Multistate effort to evaluate the economics of producing structural grade hardwood lumber from cants

Project Description The activities to be conducted in this project are detailed by specific objectives below: Objective 1: Manufacturing SGHL from yellow-poplar cants. A minimum of 30 cants will be collected for a one-dimension group identified by the cants cross-section and length. The common lumber used by CLT mills in the US are 2x6 and 2x8, so each cant will be sawn to optimize and produce the maximum number of 2x6 and 2x8 lumber. The common lumber currently received by CLT mills is 8 to16 feet; thus, all the lumber produced by this project will be from 8 feet to 16 feet long cants. All the lumber produced by this project will be shipped to Texas CLT to produce CLTs that will be used to construct a hardwood CLT demo project at the University of Kentucky premises. Objective 2: Evaluate the time and cost of SGHL produced from objective 1. It is a parallel process to objective 1. All the cants will be marked and tracked throughout the process to evaluate the production time and cost. Each cant will be evaluated for the value- added process and recorded for the processing time in each step. Based on unit cost per station, lumber value will be evaluated to measure the final cost of production and determine the final SGHL value with the expected profit margin. It is very important information to evaluate the economics of SGHL manufacturing and determine the competitiveness of the SGHL with other structural grade lumber available in the commercial market. Objective 3: Comparing the rapid and timed drying effect on SGHL properties. One of the major cost factors to produce SGHL is the drying cost of lumber. SGHL manufactured from Objective one is critically evaluated under two different drying conditions. Some lumber will be dried using traditional lumber drying techniques practiced by the partnering sawmills. The second method is to dry the lumber rapidly in approximately 72 hrs. Using high- temperature schedules, as (Gerhards 1983)) proposed. Generally, YP lumber is dried in 7 to 10 days, depending on the kiln''s type and efficiency. The assumption is that, If drying time can be reduced from 7-10 days to 72 hours, it will increase productivity and help reduce the SGHL production cost and thus assist in making SGHL more competitive with softwood lumber and help increase market penetration.