent claims, Fields ultimately convinced Sohn to sell the system to Coe, with Coe taking over the lawsuit. The legal imbroglio was

Coe’s peeling technologies produced sensational recovery numbers.

finally resolved in the late ’80s.

The first system at Potlatch featured IBM System 3 computers and Redcon scanning cameras. Soon after getting it started up and running, Potlatch ordered two more. Just as soon as Roseburg Forest Products’ Ken Ford saw one in action, he ordered five to install among the company’s multiple peeling operations. Coe ended up installing around 100 of the original blocked-light camera systems.

Coe was at the forefront of next generation log scanning a few years afterward, when the company purchased the Nosler laser scanner from Oregon inventor John Nosler in 1982. Incorporating the laser scanning was a significant upgrade, allowing the system to perform better on logs with both light and dark coloration, and provided a much truer picture of the log’s actual shape. The laser scanners also performed much better in the rugged veneer mill environment and required less attention than camera systems—and were much more accurate at longer range.

Automation The past 50 years of panel industry history begins with widespread automation of veneer handling and processing: mechanical stackers, veneer dryer infeed and outfeed systems. Two of the biggest developments, however, were automated clipping systems and automatic layup lines.

According to plywood veteran Dick Baldwin in his book “Plywood and Veneer-Based Products Manufacturing Practices,” the 1964-65 period saw the introduction of a computerized clipping system by Black Clawson.

Called a “breakthrough in veneer processing” and “an electronic marvel” by Baldwin, the system at Simpson Timber Co.’s new plywood mill at Shelton, Wash. scanned the green veneer ribbon entering the clipper with an infrared scanner that identified voids and selected sizes and automatically triggered an accurate, high-speed veneer clip time after time. The result was better accuracy and more wide sheets, higher feed speeds and productivity and less waste. Yield increases of 2%-3% or more were common.

Later, the company Ventek would become a major factor with its clipper/scanner technologies.

Labor costs were greatly reduced through the development and implementation of automatic panel layup systems in the late 1960s and through the ’70s and ’80s. Georgia-Pacific and Weyerhaeuser were early innovators and developers of automatic layup systems, with most industry observers agreeing G-P produced the better of the two. (Coe Mfg. was able to secure a license to produce G-P’s automatic layup line in 1982, when G-P moved its corporate headquarters to Atlanta and sold its highly regarded and secretive Tualatin, Ore. R&D facility to Coe.) As of the early 1980s, a Panel World magazine industry directory listing for “layup” lines (no mention is made of automation) includes suppliers such as American Mfg., Coe Mfg., Dieffenbacher, Durand-Raute, Globe Machine, Plywood Equipment Sales, E.V. Prentice, Raute Oy, Stiles Machinery and Superior PMI, among others.

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veneer for LVL applications, such as the LVL layup systems provided by Raute at Roseburg’s Riddle, Ore. EWP plant in 2001 and Murphy Co.’s Sutherlin, Ore. LVL plant in 2007.

Raute was the turnkey supplier for the Murphy LVL plant. Raute also installed its new generation fork layup system, sixdeck, 20-section jet dryer, VDA veneer grade scanning system, 12 bin stacker, and a 90 ft. four-opening hot press.

Advances in materials handling solutions continued as well, coming from companies such as Con-Vey, which worked with Roseburg at its LVL plant on an innovative I-joist assembly machine, as well as billet handling equipment and transfer equipment for the large fingerjointed lumber system.

Another development in structural panel plants was the influx of robotic cells for tasks such as veneer plugging, complementing the use of robots for painting and wrapping.

Two technologies that crossed over between structural and non-structural panels were panel cutting and sanding. Kimwood for example supplied 4 ft. and 5 ft., 2, 4 and 6 belts sanders to many of the early plywood and particleboard plants. The company, which started out primarily with sawmill machinery repair and job shop work, jumped into sanding as new plywood plant expansion came on in the early 1960s. Kimwood obtained the rights to manufacture the Smithway sander in 1963. The first high speed, multiple head plywood sander was manufactured by Kimwood and delivered to Weyerhaeuser in Coos Bay, Ore. The company, which manufactured numerous other products through the years, continues to serve the panel industries with wide belt sanders after more than 60 years in business.

Cut-to-size sawing and finished panel handling also continued to evolve.

Schelling became a leading supplier of versatile sawing and software solutions.

