Stress For Success:
Truss Builders and Mills Boost Profits
With MSR Lumber

For immediate release --  12/03/1998

Pullman Washington --It’s no secret in the lumber industry that high-quality material can be extracted from a given batch of wood via a stress rating system and sold for a hefty premium. However, the visual method of wood evaluation relies on a grader’s sharp eyes and judgement, and thus is subject to human fallibility. When boards are going by on the line at a rate of fifty to sixty lugs per minute, graders have less than three seconds to scan them and make a decision; the next board is right behind, all shift long.

Machine stress rating (MSR), a far more thorough and cost-effective method of lumber grading, is gaining popularity with truss builders and lumber mills alike. The MSR process utilizes special machines which test individual boards by bending or "stressing" them to evaluate their stiffness.

"A direct physical measurement of lumber’s mechanical properties is more reliable and accurate than estimates based on visual inspection alone," asserts James D. Logan, president of Metriguard Inc, the world leader in MSR equipment. "Weak pieces cause a majority of problems in lumber applications; application of bending stress weeds out weak lumber with real-world forces."

This level of quality assurance is highly valued by construction engineers, especially truss manufacturers, whose products are critical components in houses and light commercial construction. Without the quality of MSR lumber, truss builders would have to resort to expensive over-design to provide a margin against possible defects and the associated repair costs.

"When builders are engineering their wood trusses, it helps to know the property limits of the wood they’re dealing with," states Donald DeVisser, technical director of the West Coast Lumber Inspection Bureau in Portland, Oregon. "MSR lumber gives less variability in stiffness properties than visually-graded lumber, which helps truss engineers design to tighter tolerances and guards against expensive failures."

Shuck Component Systems, one of the top three truss manufacturers in the United States, used an MSR tester to eliminate a five-man repair crew at their mill in Glendale, Arizona, thus saving over $100,000 per year in man hours while keeping faulty lumber out of their trusses.

"We’re probably one of two truss manufacturers in the country that machine stress-grades our own lumber," says Craig Steele, president of Shuck. "Before we got the tester, we just purchased our lumber from mills already graded.

"We have a lumber yard as well, and we run so much lumber through our operation that we thought we could get a good recovery by grading our own materials. So we researched it, bought the MSR tester and got certified. All the boards which are used in our trusses are screened through the tester for strength and stiffness. We eliminated a crew that was doing truss repairs; at $20,000 per man annually, that’s $100,000 per year we’ve saved on repairs. The machine helps us on the quality control of our trusses," explains Steele.

"Weak lumber will come back and bite a lumber supplier in the form of failures, which they will have to replace," continues Logan. "Lumber mills have several choices: one of them is to not replace failed pieces. Eventually, they get crossed off people’s supplier lists. Another choice is to pay for replacing them; replacing an article in the field costs at least ten times as much as it did to produce in the first place. The third choice is to eliminate the problem before it leaves the mill, and that’s what we’re about."

Metriguard’s flagship MSR product is the Model 7200 High Capacity Lumber Tester (HCLT), a state-of-the-art lumber stress tester designed with one goal in mind: to increase the profits from all classes of structural dimension lumber produced by a mill. The 7200 HCLT evaluates up to 2000 lineal ft. (600 m.) of lumber per minute right on the production line, and its lumber tunnel design with more driven rollers means fewer jams and less downtime in the mill.

Mark Dryer, Finger Joint Coordinator at Canadian Forest Products in Alberta, Canada, says the HCLT opened the door to MSR profits for his company in a shrinking world marketplace.

"We were visually grading our lumber with a team of men, which was quite slow. MSR grading gave us a huge new market," states Dryer. "The MSR lumber goes mostly to truss manufacturers, a market we weren’t able to penetrate until we got the HCLT.

"The size, speed and configuration of the machine makes it work much better inline," he says. "It’s also a lot shorter than the machine that other mills were using. We looked at others, but they wouldn’t fit our space without major building modifications. We had no problems installing it on our existing planer outfeed."

Canadian Forest Products runs the HCLT at an average of 1500 feet per minute – an easy task, since the machine is in-line. ""We’ve run over 1800 feet a minute with it, as fast as we can run our planer. The HCLT has held up very well; we put 100% of our 2x4 and 2x6 through it. That’s our mainstay."

"With the Asian market crash, a lot of the product that would’ve been destined for Asia is perfect for MSR. Instead of having to sell that here as regular lumber, we’re able to pick up a premium by stress rating the wood. The machine has definitely paid for itself."

The MSR grading process has been used successfully for 35 years, and the Model 7200 HCLT produces the best grade yields to realize the value-added benefits of the growing MSR marketplace. More than 1.1 billion board feet of MSR lumber was produced in 1997 using Metriguard machines.

"Metriguard’s equipment is well engineered and well built," states DeVisser. "It has to be rugged because it’s in a pretty nasty environment out there in the mill. If the machines weren’t built strong, they would not be able to take the stress."

For more information on how the 7200 HCLT can help increase your lumber profits, contact Metriguard Inc. at 2465 NE Hopkins Court, PO Box 399, Pullman, WA 99163, tel. 509/332-7526, fax 509/332-0485, email sales@metriguard.com, website www.Metriguard.com.

For more information on Canadian Forest Products contact Canfor Wood Products Marketing, 301 - 1700 West 75th Avenue, Vancouver, BC V6P 6G2, tel. 604/261-5111, fax 604/264-6217, email sgarden@mail.canfor.ca, website www.Canfor.com.

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Note:  The speeds indicated in this report have now been exceeded by a large factor.  Metriguard customers are now running this equipment at speeds up to 3,200 ft/ minute.  7/12/05 

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12 Jul 2005