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News
By Quinn Illi
IRON RIVER – Shamco Lumber Inc. hosted a grand opening of their recent expansion to their lumber mill in Iron River June 14, where they gave tours of the mill that explained the process that lumber goes through and the machinery used to do it. Food and drink were provided.
Co-owner Jon Richter and his father originally started their sawmill in 2003 and upgraded and modernized in 2014. It was only in 2018 that Jon partnered with Shamco Inc. and Shamco Lumber Inc. was created to run the sawmill. After three years, in 2021, Shamco Lumber Inc. began their expansion to the mill.
“We went into business with Jon… …in 2018,” said Todd Shamion, the President of Shamco Inc. “We ran the original equipment that was in there (Woodmizer equipment) for three years and then purchased all new Cleereman equipment (Cleereman’s made in Newald, Wisconsin, so they’re very close to us for parts and service).”
The expansion itself cost a total of $5.5 million and consists of the addition of an automatic railroad tie stacker which takes lumber that has been cut into ties then stacks the ties and groups them together and an add-on to the building itself, all of which has tripled their output, allow the mill to process approximately one log per minute, and cut maple year round.
With the expansion, the process that a log goes through when it gets to the mill begins with debarking where it is also counted and put through a metal detector to find anything that could potentially damage the mill’s equipment.
The debarked log is then fed into the head rig which scans the log and optimizes the cuts to get the most usable lumber out of every log. After this the lumber is sent down the line where it is split between going to the auto-tie-stacker and the combination gang saw/edger which will cut it to the right height and width.
The final step that lumber will go through before being stacked and sold is that it is then graded based on the number of knots that the board has (the fewer being the better) and then cut to a specified length.
Currently the company employs 13 people to run the mill and also prides itself on being a zero-waste facility. This means that every bit of the log that comes through the mill is sold and then used by other companies, whether it’s the wood chips and sawdust that are used to make either paper or biofuel, the ties that go to the railroad, or the regular boards sold by the bundle, every bit of lumber cut from the forest, is used.