Small Log Peeling The past 50 years of panel industry history in North America coincide with the wholesale move toward small log utilization across all segments of the forest products industry. In the panel industry, this was evidenced by the expansion into the pine regions of the Intermountain West and of course the explosion of plywood production in the U.S. South.

Coe produced a direct-driven roller bar in 1984 in collaboration with Potlatch in St. Maries, Idaho. Today, USNR manufactures powered roller bars at 3 3/4 inch, 58 P A N E L A G E 5 0

which allows a free pass-through of slivers and debris and also helps rotate the block during the peeling cycle thus reducing spinouts. The roll is driven from two hydraulic motors, one at each end of the roll, compared to the old design with gear box drives.

The powered backup roll (PBR) added to small log peeling utilization by reducing spin-out. According to a Forest Products Laboratory Report from 1982, after a prototype in the lab generated considerable industry interest, lab officials entered into an agreement with Boise Cascade to install and test a PBR at its Yakima, Wash. plant.

The PBR at Yakima was designed and built by Premier Gear & Machine Works, with a Lloyd Controls control system, and started up in 1981. The system showed an immediate improvement, with a higher percentage of blocks peeled to desired core size—and spin-out reduced by more than 50% in all three of the plant’s primary peel thicknesses.

According to the project’s report, “The powered back-up roll (PBR) goes a long way towards solving (spin-out) by providing torque to the surface of a log. This means that the chucks do not have to do all the work. It also means that smaller chucks can be used, resulting in a smaller core remaining. This all translates into additional veneer recovery, and savings of the timber resource.”

Retractable, telescoping spindles for peeling were developed in an effort to increase log yield and veneer output by peeling to ever-smaller cores. An early patent application from Sterling Platt, an innovator who worked with U.S. Plywood/Champion International and who tallied several small log peeling patents, describes his “telescoping lathe spindle for small logs” as a dog for a veneer lathe, secured to an inner spindle on a two-spindle lathe. “When peeling of the log begins, the inner and outer spindle dogs are both embedded in the ends of the log. When the peeling has progressed to a point approaching the outer surface of the outer dog, the outer spindle retracts, pulling the outer spindle dog free from the ends of the log and back out of the path of the peeling knives. The inner spindle dog remains embedded in the log (and) peeling continues until the diameter of the remaining core is slightly larger than the diameter of the dog stem.”

According to Platt, by using this approach, logs could be peeled down to a three-inch diameter core, a big improvement in what was then an industry standard of a five-inch diameter core.

“It will be readily appreciated that this

invention allows the inner dogs of a twodog set on a log peeling lathe to be made even smaller so that a maximum amount of veneer can be obtained from the log.

This invention provides an economically sound approach to the problem of peeling small logs to make veneer.”

Raute, which had developed a hydraulically-operated double spindle system in the 1950s, took solving the spindle issue a step further in the 1980s with the introduction of a spindleless lathe, which used three driven rolls to drive the block during peeling. Raute’s subsidiary, Durand-Raute, sought a patent for this concept in North America.

According to a Raute history, the objective of spindleless peeling was to reduce block changeover times and eliminate spin-out. The spindleless lathe was introduced at the Ligna Fair in 1989. Several lathes were sold and the peeling principle involving three driven rolls was later applied to Raute’s existing lathe and veneer peeling systems and technology.

Composite Panels Through the 1960s, composite board technology changed dramatically, noted Charles Morschauser, Technical Director of the National Particleboard Assn., who wrote in a 1974 article published in Furniture Production magazine, “The use of many new forms of residues has been accomplished, new species are being used, product uniformity and sustainability have improved, and particleboard plants are larger, more automated, more complex and much more productive.”

The nature of particleboard manufacturing allows producers to control important factors such as particle geometry, density, species, resin content and more in order to engineer a product that’s been tightly tailored to specific use requirements, Morschauser said.

Much of the technology in the early composite board industry had a European flavor. The particleboard industry originated in Europe, where 106 particleboard plants were operating as of 1956. Longtime machinery manufacturer Siempelkamp, for example, had been providing particleboard presses and complete particleboard lines in an agreement with Novopan inventor Fred Fahrni since 1948.

Siempelkamp was closely involved with Louisiana-Pacific and that company’s early efforts in OSB development, with the German company providing crucial early mat-forming and strand orientation technology. Siempelkamp had also provided what was then the world’s

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largest particleboard line and press at the biggest plant of all at Roseburg’s massive Dillard, Ore. plant in 1969.

