Tour of Frank Miller Lumber Mill

In a departure from my current efforts on the nesting tables, I took a break to go up to Union, Indiana and tour the Frank Miller Lumber Company. The trip was organized by my new friend Jennifer whom I met at www.woodcentral.com. If you are not tuned in to the scene at Wood Central, you are missing out on a great resource. So go there and start reading the bulletin boards and the articles. You'll learn a lot.

The tour was a lot of fun for us engineery types. I always like to go into someone else's plant and see what they do. The saw mill is all about quarter sawn white oak. Over 80% of what they produce is quarter sawn white oak. They have a little red oak and a little mahogany and not much else. Their primary customer, it turns out, is the Stickley Company, so most of this pretty quarter sawn white oak with all its ray flecks is turning in to that fine Arts & Crafts furniture that you see at the most expensive furniture stores.



The band saw that is their primary saw is awsome. It is highly automated and analyzes each log to get the most lumber out of it. They also recover and use essentially all of the byproducts. Did I mention it's highly automated? They sell the bark for mulch, they burn the sawdust to make steam for their kilns, they ship chips to a papermill. There's just not much that goes to waste.

The one thing that impressed me most was that all sharpening of the big bandsaw blades is by hand. They have a team of very specialized craftsmen that do nothing but sharpen the band saws.