Fifty Years On
Sawmilling and mouldings manufacturer with vision and using technology looks forward to a bright future. One of the longest established sawmilling and mouldings manufacturing operations in New Zealand has just entered its 50th year of business. Bob Nordgren from JOINERS Magazine spoke with General Manager Jeff Tanner of PukePine Sawmills and Purepine Mouldings about the company looking at its past, its future and the changes it has undergone.
Situated just out of Te Puke in the Bay of Plenty, the seven and a half hectare site was established back in 1958 as a moulding factory by Hayward Hooper as H W Hooper Ltd. In 1968 the sawmill operation was added. Over the years this site has been transformed from the original small factory building to a complex of buildings and sealed yards custom made for the processes carried out on the site. In the early days log supplies were erratic and varied and logs of all shapes and sizes arrived on site to be sawn into timber for the moulding factory and the local market.
A number of species were sawn including Rimu, Matai, Totara, Miro, Larch, Cedar, Douglas fir as well as several pine species. In 1998 the sawmilling operation was bought by the Ken Tanner family of Tairua, a family successfully involved in sawmilling for over thirty years, and renamed PukePine Sawmills 1998 Ltd. Later in 2003 they also purchased the business of the original parent company HW Hooper Ltd and renamed it PurePine Mouldings Ltd. Over the years the operation changed with the current sawmill equipment being designed to handle plantation logs of Radiata Pine which is now the only specie normally milled. Further processing machinery has also been added to the site with a pressure treatment plant, workshops, planers, drying kilns, a finger jointing operation and a sophisticated paint machine for pre finishing. Today the business is a truly family business, with Ken as CEO, Jeff as General Manager, Paul as Head of Engineering and Rachel in Sales.
“To grow the business it now has an international as well as local outlook” comments General Manager Jeff Tanner. “We source all our logs from sustainable plantation forests found around the Bay of Plenty, Waikato and Poverty Bay and choose with great care to ensure they meet the specifications of the products required from them.”
The finger jointing operation turns out between two and two and a half million lineal metres annually of high quality pine board. They mill, dry, plane and treat the timber with Boron and CCA to produce grades H1.2, H3.1, H3.2 and H4. This timber is used to make mouldings, prepared preprimed fascia and weatherboard as well as hand rails and decorative mouldings. The finger jointing operation is very much influenced by technology. “To be competitive as well as cost effective, optimizing the timber to reduce wastage is vital. To this end we are using OptiCut technology from Michael Weinig to maximize the amount of timber we can use.” Mr Tanner explains.
“It goes beyond that though. Being efficient everywhere in the operation is important. A good example is the use of waste sawdust and shavings as bio fuel to produce heat for the kiln drying operation. Increased production has also meant the need for an efficient dust extraction and collection system. To this end we recently had dust extraction specialists Viking Ironcraft manufacture and install a collection system and hogger with a 50,000 cubic metres per hour air volume, which enabled us in turn to increase our recovery of waste by between 30 to 50%. The hogger reduces the waste further in size enabling existing waste storage bins to hold aproximateley 1/3 more waste and making the heatplant for the kilns more efficient.
This waste in turn, once put through a hogger to reduce it further in size from shavings, could be used in our bio fuel operation for the kiln drying operation. The new system is a real boon for the whole operation and our faith in Viking to do the job has been rewarded.”
PukePine Sawmills and Purepine Mouldings export to a number of overseas markets including the USA, Australia and a number of Asian countries with small volumes finding their way into Europe and the Pacific Islands. “These exports combined with our supply to the local market auger well for the business in the future” says Mr Tanner.
“We are now just launching a new weatherboard product called “SmartClad” utilising a patented fixing system unique to weatherboard. Its just another positive step forward for the business.”