Pressing had been one of the most basic panel manufacturing technologies across all product segments. Yet new technologies, new products and new markets were creating the impetus for a radical new approach: Why did all panels have to come in 8x, 9x, 10x or some other platen press size roughly matched to end product measurements? With its composite nature, what if particleboard or MDF could be produced in much longer lengths, limited only by the width of the press?

Kusters introduced the new continuous pressing technology to the board industry at the Spano particleboard plant in Belgium in early 1977, and by 1988 had six more in operation.

In the mid 1980s, major European equipment and technology supplier Siempelkamp developed and introduced the ContiRoll continuous press, which had more than 200 installations worldwide as of 2010. A top worldwide panel press and press line equipment manufacturer based in Krefeld, Germany, Siempelkamp embarked on a major international expansion program in the 1970s. As Louisiana-Pacific CEO Harry Merlo stated in a 1989 Panel World interview looking back at the early and mid 1980s when he was seeking more efficient, lower cost production, “There’s no future for our industry if we can’t eliminate those big multi-opening

L-P chief Harry Merlo, bending, supported the continuous press developments of Dieter Siempelkamp, at far left. L-P ordered five in 1985.

and closing presses. Continuous presses, I think it’s the most revolutionary thing!”

According to Merlo, he told Siempelkamp President and Chairman Dieter Siempelkamp, “The pits and foundations that I put your press in are costing me more than the whole press should cost!”

Siempelkamp had been working on a R&D protype since 1983, but with Merlo’s encouragement Siempelkamp responded with its ContiRoll continuous press, and in 1985 L-P ordered five for plants at Oroville, Calif. (MDF), Clayton, Ala. (MDF), Corrigan, Tex. (OSB), Mis-

The continuous press was compatible with Europe’s board preferences.

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soula, Mont. (particleboard) and Urania, La. (MDF). By early 1989, 36 Siempelkamp ContiRoll continuous presses were on order for mostly particleboard plants as well as some MDF lines, and 16 were in operation. The longest at the time was just beyond 124 ft.

An article in a Sunds Defibrator newsletter from 1990 had a blaring headline: “The Great Debate: Multi-Opening Versus Continuous Presses.” In the newsletter, Sunds was promoting its own multi-opening presses for some applications and recommending the Küsters con-

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tinuous press for projects where the new technology was better suited.

According to the newsletter, “The multi-opening press is still the workhorse of the board industry. In the early days it was a rather crude machine with hydraulic controls that offered much less accuracy than today (with recent) improvements in hydraulics and electronic components.

“The platen-type press is still the best tool for achieving high flexibility in tailormade board parameters such as density profile, surface densification, etc. At the end of the pressure cycle, smooth and accurate pressure reduction is a must to allow the steam and gases trapped within the board sheet to escape without board delamination. This is where modern controls are becoming a key productivity tool.”

On the negative side, however, multiopening presses “produce more precure, which must be removed with the sander.

With thinner board, the yield of the finished board is reduced since a greater portion of the press material must be sanded off. The dead time required for loading and unloading is another negative factor with the multi-opening solution, especially for thin board with short cycles. Since dead time is the same for all board thicknesses, the percentage of available pressing time decreases with thinner board.”

Of course, the main advantage of the continuous press is in its name—it’s continuous, requiring fewer process steps than multi-opening pressing.

By 1991, four German companies— Küsters, Bison, Siempelkamp and Dieffenbacher—were manufacturing continuous presses. At the time, 65 continuous presses were in operation around the world in particleboard and MDF applications. In the Bison press, steel belts glided over an oil film on the top and lower press platens.

The Küsters press featured roller chain movement to reduce friction between the steel belts and the press plates. Siempelkamp used an endless carpet of calibrated rods moving between the steel belts and the heating platens.

Dieffenbacher, long a manufacturer of multi-opening and single-opening presses, was the latest to join the competition.

In 1989 it received an order from particleboard manufacturer Kunz. The press produced its first board the following year. The press featured a wedge-shaped press inlet and a variable press cylinders arrangement. Meanwhile steel belt manufacturers such as Sandvik realized the new generation of presses required a new generation of hardened high strength stainless steel belt grades with a higher 62 P A N E L A G E 5 0

fatigue strength level and extremely good weld strength and repairability.

