An Alberta company has completed the construction of an $80 million state-of-the-art glulam manufacturing plant north of Edmonton, using Canadian dimension lumber, lamstock, to create products that the company says will compete directly with European manufacturers in terms of quality, precision and throughput.

At present, the highly-automated facility is capable of producing straight glulam and glue-laminated timber (GLT) panels.

Some plant production capabilities are still in progress. The site has room to grow and one planned next step involves expanding the east facade of their new facility to accommodate additional equipment, including the commissioning of a curved beam press. Western Archrib can already produce curved beam products at its existing Edmonton plant and this will supplement that production.

Commissioning of the new plant is a significant expansion for Western Archrib, part of One Tree Development, whose Northland Forest Products near Fort McMurray produces 450,000 board feet of dimension lumber per day.

Both its sawmill and glulam facilities are somewhat vertically integrated in that the sawmill has upgraded its computerized lumber grader to pull lamstock from its dimension lumber production line as one of the sources of raw material for its glulam operations. This is a reflection of company’s longstanding philosophy of pursuing value-adding opportunities wherever possible.

Because the company is producing some of its own lamstock while sourcing more from other suppliers to meet its needs, it says that this allows it to maintain tight quality control over its input material, “in a way that few manufacturers in the world can claim”.

With this plant coming online, Western Archrib will be capable of producing 30 million board feet of glulam annually, which in combination with its other glulam plants in Edmonton and Boissevain, Manitoba, will triple its production output. The new plant is located in an industrial area of Sturgeon County immediately north of Edmonton, and is intended to complement and not replace current facilities.

This 13.7 hectare site was chosen for its close proximity to transportation infrastructure while also offering the scale needed to stage, move and store large format engineered wood products.

Now fully operational, the new plant has created about 75 new positions, consisting of a mix of equipment and machine operators, engineers, technicians, project managers, skilled laborers and programmers.

“At the glulam manufacturing level, each of our three facilities has its own strengths and product mix,” says company spokesperson, Barbara Murray. “The Sturgeon County plant, with its advanced automation and larger floor plate, is designed to handle high volume runs with greater efficiency, which is perfect for our kits of parts for warehouses and schools.”

She adds that the jobs in the new facility are more technically demanding than traditional glulam manufacturing jobs.

“The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)-driven, data-intensive nature of the operation requires comfort with digital systems and capacity to work alongside automated machinery,” she explained. “This is a transition in our industry broadly, and we are investing in the training and onboarding infrastructure to support our people through it.”

Suffice to say that the company has come a long way since its acquisition five years ago in 2021 by One Tree Development, owned by Howie and Craig Ewashko, from previous owners, Kent and Joan Fargey, who were the second generation to operate Western Archrib, after it was founded by Kent’s father, Cecil Fargey, in 1951.

Western Archrib and its former owner, Kent Fargey, was a pioneer in working to establish building standards for glulam use, which also helped to expand application and markets over the past 75 years.

“The scale of glulam production, combined with the level of automation and sophistication of the technology being deployed is not broadly available in North America today,” says Murray. “Western Archrib was already one of North America’s leading glulam manufacturers, but the Sturgeon facility represents a step-change in domestic production capability.”

She adds that the distinction between glulam lamstock and standard dimension lumber is significant. Glulam is a precision engineered product, and the quality of the input material directly determines the quality of the output. Standard dimension lumber is manufactured to a general structural standard and tolerates a range of variation in moisture content, knot placement, wane and surface finish. Lamstock, by contrast, must meet tighter specifications. It requires controlled moisture content, precise planing tolerances, and a carefully managed mix of higher and lower grade boards that are positioned within the beam to optimize structural performance.

Glulam is used across a broad spectrum of building types that includes schools, recreation centres, arenas, pools, government and civic buildings, multi-unit residential and industrial structures. It serves both structural and architectural functions, often together, which Murray says is one of its compelling attributes for owners and architects.

One Tree Development has a strong grasp of the business potential for glulam going forward and this was a significant driver in their desire to pursue this production expansion. The company says that multiple independent studies, including research from RBC and Forest Economic Advisors (FEA), project that the mass timber market that glulam is part of will more than triple over the next decade.

