Installation of the final few pieces of equipment at the Edgewood Forest Products stud mill in Carrot River, Saskatchewan marks the end of a three-year journey, with a more than $240 million investment by Dunkley Lumber that has resulted in a significant achievement for the company.

The new state-of-the-art, two-line stud mill owned by the Strathnaver, B.C.-based company leverages some of today’s most advanced digital and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for sawmills, and the mill is now capable of producing 70 per cent more lumber on a two-shift basis than what they were able to produce previously with three shifts on a single line. Truly, a big win, production-wise.

The company still employs roughly the same number of workers, as with this production uplift and investment in new technology they were able to reassign some staff and add a third shift at their planer mill. They have 171 employees.

Production has increased from about 130 million board feet annually to 200 million board feet of 1 x 4, 2 x 3, 2 x 4, and 2 x 6 framing lumber in 9’ lengths. While the facility is a stud mill, the capability has been built in to also produce 10’ stud lumber as well as wider lumber up to 2 x 8 at some future time.

“Our future intent is to be able to run this entire sawmill with three operators,” says Mark Novak, Dunkley Lumber Capital Projects Manager. “That will consist of one individual operating the entire log infeed including two saw lines, another individual operating the trimmer, and a third individual operating the stacker, with support staff to react to or fix unforeseen conditions.”

The old sawmill operated with 11 employees per shift. The goal is to reduce that to 6 employees.

This investment has not only been transformative for Edgewood Forest Products and family-owned Dunkley Lumber, but also for the small community of Carrot River, two hours east of Prince Albert.

Prosperity has been secured for the long term in Carrot River as a result of this investment. Local businesses benefitted significantly over the three-year construction period. A new Kindergarten to Grade 12 school has been built, recognizing the number of young families moving into a growing community often to take jobs at the sawmill, and incoming highways have been newly paved by the province in multiple directions.

The sawmill was actually closed for five years from 2007 to 2012, devastating Carrot River economically as it was the community’s largest employer. However, hope returned when the stud mill started up again on a single-line basis and with an investment in a LINCK processing line in 2015 as the backbone of the operation. The LINCK breakdown system is in fact the only major piece of hardware left intact in the refurbished mill because Dunkley found that their technology is a good fit for the stud mill’s small log line.

In 2019, Dunkley Lumber purchased Edgewood as well as Foothills Forest Products in Grande Cache, Alberta, already contemplating what sort of capital investments could be made to modernize both facilities by taking advantage of new technologies to maximize their potential.

“We knew at the time of acquisition that these facilities were undercapitalized,” says Novak.

Ironically, Bill Dunkley and his brothers and sisters, who founded Dunkley Lumber in Strathnaver, started out in the Carrot River region. They owned and operated the local Beaver Lumber Planeryard in the 1940’s before moving to B.C. The Novak family purchased Dunkley Lumber in 1977.

The move outside of British Columbia to Grande Cache and Carrot River was a first for Dunkley Lumber and a strategic decision to diversify geographically. Also, the stud lumber produced in Carrot River was a good complement to Dunkley’s random length dimension lumber production in both Strathnaver and Grande Cache. Finally, Edgewood’s location provided the company with good access to markets in the American Midwest.

The plan initially was to phase in capital investment at Edgewood Forest Products over more than a decade with the main focus initially on Grande Cache, where there was a more immediate need for a new sawmill line. However, the income earned during the spike in lumber prices during COVID created an opportunity to move faster on the Carrot River project—and they did. Construction began in 2021 and was completed in 2024.

“We turned a 10 to 15-year capital investment plan into three years,” says Novak. “It was always our intention to increase throughput by 70 per cent and the availability of fibre also worked in our favor.”

Mill Manager Trevor Reid says that prior to the capital project at Carrot River, they already had 70 per cent of their fibre needs for a two-line stud mill under tenure and were able to complement that with third party and several Indigenous fibre supply agreements. The province has also made some additional incremental fibre available. Their SPF log basket of mainly spruce and jackpine ranges from 4” to 20” in diameter.

Everything on the Edgewood Forest Products site has physically changed. Drainage, with a design supplied by TTES Consulting from Tisdale, Saskatchewan, has been vastly improved with installation of over 1,000 meters of buried concrete drainage pipe including a multitude of manholes. Also, truckloads of gravel were delivered, geotextile was installed in some wet areas and major earthworks took place throughout the site. As a result, the site is more functional and they were able to reclaim some of it for new buildings. Local contractor Bryden Construction worked on the civil construction project.

“SaskPower, who has been a great partner on this project, also had to build a brand new incoming overhead power line on the west side of the property to feed our 25 kV distribution switchgear panel, and a second new service line to the east to feed our mobile shop and the bio-refinery facility,” Novak says.

The entire capital project consisted of a number of pieces which involved several different equipment suppliers and contractors, but the expansion project from one to two production lines in the stud mill and overall technology upgrade was provided entirely on a design/build basis by Comact. It features some of their latest digital and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Prince George, B.C.-based, Milltron Electric, was their main electrical sub-contractor on the project.

“The appeal of the design/build concept with Comact came from their ability to execute quickly and efficiently while maintaining our high quality standard,” says Novak. “We had done several smaller-scale projects with them prior and gained a level of comfort with both their approach and the company.”

As a separate piece, Allied Blower supplied the dust and shaving collections systems on the site.

The first building construction phase of the overall makeover of the Edgewood Forest Products site, before the beehive burner was demolished, was to capture and manage the residuals that would otherwise have been sent to the beehive burner. A new hog building, equipped with a Rawlings Manufacturing PXZ wood hog, as well as a new chip screen building, is equipped with two BM&M 10’ x 14’ 3-Deck Counterflow Chip Screen “twin fines” models, manufactured in Surrey, B.C., which were selected due to its 280 sq. ft. of fines removal ability (per machine) while maximizing sellable fibre, and was provided by Prince George, B.C.-based, Heartland Steel Structures Ltd. The buildings feed residual bins for hog, sawdust and chip storage.

