B.C. Saw Filer’s Association trade show: sharing knowledge and resources

Sawfilers key to lumber recovery

They’re called sawmills for a good reason. The saws at the heart of the industrial plants have always been the focus for creating squared boards from the round logs delivered to them.

The early saws were unwieldy creatures at best and with their crocodile teeth, heavy handed on the wood fibre. Today’s mill saws are all about thin kerf, high speed precision with minimal deviation that significantly help produce greater lumber recovery and less sawdust.

The sawfilers and benchmen are charged with maintaining and enhancing that accuracy in a wood diet that varies in diameter and species along with fibre types from the beetle-killed super dry to green wood. The sawfiler’s objective remains constant.

“But I think in the best mills, the sawfilers work together as a team with the electricians and the millwrights,” points out Bryan Glaister, vice-president of the B.C. Saw Filer’s Association.

The filer cares for and prepares the best saws required at each machine centre; the millwright is responsible for the precise installation necessary for saw performance while the electricians install the optimized magic to allow the whole machine system to do the job for which it’s designed.

Glaister is a benchman with Gorman Brothers Lumber based at Westbank near Kelowna, B.C. Gorman Bros is a specialist sawmill producing all one-inch products for a range of repeat international customers. One of the issues facing the sawfiling fraternity right now is not so much one of attracting new entrants into the profession as it is certifying those already participating in it, outlines Glaister. The origins of the issue date back to the recession of 2008/9 when the bottom fell out of the U.S. lumber market and much of the developed world descended into an economic tailspin. Sawmill closures were one of the devastating casualties for the forest industry. Qualified workers in many sawmill professions found themselves out of work. A ripple effect from that was a decline in the numbers of new entrants into the industry. That, in turn, meant training institutions—it was the B.C. Institute of Technology at the time—had no demand for their classes and had no choice but to drop them.

As the industry began its gradual recovery from the recession, the need for industrial ticket training began to regenerate. The BC Saw Filers’s trade school, the only one on the province, switched to Thompson Rivers University’s (TRU) Williams Lake campus. It teaches all aspects of operating, repairing and adjusting saws and sharpening equipment. TRU offers sawfilers two courses toward certification but there was no course instructor for the benchman endorsement, says Glaister. And that is cause of a bottleneck for would be ticket holders until the situation changes.

Automation in the sawmilling sector has undoubtedly cost some workers their jobs. New technologies are being perfected daily including the increasing use of robotics in sawmills. Naturally, sawmill workers like their counterparts in other industries undergoing similar transformations, are anxious about the implications for their future job security. “In our area, we still have to have the skilled workers,” believes Glaister. He cites the emergence of auto levelling technology within the sawfiling discipline as an example of an innovation that was predicted by some to cause job loss. “It’s been helpful, yes, but it’s just another tool. A filing room still needs the experience of manual labour.”

Glaister has been working around filing rooms since 1980 and that was a lot of innovations ago. He followed his dad’s example as a professional sawfiler starting on the B.C. coast before moving to the interior. Old attitudes, however, can remain relevant even with the latest in technology. “A wise old sawfiler once said ‘take care of the details, the rest will take care of itself,’” recalls Glaister. “And that still makes a lot of sense today.”