December 24, 2012 • 5

Festive something… Well i must be crackers

Today, yes today… Is Christmas day, here i am stuck in this huge site with a handful of others watching over Mr E’s cloud factory. Most of the plant has shut down for 48 hours but the main production line is still churning out its cloud.

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Now i did say a pictorial tour was on the cards today but some areas are that shut down they’ve even shut doors and turned off the lights. It’s not normally the case, but then again it is unusual that the upgrading lines shut at all.

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So let me show you the process in layman’s terms, that’s me saying “some of the processes in here are still a mystery to me”
Here goes, start with raw material,

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This little lot is a mix of all waste wood material,
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you can spot an old table leg, well a bit of one in that lot.
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We then have timber all sourced from FSC woodlands  http://ic.fsc.org/
Even sawmill residues…
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Like that huge heap of sawdust in the background and these hack chips
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All this is graded processed and fed into huge silo’s
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From there it goes through the driers. This is the huge plume of steam, it is scrubbed to make sure there are no emissions other than water vapour.
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The whole system is heated by the by products of the process, as in the fines that can’t be used in the manufacture of particle board.
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That’s the energy plant, or is it a massive wood burning stove, essentially that’s what it is.
All the dry prepped stuff heads of to other silos the on to feed the production. This works by a forming layered mattress
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of fine to coarse then back to fine mixed with resins and hardener.
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It all continues through a heated rolling press.
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This takes a matter of seconds and the output is measured in meters per minute.
The resulting board is cut to the required length then cooled in those turnover wheels.
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It’s stacked then sanded to the correct thickness.
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These stacks are stored but can be used virtually straight away by upgrading.
This is where a resin impregnated paper is added to the surfaces to give it that real wood effect or any colour
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That then goes off to furniture manufactures, it also goes to shop fitters building merchants and many other applications.
One of the biggest markets is the building industry, floor boards being the biggest sector
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So there you have it, the process in a nut shell, it is a lot more complicated than that and theres a lot of folk make it happen.

That’s me for the day, I’m of home soon for a hot tub a shave and a little bit of Christmas cheer with Mrs R

more scribbles later…TTFN…Posted from WordPress for Android

Categories: Northumberland (the peoples republic of)

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