North Fork Lumber, located just west of Arcata, California produces green planed finished Douglas Fir, HemFir, and Larch. The new owners resurrected and modernized an old redwood processing plant. As part of the entire mill rebuild Raptor was chosen to supply scanning and controls for the dual sorter, planning and stacking lines.
The 20ft trim line benefits from optimized solutions of the BoardScanner-Q. The scanner is equipped with lasers and colour vision cameras to grade a range of products from 2×4 to 4×12 at a speed of 120 LPM that are fed through two multi-saw trimmers. The first trimmer cuts dimension products and the 2nd captures PET lengths. There is a positioning fence prior to each saw box.
Raptor controls the trim line as well as the two drag chain sorters and packaging lines. The WEBSort interface optimizes product flow through the entire system and passes enterprise data to third party systems critical to the mill management team.
The order management system tracks specialty orders and communicates to up stream machine centers when quantities have been achieved.