THE Bigge st Sawmills World's

Bl 7.C. Dionne

What is the biggest sawmill in the world?

Who owns it?

Where is it?

What is its equipment?

How much does it cut?

What are the other mammoth mills of the country, and what about their size, equipment, ownership, production?

These are all questions that the average lumberman should be and undoubtedly is, very much interested in. Because there is something keenly attractive about these huge milling institutions that turn logs into building material at so hurried a rate. They hold more of interest, to the lumberman at least, than any other sort of industrial unit.

I have often asked the question,, "What is the biggest mill in the country?" and those of whom the question was asked either did not know or gave a variety of answers.

So it occurred to me that our readers would like very much indeed, just as I did, to know what really IS the biggest sawmill, and which are the next biggest sawmills, and where they are, and what they cut, etc., so I have been conducting a little investigation, the result of which I will give in this story, tersely, but with enough detail to properly contrast and compare the big mills of today.

And of course, when you discuss the "biggest mills," you must first come to an understanding as to just what you mean, because there are many milling plants in the country that are double mills, and some triple mills, that is, more than one sawmill at one plant.

And it is not just a matter of production PER DAY or PER MONTII, or year, because there are mills that run 8 hours, mills that run t hours, mills that ruri 10 hours; there are mills that run one shift. others that run two shifts, and many that run three shifts a day. There are mills that saw up the logs into the actual lumber, and mills that merely "break down" the log, and let a lot of other machinery rework it into the smaller items. flowever, this is not to be a discussion of manufacturing methods, but rather a news story of big mill production. But it must be remembered, in reading these mill production figures, that it makes a lot of difference what they cut and how they cut it. The biggest millin Oregon, for instance, with two band headrigs, cuts more lumber in one shift than a five band headrig mill in California cuts in two shifts.

It is a matter of equipment, a matter of cutting methods, a matter of species, etc., that has to do with mill production. Mr. George S. Long of Tacoma, Washingon, head of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company and one of the biggest and best lumbermen in America, in telling me about their biggest mills, remarked that the production of a mill depends less upo4 the equipment of the mill as upon the methods of manufacture employed, stressing the undoubted fact that while their biggest plant cuts an average of about 350,000 feet in a shift, there are many other mills with far less and far inferior equipment to theirs that cut as much or more lumber, this being due to the fact that the \Meyerhaeuser mills saw their stock into much smaller units on the headrigs. Mr. Long further remarked that his concern, doesn't think so much of the heavy production operations and would wish that their bigger mills were smaller than they are.

Now to the mills. There are probably not half a dozen lumbermen living who know the biggest producing single unit sawmill on earth. Don't forget, this is SINGLE UNIT. The biggest producing sawmill PLANT on earth is undoubtedly the Long-Bell plant at Longview, Washington.

The: Biggest Mill

But the biggest single unit mill is at Marshfield, Oregon, and is owned and operated by the Coos Bay Lumber Company, headquarters San Francisco, California.

There doesn't seem to be any doubt but that this sawmill surpasses in hourly and daily production any sawmill unit ever built. This mill runs 8-hour shifts, and cuts 100'000 feet per hour frequently. An 800,000-foot 8-hour day is looked upoq as nothing extraordinary atthis great plant. They do not run nights. They are equipped to do so, and could if they desired, but they operate only on a one shift basis.

Their record recent run was 807,000 feet in 8 hours' operation, and 612,500 feet per day for an errtire month, single shift operatioq.

So far as I can learn, no other single sawmill ever cut 800,000 in 8 hours' run.

The Marshfield mill was built by the late C. A. Smith, the famous Minneapolis lumberman. He not only built the biggest sawmill on record, but he established another record by purchasing most of the Port Orford Cedar there was in the world. This remarkable wood grows nowhere else on earth but right there on Coos Bay, and this concern owns and manufactures most of it. They have a separate mill for Port Orford Cedar, however, a double band and resaw mill that cuts 200,000 feet a day.

The big mill at Marshfield cuts Douglas Fir. It is equipped with two band headrigs, one a single and the other a double cutting band. These are the gengine "break down" mills, and behind them there is the great assortment of machinery that makes the huge production possible. I asked one sawmill man, before I talked to the Coos Bay people, what the equipment at Marshfield was, and he threw up his hands in protest. "There are so many big machines you can't count them," was the way he put it.

At any rate, besides the two headrigs, there are two trernendous resaws, one a five band resaw, and the other a six band resaw, and the way lumber comes through these huge machines is the wonder of the mill. Besides these there are two more modest sized resaws, one huge bull edger, two pony edgers, with all the supplementary machinery that goes with them. No lumber has to go backward in this rnill, as in most mills with a flock of resaws. So arranged are the edger decks that the lurnber, even that which is to be re-edged, goes constantly forward, and never has to be run backward for re-working, there being always equipment ahead to do the work.

This is all electrically driven, and they have a surplus of power, so that the boards and planks and hitches and cants and timbers pour through the machines as though they were made of paper, and the huge total of 100,000 feet an hour is attained without special logs or special effort.

Longview Next

The second biggest single sawmill unitin production is the West Unit of the Long-Bell Lumber Company, at Longview, Washington. While this mill is equipped with two band headrigs, and the new East Unit at Longview is equipped with four band headrigs, yet the West Unit is the "break down" type of mill, and has a considerably gr€ater lumber capacity than the East Unit with its four bands. A great gang and a battery of resaws, edgers and trimmers help make this the second biggest sawmill on earth, from a standpoint of production. Its best records, however, are fully 100,000 feet less in 8 hours, than that of Marshfield, and the average run of the two mills for 8 hours probably shows about that much difference.

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