I had never been in a sawmill. I was looking forward to this tour. We booked it in the past, but Covid killed it. My grandfather was in the US Forest Service his whole career. He got a Master’s in Forestry from the University of Minnesota back in the 1930s. He used to quip that his business was “growing”.
I think we have managed our forests incorrectly over the last 30 years. We have caved to environmentalists, and that is one major reason why we have wildfires. It’s not climate change. Climate change has little to do with it.
Interestingly, the town we summer in, Grand Marais, MN, was clear-cut in the early 1900s. Technically, none of the forests here are “natural”. Today, when logging happens the USFS replants the land if it is government land.
The business of lumber is interesting. You’d think when there is a shortage, the people that own the land with the trees on it would make bank but they don’t. The mills do because that’s where the bottleneck is. It is similar in other industries like meat.
Hedstrom is the largest employer in this town with 38 employees. It was started in 1914. The mill is highly automated. It was fascinating. Logs come in and get weighed.
Nothing, and I mean nothing goes to waste. Computers scan the log, and artificial intelligence determines within seconds how to cut the log to maximize the amount of lumber.
The mill uses 100,000 board feet of lumber per day. They used to get a lot of lumber from Canada, but Covid stopped that. By the way, that increases the price of lumber. All this lumber is red pine cut from the Superior National Forest. We have some logging going on by our cabin. It was clearcut 40 years ago and replanted to red pine. They are starting to harvest them.
All the logs go through a metal detector. Environmentalist wackos pound metal stakes into trees so they either can’t be logged, or hurt the saws at the mill. The other thing that happens is trees grow around metal. Sometimes people might have nailed something to the tree or a hunter might have put a slug in it. The below photograph shows some of the crazy stuff they have found in trees. Yes, that’s a horseshoe.
Logs get debarked, and sorted. The bigger ones go one way, smaller another.
Then, they get trimmed. A saw takes off each side of the log so there are two flat sides.
Then it goes to the gang saw. Check this out. This is where the computer does its work. Each log is different, so each cut is different.
If it doesn’t go to the gang saw, it goes to the other saw and gets a bit more custom treatment. Hedstrom’s bread and butter are 4x4 posts. We saw a lot of those. We also saw all kinds of 2 by any length you want up to 20 feet boards. They can do tongue and groove paneling too but they weren’t making any in their planer today.
This is where they sharpen saw blades. I should have brought my chainsaw!
A file sharpens it up so it is as good as new.
Wood goes into the kiln. Walking close to the wall, you can feel the humidity and the heat. The kiln operates at 2000 degrees and will dry the wood in two days. Then, it’s wrapped and shipped to the lumber yard.
What’s really interesting is what they do with all the scrap. They hand-make smaller boards and posts for pallets. They take some of the scraps and burn it to power the kiln's boiler. Other scrap gets turned into other things. There is no part of the entire log that is left behind and not used for something. Even the sawdust gets collected, and shipped to paper companies. It’s turned into toilet paper.
We went across the street to a guy we know. He custom-cut a maple log I had bucked. We will make two linear end tables out of it. It is spalted maple. We got a little lucky. A neighbor had cut down at least thirty or forty maple trees to make room for a cabin. They lay there for a few years. We cut a bunch up for firewood but I made a couple of end tables last year with it too. Alas, the wood is gone. My neighbor gave it to a local woodworker.
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in quite a while. Turns out the internet is actually good for something. Thanks for posting.
Great job showing the sawmill! Must have been a really fun day. As a cub scout, I went to the GM plant in Fremont, CA which has changed hands a time or two before Tesla took it over. And as a younger guy, my girlfriend's dad toured us the SC GE nuclear rod production factory he was in charge of.
Always fun to see smart people doing good things. Not an everyday occurrence anymore! Enjoy the rest of your summer!