High-tech panel manufacturing coming to C-Falls
Columbia Falls could soon be home to a high-tech timber-product manufacturing plant, according to Western Building Center general manager Doug Shanks.
The company hopes to have the new plant up and running by July, producing prefabricated, cross-laminated wood panels up to 11 feet wide and 40 feet long. The panels will be pre-cut to match architectural drawings so they can be quickly assembled at a job site for residential or commercial buildings.
An example of this advanced wood-processing industry is the two-story Sawbuck Do Jang martial arts studio completed in Whitefish last year. Panels for that project arrived in shipping containers from Europe and were pre-cut and pre-assembled at the industrial park north of Columbia Falls.
The 5,000-square-foot building went up in five days, according to Pete Kobelt, who studied Europe’s advanced wood-processing industry and founded Innovative Timber Systems, also known as Smartwoods.
Kobelt says the panels go up faster and produce less waste on site, provide good insulation and thermal mass, burn slowly in a fire, provide acoustic protection, and have additional structural capacity so they can replace concrete and steel.
“They’ve built seven-story buildings with these panels in Europe,” Shanks said. “And the Japanese are experimenting with it.”
Smartwoods built a home in Vancouver, B.C., and a tower for a church in North Carolina using the high-tech panels, Kobelt said. But those panels came from Europe, and his hope has been to see a manufacturing plant in the Flathead.
Western Building Center has stepped up to the plate and plans to install a panel-manufacturing line in its building near Super 1 Foods, where a line currently produces roof and floor trusses.
Shanks said WBC has ordered the equipment, which is being assembled by a company in Frankfurt, Germany. WBC representatives will travel to Germany to inspect the equipment in mid-April. If all goes well, the equipment will be in Columbia Falls by June for installation.
The crucial piece of equipment is a large hydraulic press capable of squeezing together 2-by-4s, 2-by-6s or even 2-by-8s into glued cross-laminated panels up to 11 feet wide and 40 feet long. A beam saw with a large circular blade will be used to cut the panels to size or for window and door openings.
Like the truss-assembling equipment currently in the building, which has been operating since June 2008, the new equipment will be operated with numerical controls, Shanks said.
Stoltze Land & Lumber Co. and Plum Creek Timber have indicated they can initially supply material for the panels, Shanks said. The 2-by material can be of different lengths, with bad sections cut out and then finger-jointed and planed into 40-foot lengths ready for laminating.
Shanks said two shifts with five to seven workers could be employed in the first phase. If all works out, the company plans to buy a second press and hire more workers.
“The press is the slow part of the whole process,” he said.
Shanks said he’s received inquiries about the high-tech timber product from around the U.S., including the U.S. Forest Service, which might want to use the panels for a new office building in Missoula.