Freres Plywood made the switch to revoutionary new light sorting technology

When times are tough, businesses as a rule tend to tighten their belts, batten down the hatches and hang on tight to ride out the storm.  This is not the case with the Freres Lumber Company. They have traditionally taken times when the economy is soft as an opportunity to re-invest in their mill and add technology to ensure they stay ahead of the curve, says Tyler Freres, grandson of founder Theodore George (TG) Freres. 

 

This mindset of investing in new technology when other companies are lying low is one of the reasons, Tyler says, that the 3rd generation family owned business is approaching their 100th year of operation. “I think being willing to re-invest in our plant and our equipment when others aren’t willing to do that has been a big help, “ he says. “We have been less interested in growing quickly and in a different location and more interested in making sure the processes we have in place at the current plant are sufficient.” 

 

Mill manager and 40-year company employee Norm Persons says with a laugh that he has seen many changes in his time at Freres, and agrees that has played a major part in their success. “They bought a plywood mill when plywood mills were going out of business, and that turned out to be a great thing for the company,” he says. “They choose downtimes to make improvements that would normally cost production hours. It has been a good strategy, it has proven out over the years. They are really proactive about putting money back into the company, keeping things up to date.”

 

The Lyons, Oregon based mill came to be in the Freres family when TG traded one of the two thrashing machines he had been operating, with income from the family grain farms, for a small struggling sawmill in the Fern Ridge area in 1922, according to the company’s history. After struggling financially through the Second World War the mill came into more prosperous times and moved to Lyons, where it remains today. The company has remained in the family, as was the dying wish of TG in 1979. Second generation Bob Freres is now chairman of the board, Ted Freres is president, and Rob Freres is executive vice-president. Freres operates two primary wood lathes in Lyons as well as a plywood plant in Mill City, five miles away. 

 

The latest instance of the company making lemonade of the current sour economic climate is the recent installation of Westmill’s LightSORT√¢‚Äû¬¢ Green Veneer Moisture Measuring (GVMM) sorting system at their mill. The project was put into service and replaced their existing moisture meter in May of this year, says Tyler, and is the most current in a line of recent upgrades. LightSORT is an alternative technology for sorting veneer, says Brian Martin, general manager at Westmill Machine Automation in Aldergrove, B.C.. They are the exclusive distributors of the product that was developed by Forintek. 

 

Freres made the decision to make the change to LightSORT after years of struggling to get an accurate wood moisture sort on their six-bin radio frequency stacker, says Persons. “We send most of our wood to our own dryers so it is critical that we get a good sort for efficient drying,” he explains. “With the old style moisture heads there was a lot of misreading of the moisture content machines. They might be close but they would be off a bin or two and in some cases they would be way off.” 

 

When LightSORT came out they watched it online for a couple of years and then spoke to Westmill about it. “It sounded like they were having pretty good luck with it,” says Persons. “We decided to try it and it has been one of the best things we ever did.” Martin says when they installed LightSORT at Freres they compared it with the old system and found anywhere from 39 to 52 percent of the sheets had been mis-sorted by the radio frequency system as compared to the new light transmission one. 

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