An article in Panel World magazine noted that continuous presses were relatively slow to catch on in the U.S., with only a handful operating at several Louisiana-Pacific MDF plants, a Masonite particleboard mill and at the new Allegheny Particleboard plant in Pennsylvania. The most recent announced plant in the U.S., Willamette Industries at Bennetsville, SC, had opted to go with a multi-opening press. L-P’s MDF plant in Clayton, Ala. started up a continuous press in 1988, but the operation also continued to run an older multi-opening press for thicker panels.

The lack of interest in continuous pressing in the U.S. reflected market and operating conditions there, said several reps from major North American board producers: Tom Buglione, plant manager at

The wide product line requirements at many U.S. board plants also hinder the efficiency of continuous pressing, said Don McNary, operations manager at Weyerhaeuser’s Moncure, NC MDF facility. “We have more variable products within a single plant” than European producers, he added.

A rep for a continuous press supplier noted that the technology was well capable of producing a 1 1/4 in. board, but not economically, with current designs lacking more platen heating area that would help address heat transfer and productivity issues cited. But more heating area would drive up costs, already estimated at least 20% more than traditional multiopening press line systems.

One particleboard plant executive noted that continuous presses are most efficient in the 1/2 in. and under range.

Del-Tin Fiber began producing MDF at its greenfield plant in Arkansas in 1998

One of the newest continuous presses in the U.S. is at the Uniboard MDF plant in Moncure, NC.

Willamette’s Duraflake particleboard plant in Albany, Ore., cited board thickness and density preferences in U.S. markets. Continuous pressing does well on 38- and 40-lb. board and produces a quality product, albeit slowly, he noted. But going up in thickness and density for industrial grade board markets above 1 in. slows down a continuous press considerably and unacceptably, Buglione said.

Furniture manufacturers in Europe had learned how to use low density particleboard, he added. “None of their fastening systems rely on the edge of the board.”

Gary Larson, plant manager at Willamette’s Malvern, Ark. MDF plant, added that thicker boards mean slower and less efficient heat transfer.

with a Küsters 9 ft. wide press, with emphasis on 1/8 in. to 1 in. boards. Not satisfied with traditional multi-opening or new continuous presses, G-P operated the “roller-coaster” Mende press at its MDF facility in Monticello, Ga. in 1996.

In 2000, Huber and Norbord were the only two North American OSB producers running continuous presses, though new lines going into Ainsworth and Footner Forest Products plants in Canada were supplied by Siempelkamp and Dieffenbacher, respectively. Huber had installed a 159 ft. long continuous press at Spring City, Tennessee in 1997, and then in 2004 installed what at the time was the world’s longest continuous press at 198 ft. at its new OSB mill in Broken Bow, Okla.

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By 2007, when Siempelkamp sold its 200th continuous press to the Brazilian company, Duratex for MDF, the press measured almost 253 feet.

Though the influx of the continuous press in the U.S. continued to be marginal, the acceptance of it worldwide, and most recently in China and Asia with mostly smaller presses, became the norm, as both Siempelkamp and Dieffenbacher gained major inroads there. The companies continue to enhance their respective continuous presses—Siempelkamp’s ContiRoll is on “Generation 8,” while Dieffenbacher refers to its CPS as an “ongoing process.”

Though both companies, through internal expansions, acquisitions and alliances, strive toward total plant scope of supply, their continuous presses remain the heartbeat of their respective operations.

Tremendous technologies were implemented, and continue to be enhanced, on composite mat lines for quality control, including thickness monitoring and measurement, defect and blow detection and moisture measurement. GreCon’s mat scanner Dieffensor technology measured material distribution over the entire mat width, providing a twofold measuring function—weight per unit area and foreign object identification.

Adhesive Development Looking at the past 50 years of panel industry resin technology, for almost half the 20th century the standard plywood adhesive was an organic resin such as starch- or soybean-based glues, or animal-based glues made from casein and blood albumin. Truly waterproof adhesives were introduced before World War II and widely used in wartime applications.

As the plywood industry evolved in the 1960s, Urea Formaldehyde, Melamine Formaldehyde and Phenol Formaldehyde type resins were well established as industrial adhesives. Research and development in the past 50 years covering all segments of the panel industry has centered on reducing press and curing times, lowering overall resin costs through more efficient formulas, and more recently seeking to greatly reduce or eliminate the use of formaldehyde in response to regulatory pressure.

