Hales and Hearty

A £5m investment by Hales Sawmills has seen a wide range of equipment installed, Sally Spencer reports

Shropshire-based Hales Sawmills has completed the construction of a new £5m-plus timber facility at its Market Drayton site, creating 15 new jobs in the process.

The 15-acre facility includes new treatment plants, biomass boilers and a kiln, as well as manufacturing facilities and a large shop which, amongst other things, stocks garden equipment and clothing.

The company had outgrown its previous premises, said Julian Parton, managing director.

"We got to a saturation point and were faced with the decision to either increase capacity or scale down the business."

As the customer base was growing the decision was made to expand and a Regional Growth Fund grant was secured to supplement funds raised by the company itself.

The investment included a new Stenner resaw and a number of cross-cuts from Daltons Wadkin, while the new building gave the company space to re-site its Excalibur incising machine, which it had bought from Tweddle Engineering back in 2013).

"We weren’t able to use it very well in our old premises because of lack of space but we can use it full time now,"

Another investment on the timber treatment side has been in two fully automated treatment tanks from Lonza, which more than doubles the company’s capacity.

New drying technology includes a 45m3 kiln, from Kiln Services, and a Fliegal dryer, from Edge Renewables, which dries woodchips. The three 199kW HDG biomass boilers, also from Edge Renewables, provide heat for the kiln and the factory.

Four new handling vehicles deal with the extra capacity – two Caterpillar forklifts, a JCB Loadall and a JCB Teletruk.

Sunny Side up

New biomass boilers, dryers and solar panels are the latest investments at Ransfords, Sally Spencer reports.

Charles Ransford & Sons has been no stranger to investment during the last few years. In fact the Bishop’s Castle fencing and pallet manufacturer has spent more than £10m on technology since 2012.

That was the year the company installed a new EWD sawline, boosting capacity by 20-25%. This allowed Ransford to enter the volume feather-edge board market, which, a year later, led to the purchase of a Stenner MHS 10 multi-head horizontal resaw line to process the blockwood cut on the EWD, and Brodbaek handling technology. The resaw was housed in a new building.

More recent investments have revealed some lateral thinking.

"Modern sawmilling is an energy intensive business so there was always an incentive to look for ways in which we could reduce the amount of energy we buy," said Alistair Evans, operations director.

"Allied to that is the constant search to recover more value from every part of the logs we process."

In 2013 Ransford researched solar power generation and about a year and £1.5m later, 2,000 solar panels were installed on the roofs of the sawmill and ancillary buildings.

The panels are capable of generating 600kW of electricity – roughly equivalent to the peak consumption of the small town in which the mill is situated – catering for around 25% of the mill’s needs when it is running.

"We would otherwise have to buy 25% more electricity from an energy supplier and instead, if solar power is being generated and feeding into the supply for the entire mill, in effect the meter from the National Grid supply slows down," said Mr Evans.

He added that the local council and local planning authority were very supportive throughout the process and that installation was trouble-free.

"The panels were supplied and installed by Kingspan Energy who worked with us through the whole process and who made what might have been a very complicated process a relatively hassle free one," said Mr Evans.

The company also invested in chip drying technology in the form of HDG boilers and Fliegal walking floor driers.

"The chip drying plant enables us to add value to around 6,000tons of chip residue," said Mr Evans. "The dried chips command a better margin than undried ones when sold to local farms and nursery businesses who have made the switch to boilers powered by biomass of one kind or another."