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If necessary, a disk-shaped turning device rotates the logs by 180° so that they enter the sawmill hall top end first © Günther Jauk

tschopp holzindustrie

Little space for a lot of wood

Article by Günther Jauk (translated by Eva Guzely) | 29.05.2024 - 11:18

In Switzerland, space plays a crucial role in investment projects, as building plots are hardly available anymore. So, when companies want to expand, they always need a well-thought-out overall design and layout and numerous customized detail solutions. Tschopp’s most remarkable investment of this kind is certainly the ten-year-old, 60-meter-high pellet silo which is shaped like a Roman column and can hold up to 7,000 tonnes of wood pellets. 

Already in December 2017 (when the Holzkurier named the Swiss business “Timber company of the year 2018”), the brothers Ronald and Daniel Tschopp were toying with the idea of building a new sawmill. In 2020, it was officially announced that all plants and machines had already been ordered and that Tschopp was just waiting for the building permit to actually make the largest investment in the company’s 100-year history. In addition to supplying the formwork panel factory, the new sawmill was to replace the old one and provide the raw material for three-layer natural wood panels. This plant is still in the planning phase.

Customized solution

For the log yard of the new sawmill, Tschopp relied on a plant design by Springer of Friesach for the first time. “We wanted a compact yet versatile plant but nothing experimental, and that’s how we ended up working with Springer,” Daniel Tschopp says about the reasons behind the decision. Specifically, the Carinthian plant specialists delivered a combined plant for long and short logs, including a sorting line and the option of online operation and the infeed of external material. “Online operation alone saves us 70,000 m³ of log handling every year,” sawmill manager Roland Birrer says, highlighting one of the numerous well-thought-out solutions in the log yard. 

Springer designed the plant for input lengths of 4 to 22.5 m, with short logs occupying one of the three infeed decks, while long logs can extend over the entire infeed station. “Long logs account for around one third of the wood we process. The remaining two thirds are short logs,” Birrer tells us, adding that logs with a stump diameter of 140 to a maximum of 1,000 mm can be fed in.

Log diameters of 1 m possible

From the infeed decks, the logs are transported longitudinally to a cross-cut saw, which cuts them to length before another circular saw cuts the second side of the logs in a crosswise pass. Logs with diameters of up to 800 mm then enter the Valone Kone debarker right away. Excessively large logs and logs which still have the root flare attached enter a bypass butt reducer line. “We equipped the butt reducer with an additional overhead milling shaft. This way, the customer cannot only reduce root flares, but also mill logs with a diameter of up to 1,000 mm until they reach the 700 mm required by the saw line. Logs with a maximum length of 3 m can be processed,” Günter Reibnegger, who is responsible for sales-related matters of the project at Springer, explains. 

The debarked logs are then transported longitudinally to the outside again. The by-products from the butt reducer and the saws as well as the bark fall down and are removed by a conveyor. Springer is also responsible for this entire wood waste disposal system.

Goal achieved

Via a sorting line, a chain conveyor brings the logs to the sorting bins, which are primarily used for pre-sorting, as Tschopp cuts unsorted logs in the new sawmill. Stump diameters range from 180 to 700 mm, and the average diameter of the processed logs is 300 mm. The majority of logs are transported online to the sawmill. Here, Springer also installed an infeed station for external material. To ensure that all logs enter the sawmill hall top end first, Springer built a disk-shaped turning device, which rotates the logs by 180° if necessary. This device is the final component of the log plant. 

The plant is designed for a per-shift output of 230,000 m³ a year for long logs or 300,000 m³ a year for short logs. “This way, we can easily achieve the 600 m³ per shift required by the sawmill,” Daniel Tschopp says. He is satisfied with Springer’s performance and emphasizes the good collaboration with and professional project management of the Carinthian company.