the most challenging and 

 successful research efforts 

 has involved the use of 

 southern pines in the 

 manufacture of plywood. 

 Experiments begun in 1952 

 at Yale University and the 

 Forest Products Laboratory 

 at Madison, Wl, led to the 

 conclusion that the 

 manufacture of southern 

 pine plywood was not 

 feasible. Georgia-Pacific 

 Corporation, which had 

 hardwood plywood 

 manufacturing experience 

 at its Savannah, GA, plant, 

 felt the manufacture of 

 southern pine plywood was 

 not the question: making a 

 commercially acceptable 

 product was the question. 

 The development of an 

 automatic lathe charger 

 and retractable chucks 

 made the use of the small 

 (by west coast standards) 

 southern logs practical. 

 Georgia-Pacific worked on 

 glue formulas, drying time, 

 and steaming of logs until 

 personnel felt confident 

 they had the necessary 

 knowledge to successfully 

 manufacture southern pine 

 plywood. In February 1964, 

 the company shipped the 

 first load of plywood from 

 its new $2.25 million plant 

 at Fordyce, AR, and the 

 race was on (Ross 1978). 



Today, there are plywood 

 plants throughout the South, 

 manufacturing annually 



about 10 billion square feet 

 of rough plywood expressed 

 in the commonly used 

 3/8-inch basis and 

 consuming about 4 billion 

 board feet of logs, Doyle 

 Scale. The impact of this 

 new industry has been 

 significant both on the 

 labor market and the timber 

 resource of the South. 



The other major 

 development in industrial 

 forestry in the South was 

 taking place during the 

 years 1 963 to 1 966. Several 

 machines had been 

 developed, some in local 

 machine shops, in an 

 attempt to recover slabs for 

 the paper industry from 

 sawmill bandsaws or circular 

 saws. These devices met 

 with limited success. The 

 economics of transporting 

 the slabs to a centralized 

 chipping center and the 

 lack of chip uniformity (and 

 sometimes the presence of 

 bark) made the chips 

 unacceptable to most 

 pulpmills. 



Starting about 1963, the 

 advent of the chipping 

 headrig made it possible to 

 convert small logs into 

 cants with immediate 

 downstream sawing of the 

 cants into lumber. This 

 direct conversion of what 

 used to be slabs into pulp 

 chips of relatively uniform 

 size rounds out the story of 



37 



