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February 2007 - The Logging and Sawmilling Journal

SPOTLIGHT

REVITALIZED MILL FROM THE RUINS

After his small value-added sawmill operation was hit by a fire, Peter Pelton chose to rebuild—supported by a valued and loyal customer—and today has a revitalized mill operation that is turning out more high value birch that is ready for the trip to Japan.

By Jim Stirling

On a fateful morning in 2004, fire ripped through Peter Pelton’s small value-added sawmill operation.

In short order, 15 years of his life’s work lay in smouldering ruin. Afterwards, he sat around for a couple of days, drinking coffee and weighing options for his company, Silver Dew Hardwoods. It was in the business of producing a high quality, specialized product: clear, precisely measured lengths of white birch used primarily for flooring products by his Japanese customer.

It was a needed boost when his customer flew over from Japan to visit Pelton at his devastated mill site, about 30 kilometres north of Clearwater in the southern Interior of British Columbia. The customer told Pelton that if he decided to rebuild, he’d continue to purchase birch product from Silver Dew Hardwoods.

Piece by piece, a hand-built and revitalized Silver Dew Hardwoods rose gradually from the ashes and is back producing high quality, value-added product manufactured from white birch harvested in the BC Interior

And so it was. Piece by meticulous piece, a hand-built and revitalized Silver Dew Hardwoods sawmill rose gradually from the ashes. Fast forward to last year and Pelton was one of a group of people receiving a community achievement award from the BC Achievement Foundation. It recognizes people who have, among other attributes, demonstrated determination and innovation in their endeavours. Silver Dew Hardwoods qualifies on both counts.

Local people are back at work, birch is being converted to high value quality products and a customer in Japan is a happy man.

Looking back, maybe the fire wasn’t altogether a bad thing, philosophizes Pelton, who runs Silver Dew with his brother, Steve. They were getting into a routine. The fire forced a re-evaluation and a re-thinking process, he continues, which in turn led to changes being incorporated into the new mill design.

The result has been an improved lumber recovery and production increase while maintaining the all-important product quality.

Pelton spent the first half of his forest industry career as a logging contractor, working for several large licensees in the region. But he discovered his true niche when he switched focus to running his own small scale sawmilling operation. From the beginning, he was looking at specialty woods and products like timbers, cedar beams and in utilizing birch. Much of the wood to start with was selectively harvested from his own land—a deeded family ranch since 1911—and he was selling into the US markets. He works with licensees like Canfor Corporation and Weyerhaeuser to access the birch he needs for his Japanese customer.

Pelton says he got a lead on this customer through a brokerage company and has been filling their exacting specifications for about five years. A key ingredient in his success is the appearance of the birch. “We’ve got the whitest birch in the world,” claims Pelton.

The white birch is typically cut into short lengths, 0.3 to 0.6 metres, 86 millimetres wide and 30 millimetres thick. It’s used as a glued veneer face on top of plywood for top-end building products.

The piece specifications are precise enough but Pelton must fulfill another requirement. The product has to be frozen and delivered frozen to Japan where it is re-milled still in frozen condition before being applied to the end product. The reason? To have the birch arrive as white as possible. Pelton has a freezer container in the mill yard run by a gen-set. He says the sought after whiteness can fade within days without freezing. That means it goes off-grade and loses value, he explains.

“It takes a lot of labour. A knot the size of a needle can lead to a reject,” he continues. Not that a rejected strip of veneer has no value. Pelton says there’s a large number of employees in Japan who convert the reject birch pieces into a diverse range of products from fans to bird feeders. Nothing is wasted.

Typically his head saw and five-foot band mill configuration will go through 18 cubic metres of birch logs a day for two shifts. The mill usually employs 11 people, mostly women and interestingly, none of them have previous sawmilling experience. They’re easier to train that way for the repetitive work required in an environment where defects must be minimized.

Silver Dew’s unusual form of secondary manufacturing helps define the term value-added. “A 16-inch diameter birch tree can have a value of $600,” he points out. But gaining access to the birch in the first place can be another matter entirely. It emphasizes a point of frustration echoed by many smaller scale sawmillers with specific fibre requirements for conversion to non-commodity wood products.

“The resource is there,” believes Pelton. But it’s intermixed with other tree species. He cites one 20,000 cubic metre non-renewable forest licence Silver Dew Hardwoods was in the running for that contained OSB stock of aspen, poplar and birch. The birch is often mixed with fir in valley bottom stands in Pelton’s fibre catchment region. In those situations, birch is not the species most wanted.

Ways have to be found to try and keep it out of the windrowed burn piles. Pelton says he uses about 6,000 cubic metres of birch a year. But he could expand his operation significantly, hire more people to run it and boost the volume of quality products manufactured—and perhaps be looking for even greater freezer capacity—if only he could get consistent access to 10,000 to 12,000 cubic metres of birch a year.

In the meantime, Pelton and his employees are just plain pleased that Silver Dew Hardwoods is literally back from the ashes.

This page last modified on Saturday, July 21, 2007