Since the area I model is the Blue Ride Mountains, I picked up Cornerstones Mountain Lumber Company kit the other day. Logging was big business in the area back during the transition era. However the kit comes with a cone-shapped teepee burner for disposing of lumber mill sawdust. Based on some research these were primarily used in the pacific northwest. My question is: were these things also used here in the the southeast? If not, how did mills in this area get rid of sawdust?
A local lumber company specializing in the manufacturing of hard wood flooring (oak) has a saw dust collector and burns the saw dust along with other fuel to generate steam to operate their machenery.
Also a by product of the manufacturing of the flooring is hard wood mulch which is bagged.
It is a truck operation, however.
The plant is located in Northern Virginia.
Hope this helps
If an industry didn’t find it more profitable to use a ‘beehive’ burner, which are/were used all over N. America, they would load the chips into hoppers and ship it to destinations that were interested in it. Particle board manufacturers might be desirous of the chips and sawdust, as an example.
Crandell
I don’t know much, but here’s my opinion…
Yeah, the teepee burners were first used in the Pacific Northwest and spread outward from there. I remember lots of them from our travels in the West during the 60s, many still in operation. I did not travel so extensively back East, but do have the impression they weren’t as common there. Heck, the way the coal mines were in that period, the mill operators probably just dumped all that sawdust in a hollow somewhere and forgot about it.
But the burners could obviously be shipped nationwide, as they are made out of panels bolted together. It wouldn’t surprise me if some eastern US mills used them. This is obviously a case where modeling a prototype helps, as you’d know whether it did or it didn’t have a burner. If that’s not an issue, I’d just say that progressive management on your line likes to keep up with the latest trends.[A]
The lumber mill here just piles it up and lights if off. Burn baby burn!
Try a google search. I found this, for example:
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/33198232
They are disappearing, so your era has an effect on whether you would have one and whether it would be in use.
Ed
I KNOW I’ve seen some beehive burners in/near Union Point, GA, but I’m not sure if they were sawdust burners, or maybe beehive Coke ovens. It’s been a while since I’ve been through there during daylight. There was a rail line that served the area, the roadbed is still visible in many points, and many buildings still stand. I’ll see if I can dig up more info.
Brad
The mill in Longleaf LA used tubes to transport the sawdust to the feed boilers in the planer mill and powerplant, it just wasn’t wasted. I’m unsure if it was a vaccum or pushed.
Here is whats left standing, under the water tank. Sawmill is to the left and planer mill to the right.
Memory is a fickle thing. If it helps, the beehive or teepee burners are metal, while coke ovens, sometimes called beehive ovens, are brick or other masonry construction.
True, that. I’m thinking the ovens I saw were masonry of some type. Not sure why there would be Coke ovens in the middle of nowhere. More research would be necessary.
Back to the OP’s topic, I worked (long ago) at a lumber mill in Gainesville, GA. We were not a sawmill, per se, we received rough cut lumber and cut it to length, ran it through the planer for finished lumber. We had 2 sawdust collection systems/buildings. One for the planer shed, and a separate one for the machine shop. They were the so called “cyclone” collection units. Nothing was burned (this was late 80’s, early 90’s), and I do not remember seeing any remnants of a boiler works or incinerator. Sawdust was sold to anyone who wanted it, we had several who got it for horse stables and the like.
That said, if he is using the burners included with his kit, I wouldn’t find that out of place - nor would I find their absence conspicuous, as long as there’s some plausible method of collecting and dealing with sawdust. I’ll see if I can locate some photos of the sawdust collector we had for the planer shed. It was a brick building (I think), looking to be about 4-5 stories tall, the cyclone collector on the roof, a long sheetmetal “duct” connecting to the planer shed, and room for a truck to back under the “floor” to load out wood chips/sawdust. I don’t recall there being any windows.
The sawdust collector for the machine shop was a much smaller affair, adjacent to the shop, on the ground level. It was part of the large wood shed we had for finished materials, that needed to be kept dry, but didn’t need protection from temperatures.
Brad
The original post does not mention an era. The local sawmill, wayy down in south Florida, did not use burners in the 1930s. The junk wood was dumped onto a heap by a long conveyor and set on fire. After the mill caught fire a couple times they installed a metal mesh screen that was a couple stories high, between the slab heap and the mill. ( Like the backstop on a baseball field).
The junk that was left over from sawing logs was known as slab. If the pieces were big enough they were sawed into pieces like shingles and used to fire the locomotives, yarders and skidders. If the pieces were too small they were ground up into what we call mulch. The mulch was used to fire the mills boilers. They had a storage bin that neld 3 days’ worth of fuel for the boilers. If the bin was full, everything else went into the slab pile and was burned.
If you Google the name ‘Ralph Clement Bryant’, you will find 2 books online that he authored in the early 1900s. One was about logging, the other was about lumbering. They were college text books back in the 1920s and contain all the info on the subject you could want.
I believe that the OP made reference to the transition era, so here’s a sawdust burner which was in-use when this photo was taken in the early '60s (and very likely several decades before that, too). It was located not too far from North Bay, Ontario.
Wayne
I hope this link works. There were two burners of this type in or near the town where I finished high school. This was in south-central British Columbia The one shown here is the smaller of the two, and was on the outskirts of town. I got there in '67. it looked like what you see…unused, and for some time. The other was over the bank below my bedroom window, about 200 yards or more away, and was at least twice as big as the one in the image here.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rog45/6274113119/in/pool-clearfocus
Crandell
I recall at least one badmitten birdee (least that’s what they look like to me) at a lumber yard in Spartanburg in the 1960s. We used to drive by on the way to the orthdontist (yuck). So yes, I think you’re perfect legit to use one.
you could always keep the bee hive in your kit box and use the space for wood chip loading of hoppers for a paper mill or a siding for box cars to ship bagged mulch…adds extra operations
When I lived in Southern Ohio a sawmill’s sawdust pile caught ( was set?) on fire and it burned for days.[B)] The mill was fined by the EPA and had to reimburse the City for the extra man hours and overtime.The end results was the mill shut down within weeks after the fire.
I worked in a sawmill in PA for 13 years and there was one near my house while I was growing up. Those mills both just blew their sawdust out onto the ground into a pile and then hauled it off to a vacant field to “dispose” of it, which was just piling it up. Saw dust will spontaneously combust if left in a pile for a long time as it holds and builds its own heat. The mill I worked at built a silo to hold it in the mid 1990’s after paying a fine to the EPA for its saw dust pile field. It was stored in a silo then hauled away by semi to some manufacturing plant.
I did a Google image search for Smoky Mountain sawmills and at least three images came up but they are early 1900’s mills. From the looks of the photos slabs and dust was burned in the same boiler (s). One pic shows a waynesville, nc mill with a singe boiler to the left of the mill. A couple other show the Smokemont mill with three stacks coming out of it’s boiler house.