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Newspaper Archive of
Shelton Mason County Journal
Shelton, Washington
May 20, 1965     Shelton Mason County Journal
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May 20, 1965
 
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9ec. 9upplemenE of SYrELTON.IW $0N COUNTY JOURNAE ! O Weeding the garden to get both the weeds and vegetables to pay out---this is tile aim of Simpson Timber Company's thinning pro- gram. The Northwest's largest corn- mereial thinning operation in Douglas fir is carried on in the Company's second-growth lands, where some three thousand acres are thinned yearly. Cal Poe, operations forester, is in charge of this program. Trees are marked for cutting by Strop- son foresters--Bill Kamin, Cass Visminas, Ping Armstrong and Poe. Then the logging operators cut, haul and deliver the logs to Simpson, and an operator may gross $50,000 a year for his work. THE AVERAGE operator logs out one and a half million feet a year, some hitting two and a half to three million. He has a sizeable investment in equipment, with a yarder costing around $12,000, loader of $15,- 000 to $20,000, and a truck for $5,000 to $10,000. Roads are laid out to make yard- ing distance reasonable and most operators bring out two truck loads a day, each load sorted ac- cording to destination and use. HAROLD AHLSKOG, manager of the fir and hemlock sawmills division of Simpson T i m b e r Company, watches a sticker- stacker arrange lurnber at the Remanufaoturing Plant. The ma- chinery sends al,ong a row of lumber, drops down a set of separating s t i c k s and then brings on another row of boards. Marketing is a key to a good thinning program, according to Poe. "I've always maintained the log has to be usable before thin- ning. Pre-market thinning is ex- pensive." PRINCIPAL MARKETS are the export trade, which seeks the smaller logs, and Simpson's own mills, whose machinery is increas- ingly able to handle the smaller logs. "In 1951 the smallest log we could handle was ten inches," Poe explained. "Now we're put- ting in four-inch logs." The overall result of thinning, said Poe, is increased production of trees. A thinned area may pro- duee 130 per cent of what an un- thinned area would. While the final stand on a thinned site will be eighty per cent of normal, fifty per cent additional will have been picked up in the course of thin- ning operations. THINNING USUALLY begins when an area's trees are 35 to 40 years 01d, and continues approxi- mately every ten years. Although foresters will always disagree which individual trees are to be taken, certain basic principles are followed in thin- ning, Poe said. "Not: more than twenty-five per cent of a stand is taken in any one cut, nor is the stand ever reduced to •less than seventy-five per cent of normal," he explained. "The dominant trees are never cut, un- less they're deficient." TREES ARE classified in four groups. The dominants are those reached by sunlight rm all four sides. Co-dominants have three sides open to the sun. Intermedi- ates are lower down with the tops exposed to the sun and the supressed are just below the basic canopy, covered by the branches of the taller trees. A tree cut for thinning must open some other t|'ee to the sun- light on one additional side. Things have changed around Shelton's sawmilling waterfront. At 10:12~i o'clock the morning of December 7, 1960, the first log hit the gang saw in Simpson Tim- ber Company's n e w Sawmill Three, ushering in a new concept 0,.~, ,~; pla f$1~bu tton' ' milling. ;Demolished last year was Saw Mill One, the original Reed Mill built in 1926 as Simpson's first venture into the production end of q, , m-''~ .......................................................................................................... one of the great companies of the forest products industries of the world o:n its 75th Anniversary. We are proud of our long association with and our role as a supplier of some of the vital "tools of the trade". May the next 75 years see even greater ,achieve- ments for this wonderful friend. 6500 N.E. Halsey St. Portland, Oregon II -T Marking trees is ex':tcling work, according to Poe. A m'm must be- lieve in the value ()f iC, and he must combine it with a number of other ta.sks to avoid the mental numbnes.~| which comes from full- time marking. The thinning program has an.. other adwmtage in the creation of roads for future logging an(1 fire protection. Simpson maintains some three hundred miles of roaa on its second-growtt~ lands an,1 adds roads at the rate of about twelve miles a year. The more roads there are, the quicker the access will he in ease of fire, and, thinned lands do not present as much fire hazard as clear-cut lands because the canop- ies of the remaining trees keep moisture in the stands. the timber industry. Sawmill Two, designed by Hen- ry M'eCleary in 1926 as the front end of a door plant and purchased when Simpson bought out Mc- Cleary's timber company holdings in 1941, still holds forth, althougl~ half of it has been removed. '. Mills Two and Three together produce between 150 and 175 mil- lion board feet of lumber annually under the direction of Harold Ahl- skog, manager of Simpson's Fir and Hemlock Sawmills Division. MILL TWO HANDLES the big. get" logs, 24 inches and over, whil~ Mill Three is designed as a small- log mill, for diameters 24 inches and under. Logs processed are 55 per cent hemlock, 44 per cent fir and the rest Idaho white pine. Ce.. dar will be milled in the near fu. ture, according to Ahlskog. The new planing mill and lum- ber storage shed is 107 by 800 feet