Kane, PA—Kane Hardwood, located here, recently bought, rebuilt, and installed a sorter-stacker combination for its sawmill, to eliminate the heavy manual labor of pulling lumber, increasing speed and sorting capacity. Hand pull jobs will be eliminated and some of those employees will be moved to other jobs at the plant. “It is a 38-bay sling sorter and package stacker with automatic stick placing. Sorting, sticking and stacking are now one process,” stated Bo Hammond, sales manager for Kane Hardwood, which is a division of Collins.
According to plant manager Rick Engebretsen, “About 10,000 board feet of mill production lumber per hour are going to the sling sorter, which sorts by grade, thickness, width, and length. The slings gently lower full units on to haul-out chains that transfer the lumber to our stacker. The stacker creates 72-inch wide stickered packs for drying or 42-inch wide solid pack materials for direct sales. Timbers and Railroad Ties bypass the new sorter system.
“The new stacker will take away the alignment issue when laying sticks by hand and will help us produce a nice uniform, flat board consistently,” noted Engebretsen. “The sorting line will take away any possible miss-pulls as it is taking direction from the Lucidyne Grademark Reader that gives it the instructions for correct bin assignment.”
The stacker is an original Lundeen (a company later acquired by USNR) 6-foot stacker. The controls for the stacker were installed by MOCO. Controls for the sorting program were built by Robin Mathews. The sorting line was originally built by Hemco.
This equipment was purchased at auction and was rebuilt by MOCO with help from a Kane team in-house. For more information, you can go to www.collinsco.com/locations/kane/.
