My new plan: sell wood. Boy, do I have sooooooooooooo much to learn about the manufacturing of flooring. The mill (Middle Tennessee Lumber) has a bunch of wood sitting in the yard and my mindset is "just cut it into flooring and let's sell it." For a machine company, parts do not grow on trees, but flooring does.
I never put much thought into the fact that raw material has to grow slow, and that the wood has so many steps to be made into flooring. Now, I have been around many mills and had many folks tell me the way it all happens, but until you stand side by side with the folks in the mill and see what goes into the flooring, well, let me do my best to share it with you.
The raw wood is brought to the yard on flatbed trucks (note: uncovered) green as it can be. The folks in the yard have to look at the grade, species, inspect, count footage and decide at that moment where to stack it. Next, flooring is dipped in a huge tank with anti-fungus and mold solution. The plant then stacks it and puts in the stickers to allow air flow between boards, then off to the yard for "air" dry. Now that means it has to get down to 20-25% in the open air with nature doing what it does. If it is a wet season then it takes longer, at best this will take 60-90 days. We like the 60 but this has been a wet season, so we are past that mark already. Each bundle is given a tag of grade, footage, species and date it was brought to the yard. The forklift driver then hits the ends of the wood with a "wax" to reduce the splits in the wood as it dries.
Once it gets to 20-25% air dried, it gets moved to the kiln for drying in the biggest EZ bake oven I have ever seen. In each kiln you will have 70,000 board feet of wood. So the more you have, the more you can make, but the key is your target. In our yard we have six units going all day long, the target moisture content is 8%. That can take longer or go faster with the species, but overall it is the target that tells you that done is done. I call it the EZ bake oven because if you go into one you will start to bake in just seconds. The tech has to go into the kiln and get samples from the bundles and test each sample to see how fast or slow the wood is drying.
So now this is all done, and the wood is ready to be made into flooring … but wait, it has to cool. We have a huge barn where the flooring has to sit for one day to cool and have time to relax from the oven. Once that one day of rest is done, we get right back to work and that wood goes to the rough mill where it is inspected again for grade and species. That person has to walk all day on a track of wood, flipping each board to see which side should be up before it goes to the planers, saws and as fast as you can blink a few times, they have all that done.
The next step is the saws, an "eye" on a computer tells the line which saw to go to and how it should be cut. You want to talk about fast … that thing is fast! The saw rips it into the best yield and size and it is sent around to the folks that stack it all into size and length. They work faster than a chicken on a June bug-no time to over-think or play around. Those new bundles then get moved around to a stage area based on the size and length of the flooring they have set up to run for that day or week. So the wood may sit a few days if the eye said to rip it into 6" wide rough flooring, but that day they are running 4" inch wood. (One more step in the chain of events: setting up the tools to make the size they want to run that day.)
Now it goes through the mill to make flooring, the machine cuts the side match, a person gets that board and marks the board to cut out the bad stuff. Holes, large knots and whatever is not going to make good flooring. That person has a big task because they can control the waste or money made on the boards. Cut too much, too much waste; cut too little and your grade drops to less money for that board. Then it is off to the end match and if you think your eyes cannot move like a swinging plumb bob, you're wrong. This person has to review the flooring for everything. That person will shoot the flooring to the correct slot to get put into bundles as we know them. There is more, that person putting the flooring into bundles will grade the flooring again so that it should not be a No. 2 common in a clear bundle. They have a belt to take it around again to get put in the correct shoot for that grade of flooring. So that one board is looked at more times than the Sunday paper in the bathroom.
Then off to you and me for install, in that time line you are looking at 3.5-4 months. So now that is why it is odd for me, the adjustment is much more than one would think. That was the short Wayne version of the story, if you ask the folks at the mill and allow them to get in to great detail, this would be even longer. Just like I said … machine parts do not grow on trees, put flooring does.
I hope we can learn this together, and you don't mind my posts now and again.