in size with 45-foot sidewalls. A 10-ton bridge crane with a 100-foot span can make the trip from one end of the shed to the other in one minute. FROM THE TIME the lumber leaves the green chain until it is placed in a boxcar for shipment, it is scarcely handled by men at all, Ahlskog said. Machinery does practically everything. Sorting and stacking is mechan~ teal. Eighty per cent of the planer output is not touched by hand, other than the work of graders turning it to determine the grade. Four pocket sorters lay sticks, fill, reset themselves to receive the next stacks. An end-butting ma- chine evens up stacks. Automatic strapping machinery squeezes the sides and top of a stack and straps it into a nice, neat package. "This is merchandising at the manufacturing level," Ahlskog ex- plained. Ends of boards are spray- ed with a protective and colorful red paint, and attractive Simpson- diamond wrapping polishes off the job. DRY KILN CAPACITY for the mills is 90 million board feet a year, With the lumber spending five days in one of the eight kilns. Steam heat removes the moisture from the boards. The advent of the pushbutton mill has created a need for a new type,, of mill worker, Ahlskog sazd. With machines to do the work," he explained, "there's less need for 'strong Ole' in the mill. Men di- rect the machinery, and they must : be fast in reactions and mind. Sometimes we have to try five or six men for a job until we find one who feels comfortable doing this type of work." AN OPERATOR sits in front of a panel of buttons and lights hold- ing a control stick that looks like a floor gear shift. He looks much as though he's in the cockpit of an airplane as he makes split-second decisions about the machinery he directs. Even though Mfll Three was the latest thing in 1960, Ahlskog feels the need to modernize continues. "The lumber business is so com- petitive we have to keep progress- ing all the time," he explained. "I will not accept anything as the best way of doing things," he said. "There is always a better way." DAVE POWELL is in charge of mill operations from the cutting of logs into timber to the green- chain. Hugh McKay manages re- manufacture, including dry kiln, surfacing, grading, packaging and shipping. !~,~.~ ~.r:.~ r ..... : : ~ ~v ..................... .... ~:~,~" - Powelrs general foremen are Don McCuiston, day shift Mill Two; Bill Kuhr, night shift Mill Two; Louis Sergeant day shift Mill Three; and Doyle Barnett, night shift Mill Three. Dewey Blacker is master mechanic, John Bishop is chipping boss, Emil Johnson is head filer and Paul Case, head st6rekeeper. Remanufacture foremen a r e George Pitts, green planer; Leon- ard Leeper, dry kiln; William Sta- pleton, dry planer; Harold Cra- met, production scheduler; Gary Dillon, assistant production sched- ;uler, and Josephine Rau, produc- tion clerk. i Roger Anderson is the methods engineer. On a beautiful ten-acre woodsy site ne').r Bellevue, research is housed in a modern building testi- fying to the struelm'al and esthet- ic wonders of wood. The man in charge is R. J. Scidl, Company vice president for research. IeAILUI~E, F A L L O U T and change are lhe things from which research learns, and the goals are complete and ever-better use of what comes from the tree."~ "The common product of re- search is faihtre," Seidl explained. "Out of a hundred ideas that; reach the lab, maybe ten are worked on in some depth. Out of th(~se you might get two to four u) the market and one might fail at the market place." Research does a pretty good job just to contain failures in the lab, 1)ecause it's far less expensive to learn in the lab thm~ the market, and the experience research goes through permits management to make better products. "FALLOUT" from research be- ing done by others is of great vMue, according to Seidl. "People visit our lab from chemical comp- anies to offer us something, for instance, because we have techni- cal people who are capable of under'standing their ideas." Change is the climate of modem] research, which probes the tech- mate acceptance as a profitable item in the marketplace. THE RESEARClt division is staffed by twenty-five persons specializing in a number of sec- tions: adhesives, chemicals and glue; coatings and overlays; build- ing-board research; building con- struction; technical se~wices and administration. Some of the studies currently in progress deal with improved de- sign and acoustical properties of ceiling tile, overlays for plywood and particle board, treatment to reduce flame spread in wood prod- uets and combination of redwood and plastic in an exterior siding system that requires no paint for twenty years. Why was the research head- quarters established at Bellevue? The lab got its start in Shelton as an aid to the insulation board plant, but the growth of the Comp- any necessitated a centralized de. partment to serve all divisions. BELLEVUE WAS chosen as a location close to a large universi- ty, close to the Company's main office, attractive to research peo- ple in giving them a choice of large-city or suburban living, close to a major airport for nation-wide travel and near a large center of consideration for convenient try. ing put of products. DAVE POWELL Mill Operations I-I~d of is most it$ to a long" upon the 75th TOM EQUIPMENT THANK YOU, SIMPSON TIMBER for the many manifestationS of tll}ll EI6HBORS You have given our organization and'our community during" ' 75 years Voiture 135 • Mason County (guaranteed 40 years) Flameproof Lumber * $ * OSMO SALTS 0 Oreosole Treaimenls at tends Congratulations and Best Wishes the 75t~ Anniversary o/a great all its J;