New Gear Equipment Sawmilling
USNR opens new manufacturing plant

The site comprises 10 acres of land, more than 150,000 square feet of flexible manufacturing and warehousing space, and a large office complex for the company’s Jacksonville-based sales, engineering, project management, service, and operations personnel.

The offices also include a new training center, with facilities to host customers and provide technical training.

The company has a long history of manufacturing products for the wood processing industry in Jacksonville. The Moore Dry Kiln Company was started there by Lafayette Moore in 1897. From 1914 until this year, the Moore Dry Kiln Company and subsequently USNR manufactured lumber dry kilns, plywood veneer dryers, sawmill machinery, and other industrial products at a site close to downtown.

“Our old site served the company for more than 100 years, but it was holding us back,” said Troy Johnson, general manager over the Jacksonville operations. “The new facility is a game-changer – we now have the opportunity to rethink every one of our processes and set everything up to optimize our operations. Only a few weeks in we are already seeing improvements in our productivity and quality control.”

Along with the building and site improvements, USNR also invested in a number of new machine tools and other equipment to significantly expand the plant’s manufacturing capabilities. The new plant uses state-of-the-art equipment and technology for raw material preparation, machining, fabrication, painting, and assembly. The new plant also features double the crane-served area, and more than double the useful manufacturing space as compared with the old plant.

“With all of this new capability, we are now in a great position to support much more of USNR’s very broad product line, both new equipment and replacement parts, right here in Florida,” Johnson said.

“We’ve long recognized that Jacksonville is a strategic location as a logistics hub close to many of our important customers in the southeastern United States. We’ve also developed a highly skilled workforce for this region that is second to none,” said George Van Hoomissen, president and CEO of USNR/Söderhamn Eriksson. “This investment reinforces our commitment to providing world-class products to the wood processing industry.”

USNR/Söderhamn Eriksson is a large supplier of equipment and technologies for the sawmill industry. The group operates four facilities in the United States, three in Canada, and five in Sweden, including five large manufacturing plants. USNR/Söderhamn Eriksson also maintains additional local language sales, service, and aftermarket support centers in the UK, Norway, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Poland, and Germany, and has relationships with agents in numerous other locations.

USNR is best known around the world for providing end-to-end solutions for sawmills and planer mills, including log lines, curve sawing gangs, edger lines, trim-sort-stack systems, dry kilns, and the optimization and control technologies that maximize the output and performance of that equipment. USNR is also known for its Coe brand products used in the manufacture of plywood and other panel products. You can learn more about USNR and its product line at www.usnr.com.

Söderhamn Eriksson has a long history, dating back to the 1860s. The company is known for its high-quality log lines and edger systems, and for the Cambio debarker, which was invented by Söderhamns Verkstäder in the 1950s and subsequently sold many thousands of machines around the world. You can learn more about Söderhamn Eriksson and its product line at www.se-saws.com.