At Abbey Timber we are involved with all the stages of timber production, starting with the trees grown in the forest around the sawmill right through to the finished product such as cladding or timber flooring.
Virtually all of our softwood and some of our hardwood comes from our own forest, with the remaining hardwood being sourced from within the Scottish Borders, East Lothian or Northumberland. Our timber harvesting has been transformed by the installation of an FMS 575ST stroke harvesting head on our 8 tonne excavator. This attachment fells the tree, strips the branches off, cuts the stem to length and stacks the logs ready for onward transport to the sawmill. After the logs are brought into our yard, they are graded into stacks of the same species, length and diameter class.
The smaller logs are sawn on a Finnish made LAIMET 120 CIRCULAR SAW which was installed in 1993 and has been at the heart of our production since then. This type of saw which was manufactured in Finland is rarely found in the UK but is very common in small sawmills like ours. It is ideal for smaller logs from 12 to 30cm diameter and long logs up to 8 meters. The speed of sawing at 1 meter per second is fast enough to allow the economic conversion of small logs that would otherwise be firewood.
The overall recovery of square edged sawn timber from a round log is 65% at best. The offcuts or “slabs” as we call them are certainly not waste. They fall onto a conveyor which feeds them into a Heizohack PTO chipper.
The very regular sized chips from this machine are either sold on or dried on our new drying floor and burnt in our new biomass district heating system which heats part of the sawmill along with thirteen properties in the hamlet.
As soon as the boards come off the Laimet, they can be crosscut to length on our semi-automatic Salvamac Classic 50 crosscut saw.
Trees grow and some are now too big for the circular saw. These logs used to be sawn on our Norwood MX34 Bandmill until in 2016 we replaced it with a Mebor 1100 horizontal bandsaw, manufactured by Mebor in Slovenia. This has completely transformed the process of sawing the log into planks and has given us a new standard of quality as well as productivity. The setup includes infeed and outfeed conveyors so that the whole process is completely mechanised and controlled by a single operator. Due to the Mebor’s wider blade and longer bed we can now saw hardwood and softwood logs up to 6m in length and up to 1m in diameter, at a much faster pace. The two sided sorting system allows us to grade and stack faster as well as dispose of waste without having to handle it. Bundled waste is then stored before being chipped into biomass for our biomass boiler. Boards and blocks are graded by their heartwood content and amount of wane as well as by their thickness and width. At this point some stacks are ready for delivery to a customer whereas others are processed further on our other machines.
Many of our orders require relatively small quantities of thin boards. To do this efficiently we hold larger sized blocks in stock and saw them to the final dimensions on demand on our American BAKER A BAND RESAW. The narrow blade achieves this with the absolute minimum of waste.
At this point some of our timber is ready for sale, usually after we have had it treated at Robertson Timber.
But for more exacting requirements timber must be dry before it can be used. Our cool and damp Scottish climate makes air drying unreliable for most of the year, so we undertake artificial drying down to 8 – 12% moisture content in our American NOVA DRY KILN This has two chambers which can dry a total of 14m3 of sawn timber and uses heat from our biomass boiler as its principal energy source. For small batches of special hardwoods we also use the Swedish SAUNO KILN which works on a special principle to dry the timber with less distortion than other methods.
After drying the wood is now ready for machining and this where we really unlock the potential of our timber. Without the Swedish LOGOSOL PH260 PANEL PLANER we couldn’t produce any of our higher end products economically e.g. cladding, decking flooring etc. All four sides of the board are shaped in a single pass and we hold a big stock of blades to make a wide range of different profiles. A few years ago we purchased the higher capacity LOGOSOL PH360 with the intention of replacing the PH260, but quickly found that what we really needed was both machines. This link will tell more about our planers and what they can do here. From time to time, we need to plane extra wide boards. In 2020, we replaced our Scottish manufactured WHITE PLANER THICKNESSER with a Wadkin AT630 thicknesser. It can plane & thickness boards up to 630mm wide.
If you would like to see the various processes needed to produce timber flooring from the log to the finished board, have a look at the video below. It was filmed at Abbey Timber by the Association of Scottish Hardwood Sawmillers.
For an interview of Willie and Ellinor Dobie published in the Forestry Journal in May 2021 click here.
Updated 08.09.2022