In his book “Modern Particleboard & Dry Process Fiberboard Manufacturing,” Tom Maloney wrote in the early 1990s that developments in UF resin since 1960 had greatly aided particleboard producers. A typical 3/4 in. UF-bonded particleboard produced in 1960 would require 10 minutes in the press for curing, Maloney 64 P A N E L A G E 5 0

wrote. Thirty years later, the same resin required was not only less expensive, but also cured twice as fast.

“Thus, without any consideration of inflation, the value of the resin has more than doubled, because of the increased production capacity of a plant based solely on improvements in resin,” Maloney noted.

According to the Wood-Based Composites Center (WBCC), in a paper on OSB and waferboard manufacturing practices, one of the most significant advancements in OSB resins has been the move from powdered to liquid phenolic resins. Powdered resins had been used from both products’ inception in the 1950s, yet liquid resins became the preferred component as OSB production boomed in the 1980s.

As in many cases, cost drove the change to liquid, with powdered resins almost twice as expensive and requiring a wax additive that restricted the quantity of resin that could be added to the product. This, in turn, hampered efforts to develop stronger, more high performance products.

Powdered resins also presented caulsticking problems in some cases, and tended to create a fine layer of dust that spread from the blending room outward, posing health and safety concerns. And finally, research showed powdered phenolic resins tended to migrate toward the bottom of the mat while on the forming line.

The WBCC paper noted that the move to liquid phenolic resins required a new approach for dispersing resin onto the strands. Originally, air-assisted or airless spray nozzles were used, but that approach was gradually abandoned in favor of spinning disc atomizers that rely on centrifugal force to disperse resin.

Reducing urea formaldehyde emissions in the manufacturing process is the main focus of recent adhesive developments.

In 2004, Columbia Forest Products introduced its formaldehyde-free PureBond adhesive system for decorative plywood, following a collaborative research effort with Oregon State University (OSU) and resin supplier Hercules Inc. (now part of Ashland Corp.).

The PureBond formula consists primarily of soy flour, and was invented by OSU’s Dr. Kaichang Li to mimic the protein that marine mussels secrete to attach themselves to rocks and other hard surfaces.

Hercules provided a proprietary resin that improved strength and water-resistance.

Columbia Forest Products began converting its plants to a formaldehyde-free system in 2005, and now all seven of its North American hardwood plywood mills produce PureBond plywood. In 2007,

Roseburg Forest Products introduced its SkyBlend general-use particleboard product, made with a phenol-formaldehyde (PF) binder instead of the industry-standard urea-formaldehyde (UF). Though PF also contains formaldehyde, the chemical is locked more tightly to the wood fibers, and formaldehyde emissions are significantly lower. Meanwhile suppliers such as Siempelkamp and Dieffenbacher introduced new resin dosing and blending technologies promoting massive glue savings.

The formaldehyde issue had surfaced more than 40 years ago, but it went crazy when the California Air Resources Board (CARB) released its regulations in 2008, affecting particleboard, MDF, thin MDF,

Industry took notice of CARB.

hardwood plywood with veneer core and hardwood plywood with composite core.

CARB established a two-phase implementation schedule. Dave Harmon, technical manager with Hexion (now Momentive) at the time, wrote: “These are just the latest in a long line of ever-more restrictive VOC emission standards championed by regulators and activists.

It’s highly debatable whether there is any health risk at all from formaldehyde at realistic indoor air levels. The die, however, is cast.” Harmon noted that resin manufacturers in partnership with board producers had reduced emissions by 80 to 90% since the early 1980s, and that urea formaldehyde resins were already very low-emitting even before CARB. In 2010, the U.S. House and Senate proposed legislation directing the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a national emissions standard. Composite Panel Association became aggressive as formaldehyde emissions regulation

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moved beyond California toward nationalization. In 2013, EPA released its proposed national regulations, addressing definitions and implementation measures, and structure and duties of third party certifiers. It also included a commonsense exemption from some testing and record-keeping requirements for products made with no-added formaldehyde resins.

CPA noted that North American composite panel manufacturers and their customers had already made great strides to not only meet the requirements of the CARB rule but also its anticipated federal counterpart. CPA was set to address some concerns it had over the EPA proposals such as when the rules would go into effect, recognition of international test methods, treatment of thirty party certifiers and the establishment of a new super structure above the TPCs, treatment of imported panels and several other concerns.