Comact was the installer on this project and Milltron Electric did the electrical work. The hog and sawdust generated by the stud mill are all collected and sold now to Canadian Kraft Paper Industries in The Pas, Manitoba. The kiln dried planer shavings are sold to local buyers for use in various agriculture applications as well as the oil and gas sector.

This project involved the relocation of the mobile equipment shop with another new building supplied by Heartland Steel Structures. Heartland also provided the building for the onsite bio-refinery.

The old beehive burner, dismantled by Bryden Construction, was permanently shut down in May 2022 and removed the next month.

A new fuel dispensing system was provided by Saskatoon-based, Petrocare Construction.

The new pre-engineered sawmill building shell and pillars were constructed around the existing building and then the old building and its support structure were dismantled, all while lumber production continued largely uninterrupted. It quite literally had the appearance of how a caterpillar changes to a butterfly, perhaps symbolically representing the entire transformation of the Edgewood Forest Products site.

A 53’ Behlen Building-brand building for the new stud mill, provided by Heartland Steel Structures, encompassed the existing 40’ building. After it was erected, Comact’s Project Services team dismantled the old building.

“The columns were strategically placed to avoid interference with existing infrastructure such as the electrical tray, production equipment, access, pass-through, and so on,” says Novak.

Reid adds that employees were incredibly patient throughout construction with parking, access, locker room and lunchroom disruptions. But in the end, he says, they anticipate staff will appreciate the stud mill’s new locker room, first aid station, lunchroom and bathrooms when completed in a few months’ time. There is also a new administration building and industrial scales provided by Saskatoon-based, VCM Construction Ltd.

Because the infeed and log handling portion of the new sawmill was entirely new, that adjacent building was able to be constructed and equipment installed while production continued on the single saw line.

The mill accepts both long length and cut-to-length (CTL) logs fed to designated entry points by Sennebogen 830E loaders equipped with trailers to transport logs from the yard decks to the infeed as needed. The ‘stems’ infeed log deck is capable of handling 9’ to 30’ log lengths, but typically handles 18’4” logs already merchandized in the bush, with the CTL infeed capable of handling 9’ to 10’ logs.

Both log decks transfer to V-Flight reception conveyors using Comact Wave Feeders and also travel through Comact log tally optimizers, or more specifically a true-shape C2-scanner, prior to entry into the debarkers.

The CTL line feeds a Nicholson 22” A8 tandem ring, air seal debarker with hydraulic pressure roll control. The stems line feeds a Nicholson 27” A8 triple ring, fixed-flare reducing debarker, with the first ring being the fixed-flare reducer and the two subsequent rings being 22” conventional air sealing rings.

“We can fixed-flare reduce a log but we can also whole-log reduce, for example, taking a 25-inch diameter log and reduce that down to 21 inches,” says Novak. “And we catch everything.”

The CTL line kicks logs into one of two log sort bins. Logs on the stems line will kick onto a slasher deck equipped with fixed saws that process stems to 9’ lengths, or to one of the two previously mentioned log sort bins. Following the slasher deck, a 48” transfer belt will convey slashed logs specifically to ‘Log Sort Bin 1’.

Both log sort bins then transfer to two log sort lines using Comact Wave Feeders and travel through Comact log sorter optimizers and metal detectors prior to being sorted into one of seven bins in advance of the small log line or large log line primary breakdown units. One of the bins consists of rejects and metal detected logs, which are conveyed to a whole log chipper.

Three bins are designated for the LINCK profiling small log line and three are designated for the Comact Optimized Length Infeed (OLI)/TBL large log line, with the break point determined more by an optimized menu of changeable cutting patterns, rather than specific diameters. This allows the mill to continue operating even if one line goes down because both lines can process logs from 4” to 20”. The LINCK line is optimally suited to process small diameter logs and is also capable of profiling all sideboard options based on optimized solutions.

The Comact large log line consists of a number of optimizers including a rotation scanner, OLI optimization system, profiler optimization system, advanced Smart Tools Primary Breakdown Closed-loop and TBL optimizing system.

All rough lumber, not including flitches, merge at the landing table and are unscrambled and delivered to the lug loader where they are optimized through the Comact TrimExpert.

Flitches from the OLI section of the Comact line travel an alternate path to the Comact edger where they are optimized for value then re-introduced onto the landing table with the other rough lumber ahead of the unscrambler and lug loader.

The TrimExpert is equipped with integrated vision and artificial intelligence and is able to detect different species.

If a board does not need to drop out into the edger, it continues to the 40 bin lumber sorter. From there, lumber is transferred to a Comact double fork stacker with kiln sticks delivered by a Comact automatic stick placer. The trimmer, sorter, and stacker line is capable of handling 190 lugs per minute.

The overall project includes installation of a new Comact-supplied, 132’ dual-track batch kiln with common sidewalls and single peak roof. The kilns are direct-fired with natural gas, and down the road, the option exists to utilize syngas generated by the bio-energy plant. One existing kiln installed back in 1974 was dismantled while a second Wellons kiln installed in 2016 continues to operate.

“The new kiln has helped us greatly improve our drying efficiency and grade outturn in the planer,” says Reid.

The optimization capabilities installed within the new stud mill are complemented by a new Comact GradExpert lumber grader and Comact trimmer installed in the planer mill in May 2020.

Reid says that the stud mill has already achieved 115 percent of its production milestones four months after start up. So the company is very pleased with how well the technology—combined with the extensive staff training that has occurred—has performed.

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