The Douglas County Mill Tour

While at the Roseburg session of REALOregon, the group had the chance to visit the lumber mill at Douglas County Forest Products. Information from their website;

Douglas County Forest Products is an independently owned sawmill located in the scenic Umpqua Valley, near Roseburg, Oregon, on the I-5 corridor. Our mission statement is, simply, A Commitment to Quality. We’re not big, and we don’t have extravagant offices. However, we do have a state-of-the-art sawmill, commitment to quality, and hard working employees dedicated to getting the job done right.

Douglas County Lumber Company, now Douglas County Forest Products, was established in 1941 east of Roseburg with the blood and sweat of a small logging crew led by timber pioneers Sid Comfort and Maurice Hallmark.

Over the years, the mill has changed and adapted and changed to a veneer and core product mill when it was struggling in the 1950’s and 60’s.  That saved the mill at the time but more troubles came their way as markets changed. There was even a stretch of time in the 1980’s when the mill was shut down and there were worries that it would never reopen again.  As time and markets changed, the company has made different products and now specializes in kiln dried studs.

When our caravan first pulled into the mill site, it was obvious there was something going on. Two lines of fully loaded log trucks were staged and ready to enter the area to unload, but they were not moving. One piece of machinery had broken down, it was the critical piece of equipment that is called a loader. This heavy monster has huge grapple jaws on the front and is able to clamp around a full log truck load and remove it from the truck with one grasp. When this machine had an issue, all unloading screeched to a halt and the mechanics switched from maintenance of the other equipment to repairing this vital machine. If the mechanics were not able to fix the machine, the loads not be able to be unloaded and the trucks would have to be turned away. Without the constant flow of 100 to 150 truckloads a day of raw logs, the mill would have to shut down.

Luckily, on this day the mechanics were able to get the loader (unloader) up and running with only a backlog of about twenty trucks. That amount of unloading proceeded quickly and process of moving the raw logs into the mill and refining them into lumber did not pause because of the short time span that the loader was broke down in the yard.

Once the tour began, we learned that this mill specializes in studs used in framing for building construction. Douglas County Forest Products produces on average 215 million board feet annually in Kiln Dried Studs from Douglas Fir, Hemlock, White Fir, Lodge Pole and occasionally Ponderosa Pine. There are two towers on site that are the burners that convert the unsaleable by-products known as hog fuel. The hog fuel creates the power for this mill.

From the yard, the raw logs are moved into the mill area by a smaller loader. The logs are cut to specifications that are needed for that particular job or order. The logs get all the bark removed before rolling toward the saws. A single log can have several cuts at the same time as it goes through the saws. The cuts are then tipped flat to be cut into the dimensions of 2 x 4’s. Once the boards have been cut to the rough size needed they still need to be planed smooth and stacked into  large bricks for the kiln where they dry to perfect moisture content and wrapped to be ready to sell to wholesale and retail markets.

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