How wood veneer is made - GIF

[Beserkleyboy]

Mate, I have toured Roseburg's home mill, although in 1982....they were sending out something in the order of 50-100 (rail)Box cars and flat cars/day!! That volume was split over plywood, particle board and solid timber. The Roseburg facility is up there in the largest of mills, producing an astounding array of varied forest products.
And those perfect fenceposts are but the 'peeler cores' from the big rotary peeling lathes, the drive centres for the lathes are about 4" across, so going any smaller than 5" is not possible; also too much deflection in a small diameter. Typically, the raw logs for rotary peeled plywood are usually softwood (we do Eucalypts here as well!), fir, spruce & pine. They pay top dollar for the butt logs of the trees, as they have the least number of branches through most of the log, save for the centres, that afford the higher grade veneer for faces. Lower grades are generally used in cores. Specialty ply like Marine, will use defect free veneers right through along with very careful layup, hence the cost. If any of you good folk get the opportunity, do a mill tour of any sort. Ply, Part Board and MDF are all VERY interesting and will blow your socks off at the sheer volume produced for such little manpower. Many mills have public tours available, you just need to ask. And in days gone by, maybe even now, anyone with a 'keen interest' could ask and receive a tour. The old days of 'green chains' and sorting belts is long gone...Cheers
Jim
30 yr expat & 3rd gen timber merchant in AUS