3524 Chapter 28 



28-13 $937,000— SYSTEM-6 PRODUCTION OF 



STANDARD-SIZE BLANKS FOR THE FURNITURE 



INDUSTRY" 



The raw material feeding this proposed operation is hardwood cants, pur- 

 chased from sawmills at a price of $200/Mbf lumber scale. Sawmillers produce 

 the cants from bolts 75 inches long selected to have no more than 1 V^ inches of 

 sweep and with small-end diameters of 7.6 to 12.5 inches. These bolts are sawn 

 at the sawmill into two-sided cants 3 or 4 inches thick by slabbing to at least a 3- 

 inch face, turning the bolt 180°, offsetting by the width of two cants plus one 

 kerf, slabbing again, and finally sawing through the center of the bolt. 



The proposed operation converts these cants into standard-size blanks (table 

 27-1 15). A standard blank is a piece of solid wood which may be of edge-glued 

 construction and is of specified size and quality. They are 13 to 100 inches long 

 and 20 to 26 inches wide. These are sold to furniture manufacturers at an average 

 price of $1.76/sq ft of blanks, 4/4 basis. 



In the proposed operation, cants are processed (fig. 28-15 top) into boards in a 

 single pass through a gang resaw. Boards from the resaw are immediately 

 stacked for air-drying with !/2-inch-thick sticks on 24-inch centers separating 

 courses; to prevent twisting of boards in top courses, 4-inch-thick concrete top 

 weights are placed on each stack. After forced-air predrying to 20-percent 

 moisture content, the stacked lumber is moved to an adjacent independent 

 operation where it is kiln-dried to 6-percent moisture content at a contract price 

 and returned for remanufacture. 



The kiln-dry boards are processed to blanks in five machining steps (fig. 28- 

 15 bottom), i.e., they are rough planed, gang crosscut, gang ripped, cut-to- 

 length, and, if necessary, salvage ripped. Following any desired matching of 

 grain and color, the pieces are edge glued into standard blanks of specified size. 

 (See table 27-115 for standard sizes and page 1960 for additional procedural 

 details.) 



Annual requirement for cants totals 1 ,407 Mbf, lumber scale, for single-shift 

 operation 225 days/year. Annual production of standard blanks is 703,125 

 square feet. With resaw production per shift of 6.25 Mbf of lumber, about 3, 125 

 square feet of blanks (520 of them) will be made per shift for a yield of about 50 

 percent fi*om the lumber. 



Key statistics for the proposed enterprise are as follows: 



Capital investment $937,000 



Operating costs, annual $929,900 



Sales, annual $1,237,500 



Net profit, annual (before income taxes) $307,600 



Return on sales 24.9 percent 



Return on investment 32.8 percent 



Employees 20 



Energy requirement, daily 



Electrical 1 ,000 kWh/day 



Oil equivalent (gasoline, oil, and gas) 20 gallons/day 



Wood (ovendry basis) 1.7 tons/day 



'^Abstracted from Gatchell and Reynolds (1981). 



