KOSKISEN

Koskisen has an investment in Kärkölä worth EUR 48 million, with production scheduled to start up in summer 2023. The new unit’s annual production will initially be 400,000 cubic metres of softwood sawn timber. The investment is a continuation of the further processing capacity expansion carried out in 2020 and the power plant investment in which heat production was converted entirely to biofuel.

Construction of Koskisen’s new sawmill in Kärkölä moving at pace

A sawing line that looks to the future

The starting point for Koskisen’s integrated mechanical wood processing operations in Järvelä is high ecoefficiency and the highest possible utilisation of the wood material. The investment project will involve moving the sawmilling operations from the centre of Järvelä to the sawn timber finishing and further processing operations, 4 kilometres away from the current Tommi Sneck, Director Koskisen Sawn Timber Industry

location. This will create synergies in production and significantly reduce the emissions from the sawmill’s internal logistics.

“The new production line will increase sawmilling productivity by up to 40% and enable the utilisation of a broader range of log diameters. This will allow us to offer our customers new products, and the wood raw material can be used even more effectively for end products that store carbon for a long time,” explains Koskisen Sawn Timber Industry Director Tommi Sneck.

Koskisen’s future sawing line represents world-class product development that also takes into account future needs. Tuomo Kauppinen, sales manager with HewSaw, the company that delivers the line, is nothing less than shocked at how good Koskisen’s new sawmill will be.

Discussions concerning Koskisen’s and HewSaw’s joint project started back in 2015, when boosting the sawing line’s yield was set as a main goal of the future investment. The plans were to build a sawmill with a movable saw assembly, and North American sawmills were the place to start looking for an example.

“The intention was to check out references in other places too, but those plans were cancelled due to Covid,” recounts Kauppinen.

Although six years have already passed since the first drafts were drawn up and the investment is running full steam ahead, the final plans are still not locked down. Kauppinen speaks of the company’s continuous product development and about the upgrades that are to be introduced in the machinery currently in production and which will be applied to the line to be delivered to Koskisen.

“I believe that the line, equipped with the latest bells and whistles, will be perfect for Koskisen. Looking at all the drawings, I’m almost afraid at how good it will be,” says Kauppinen with a laugh.

All the bells and whistles

At the heart of the plan is the large-log SL250 sawing line, which includes three machines: a chipper canter, cantsaw and ripsaw. The sawing line is 85.6 metres long in total, and so far no other sawmill has a setup that compares.

Kauppinen lists all of the line’s productivity-enhancing features, such as Prologic’s sorting and optimization scanners, log spacing control, log rotators, curve sawing, optimized edging, high feed speeds, movable saw assembly and fast setting changes.

“The chipper canter’s chipper heads has also been made from special steel for some time now. The blades used to be made of the steel used in aircraft landing gear, but nowadays a better material