CPA President Tom Julia commented, “We didn’t want to wait to be told, we decided to move aggressively in that direction before regulators pushed us, to work in sync with regulators instead. We’ve tried to take control of the issue. Today, if you want to get into architectural applications, value-added products, health care

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and commercial applications, you better have a product that people think is environmentally benign. If you don’t you’re not going to get into those markets.”

Meanwhile chemicals and resins suppliers not only produced a new generation of ultra-low emitting resins, but positioned themselves for the long haul. In 2010, Momentive acquired Hexion, which had been formed in 2005 through a merger of several companies including Borden. Earlier Ashland had acquired Hercules.

Even before CARB, all of the panel industry, including non-structural and structural products, were hit in 2004 by EPA’s Plywood & Composite Wood Products MACT (maximum achievable control technology) rule under the Clean Air Act for national emissions standards for toxic air pollutants such as methanol, formaldehyde, phenol and others from wood fiber dryers and press lines. The rule had been some time in the making. Wet electrostatic precipitators, regenerative thermal oxidizers, regenerative catalytic oxidizers, bioscrubbers and biofilters, and the technologies contained within the technology became required reading and expensive installation for most panel plants. Numerous air emissions technology companies

answered the bell, including Scheuch, Megtec, Clariant and others.

Even boilers came under the EPA gun with Boiler Maximum Achievable Control Technology rules. EPA finalized the regulations in 2013, following intensive feedback from the panel industry that the proposed regulations were unachievable and unreasonable to the extent of causing large scale industrial plant closures and an immediate halt to new projects and planned expansions at existing facilities. The final regulations provided some flexibility to the wood products industry, but concerns remained over the complexities of the standards. Companies such as Hurst Boiler and Welding adapted to the emerging regulations with low NOx modular boiler and burner configurations.

Beyond Technology While federal regulations enticed many forest products companies to adopt a “greener” mindset with regard to environmental emissions, many such companies voluntarily began to renaissance into “green” as the new century beckoned when it came to their timberlands. Some of them achieved certification of their

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timberlands through Sustainable Forestry Initiative; others opted for Smart Wood certification of timberlands based on Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standards, which require sustained yield management and adherence to many principles and criteria that take into consideration environmental and socioeconomic factors. Related to this, many plants gained Chain of Custody product certification, which means the raw material for wood products originates in their well managed, certified forests and that these raw materials are processed through production plants into finished product under a well documented production and quality control directive.

But where the renaissance especially revealed itself with some companies was the ongoing makeover

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Air emissions technology dominated the landscape.

of company culture, supported by a fresh approach to employee participation and collaboration in the enhancement of plant operations and guided by a market-driven, customer-centric organization. The effort to modify company culture through open communications and new business models was no easy task and often left as unfinished business, perhaps due to some holes in the supervisory structure, or because of the tremendous amount of emphasis put into essential technology and product improvements, or because markets heated up and the emphasis on culture waned somewhat.

But more companies revisited their culture. Some began implementation of Lean principles for manufacturing, such as Roseburg’s plywood plant at Riddle, Ore. Lean empowers employees throughout

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the manufacturing process, with special emphasis on reducing waste. The employees build the production schedule and incorporate a total productive maintenance (TPM) program. They take ownership of their work areas, with special attention to organization and cleanliness, resulting in greater efficiencies and improved safety performance. Groups of employees receive hundreds of hours of training through Lean University, and graduate to enable them to go to other Roseburg facilities to train other employees. The end result is a self-sustaining culture.

Continuous process improvement programs became established at many mills, which implemented plant-wide management systems directed at lessening waste, improving grade and enhancing production and maintenance. Supported by detailed production data and record-keeping, the effort sets specific performance improvement goals for which the management teams are accountable. Daily performance indicators maintain the focus of supervisors and operators on specific issues that may have been negatively impacting performance. These programs promote a progressive, forwardthinking mindset.

Some companies also underwent a

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Many companies modernized their control rooms for employees.

change in mindset with regard to sales and marketing, beginning with a redefined emphasis on the needs of the customer, whether an independent wholesale distributor or a “big box” retail store.

This sounds simple enough, but it’s a major transformation from a manufacturing-driven “what we make we need to sell” mentality that many companies had maintained for most of their existence.

Many companies recognized that they had become too fragmented with too many groups, resulting in ineffective communication with each other and their customers. They began to focus on becoming a green, integrated, solutions-oriented company that established strategic partnerships with its customers, presenting one unified, user-friendly face to cusL tomers across all product lines.

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