To borrow from the popular World War One ditty, ‘Where have all the young men gone?’: “Oh where have all the sawmills gone? Either left derelict, or gone to scrapyards, every one… !”
Just in our southern districts alone I can name several defunct mills and timber processors. Ernslaw One’s Blue Mountain Lumber in Tapanui, Rosebank Mill Balclutha, Tomlinson’s Luggate mill near Wanaka, Carl Fowler’s Lumsden mill, the Herbert mill in East Otago, the Dunedin City Forest plant in Mosgiel and Aparima Mill in western Southland – just to name a few.
It’s been a question of upgrade, or just give up. Just keep exporting raw logs and keep Asian manufacturers (mostly Chinese) happy.
Caught up in the trap of commodity exports.
Cant hooks and pinch bars
Back in the 1970s, we invested in a portable mill to fill in the supply gap with the closure of Queenstown’s lumber yard and mill a decade earlier.
It was just prior to a potential building boom in the 1980s.
It was a Varteg hydraulic Pacific bench system on wheels with power take-off driven plate saw on a David Brown farm tractor with a six meter long by one metre mobile tray.
And it was all hard yakka. Basic tools were cant hooks and pinch bars for log handling on skid sites and sawmills.
Much of the available stock was from wilding conifers, shelter belts and small woodlots. And the biggest percentage was Oregon timber cut board from Douglas fir.
And here I must apologise for my most recent rant targeting the current crop of CEO’s corporate directors and forest management. All I was after was feedback and responses to my recent series of articles on the future of our forestry industries, particularly in relation to climate change. There appears to be little interest or enthusiasm among both public and private stakeholders on future trends.
Then again the current crop of management and commentators may wonder what I am going on about, talking of cant hooks and pinch bars.
Back in the day
Back in those days early chainsaws and cross-cut saws were used for felling. I used a 1950s blue Fordson wheel tractor with front end forks for some hauling with snig chains, but much of the time on steeper country I contracted Daryl MacGregor’s D8 Cat series crawler with winch and strops for heavy logs and Graham Railton’s D4 for select hauling lighter logs.
The Varteg featured a 44-inch (one metre) breakdown saw and a four-foot six-inch bar 120 cc Stihl saw to break down large logs on the bench.
But, oh my gosh, the state of the bark on the logs left plenty to be desired – stones, gravel, mud and sand. Stripping, sharpening and setting took the best part of an hour, with a stand-by blade replaced at least once a day. No wonder mills in those days featured debarkers.
Stripping, as demonstrated by West Coaster, Jock Roxborough, was forcing a kingpin into the blade at 3200 PPM to...