“Market demand is growing faster than our current combined capacity, and all three facilities will be needed to serve that demand,” says Murray. “The business case was straightforward: demand for our products was exceeding what our existing two facilities could supply. We were turning away work. At the same time, the forward indicators for the mass timber market were uniformly positive.”

For the Sturgeon County facility, Western Archrib purchased an unfinished industrial building in November 2022 and proceeded to build a 30,000 square foot addition to it in 2023. This expansion was handled by Seko Construction. Now, the new plant occupies 160,000 square feet of floor space.

Some funding for the new plant was provided through Natural Resources Canada’s Investments in Forest Industry Transformation (IFIT) program and the Alberta Value-Added Wood Products Program (AVAWPP). The project received $2.3 million in federal funding through the  Forest Industry Transformation program.

According to Craig Ewashko in an earlier interview with Forestnet, Gerhard Mueller of GME Machinery was hired to work on the overall design of the plant and also helped Northland Forest Products to design and install significant upgrades at their sawmill in Fort McMurray, which allowed them to increase production at that facility by as much as 30 per cent.

Since 2022, construction and commissioning of the new glulam plant has proceeded in stages.

“The facility has been commissioned in defined phases, which allowed us to begin productive use of completed sections while other areas were still under installation,” says Murray. “This phased approach also allowed our production teams to begin learning and operating new equipment before the entire facility was fully commissioned.”

She adds that each equipment supplier provided detailed technical drawings, and these were integrated into a comprehensive macro equipment plan to ensure that everything interfaced correctly before physical installation began.

The Sturgeon County facility has been designed from the ground up around data-driven, automated processes. The centerpiece of the automation strategy, says Murray, is the purpose-built ERP system designed specifically for the glulam industry.

“The software acts as a central enterprise-wide database that digitally instructs the new machinery to perform its work—from lumber sorting and grading through pressing, planing, CNC machining, and finishing. This kind of integrated digital control of the production line is a significant advancement over manual scheduling and coordination.”

In terms of project phasing, the Hundegger K2 CNC machine arrived in January 2024 and was operational within about three months. Lumber grading and sorting/stacking equipment were operational by mid-2025. Subsequent phases brought the beam planer and sander line, ERP system, finger joint press line, radio frequency setting process, and horizontal beam press online.

According to Craig Ewashko, the main equipment and technology suppliers for the entire plant were B.C.’s Mill Tech Industries for material handling, Microtec for scanning and strength grading, Slovenia-based Ledinek for automated crosscut saw systems, and Iron Code Engineering Company, also of B.C., for controls and electrical design.

Testing, fine tuning and ramp-up brought the plant fully online by July 2026.

The production process starts with the receipt and assessment of raw lamstock lumber. When it arrives at the Sturgeon plant, it enters a sorting and strength grading line. The grading equipment assesses each board’s structural properties and assigns it to the appropriate grade for placement within the finished beam. The sorting/stacking equipment then organizes boards accordingly.

From sorting, lumber proceeds to the finger jointing line where shorter board lengths are precisely end-jointed to produce continuous laminations of the required length. The finger joint press uses radio frequency (RF) setting technology to cure the adhesive rapidly and with lower energy consumption than conventional heat-cure methods.

The laminations then move to the glulam press, where they are face-glued under controlled pressure and temperature conditions using specially formulated structural adhesives. The pressing system is designed for high turnover, which Murray says is critical to production throughput.

The German Hundegger K2 CNC machine performs precision cutting, drilling, notching, and connection detailing on each beam according to digital design files that are fed directly from the project engineering and ERP systems.

After the CNC, the beams proceed to inline sanding and surface preparation. Finished products are then staged for quality inspection, labeling and outbound logistics.

Western Archrib discovered that there are a limited number of companies that can supply this level of precision equipment for glulam production. While Hundegger supplied the CNC machines, the sander and grading system came from Italy, and the planer came from Slovenia, from suppliers identified earlier by Ewashko

“Many pieces were state-of-the-art and custom-built in Canada while we ordered the other state-of-the-art pieces like the CNC machines, sander and planer from the best suppliers and integrated them into the system,” says Murray.