Stimson Lumber’s Unconventional Start

Many paths can lead to a job at a lumber mill, but few people would think of working on a commercial fishing boat as good preparation.

“I started working on a fishing boat when I was about fourteen,” said Eric Mallery, Boiler/Kiln Lead at Stimson Lumber Company’s Tillamook mill. “After that, I also did some environmental work for a soil and conservation district for five years.”

“My experience on a ship with refrigeration and boilers helped me land a job as a Boiler/Kiln Operator when a friend at Stimson was getting ready to retire,” he explained. “I’ve been at Stimson fourteen years now.”

These days he trains the people who run boilers and kilns at other Stimson mills. He also leads a crew, supervising the lumber drying and boiler processes, both day-to-day and long-term, from ordering parts to filling in for people on vacation.

He is also the mill’s Environmental Coordinator, handling the boiler’s environmental permit standards as well as stormwater and emissions, and he has made sure Stimson has met all the benchmarks for quite a while.

There’s a little family history with Stimson, too. “My grandfather worked for Stimson up in Northern California as a contract logger 50+ years ago.”

“And since my Dad worked for my grandfather part of that time, that makes it three generations of our family working for Stimson,” he added proudly.

When asked whether one of his kids would continue the tradition, he just laughed and said, “Maybe one of the grandkids.”

Innovation Is the Watchword

Stimson Lumber has a long history of its own. Founded in Michigan in 1850, the company built a state-of-the-art mill in Forest Grove, Oregon, in 1929, just as the Great Depression got underway. Unlike many other lumber companies, Stimson kept all of its employees and never had to shut down, even temporarily, or lay off workers.

After the massive wildfires known as the “Tillamook Burn” hit its timber stands in the 1930s and 1940s, the company turned lemons into lemonade. It converted burned and green wood that was cracked, stained, or of lesser quality into hardboard. Its Forest Fiber Products Company, one of the first hardboard operations in the US, began turning out a hardboard called “sandalwood.”

Stimson acquired Northwest Petrochemical Company in Anacortes, Washington, in 1962 to make phenol for its hardboard processing. Other acquisitions beginning in the 1990s gave Stimson operating divisions in eastern Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Idaho.

Moisture Metering on the Production Line

Although Stimson Lumber uses moisture meters in its processes, it doesn’t use them at the start. “We don’t use moisture meters in the breakdown of the log because we don’t scan ours beforehand,” Mallery explained. “We don’t do an advance sort or wet sort on our lumber.”

Further down the line, though, moisture meters are critical. “We use Wagner Apex meters with the Omega upgrade in line,” said Mallery. “[Wagner] has improved the design over time so that the plates are very sturdy and the scanning capability is quite accurate.”

The in-line system takes roughly 90 readings on each board and averages them, which gives a much more complete picture of each board than a few handheld spot checks.

“The thing about using moisture meters is that the more times you can hit the target, the more consistent your product becomes,” Mallery continued. “You’re seeing the same moisture content at the planer and the wood reacts the same way each time, so you get a more consistent end product.”

“Your standard deviation will drop down, which is nice because you get a tighter curve in the kilns,” he added. “A lot of that is due to the schedule as well, but the moisture meter improves the accuracy of that schedule.”

“What we have found is that we are able to work off scheduled development to produce still better schedules.”

Handheld meters have their place in production as well. “We use the handheld Wagner L612 meters to set up the initial calibration and to spot-check the charges, but then we use the inline Wagner meters to make sure we stay on target,” said Mallery. “Values can vary throughout the year and based on which species we’re drying.”

“We also use the L612 to check for cold spots inside the kiln.”

“Wagner Meters has been a pretty good partner with us on the moisture meters over the years,” added Will Reynolds, the Planer Supervisor.

Stringent Quality Standards

Along with meeting customer requirements, Stimson Lumber follows even more demanding quality standards. “The WWPA [Western Wood Products Association] requirement for KD [Kiln Dried] or KD-HT [Kiln Dried & Heat Treated] standards for structural-grade lumber is followed in order to produce the best lumber that we can,” Mallery explained.

“We have an internal Stimson Quality Plan that WWPA audits twice a year for us as a third party,” said Mike Stockdale, the Sawmill Production Manager. “It has standard quality procedures and quality management reports to adhere to the Quality Management System.”

“WWPA looks through our quality reports to make sure we’re doing what we say we’re going to do,” Stockdale added. “That system is revised at least once a year.”

“For our retail customers we have a premium product we make for them instead of a regular stud grade. The only difference on that is that it is more of an appearance grade stud than a graded stud, which means no ugly knots and smooth cut ends.”

Working with a natural product has its challenges, of course. “Moisture varies quite a bit between heartwood and sapwood within the same log,” said Mallery. “We’re trying to get each board down to the same target of moisture content which, depending on species, is 15% to 15.5%.”

“The kiln guy’s job is to find out what the schedule is that works best with the lumber, producing the best, repeatable results. We’re using the newer techniques to stay on target and produce the best product we can. Then the challenge becomes staying there throughout the year even as lumber changes through the seasons.”

Seasonal changes can have a big effect on moisture content, too. “In the wintertime, we can go up to 100% moisture content in parts of the log while other spots will come in at 40% moisture content,” Mallery said. “During the summertime, the amount will vary quite a bit, though the numbers are lower, 50% down to as little as 30% or even lower.”

“The trick is to be able to dry wood to the same target, generally around 15%.”

Monitoring moisture is an ongoing job. “Continuous improvement of mill processes has worked well on the kilns, where we’re watching the moisture data very closely,” Mallery explained. “And the manual processes, like stickering, how the lumber is manufactured, and being careful that we’re drying for uniform charges both in and out of the kiln is important as well.”

“We’ve been concentrating on sustainable forestry and improving process efficiency over the past five years,” said Mallery. “Our focus is on a smaller log at Tillamook: Doug fir, spruce, and hemlock. The inland mills use more lodgepole and Idaho white pine.”

Once the lumber is ready to ship, a couple more steps help keep it in good condition. “Our wood is paper-wrapped and sprayed with an anti-fungal that prevents stains of boards after the fact,” said Mallery. “This decreases the likelihood of problems during shipping.”

Looking Toward the Future

Stimson Lumber continues to look for ways to produce a quality product more efficiently. At the time of this 2015 interview, it had recently added new computerized equipment at the Tillamook mill.

“The ‘Twin Project’ was a computerized twin bandsaw upgrade in 2012,” Mallery began. “The bandsaw breaks the log down and optimizes the cut of the log to get the most amount of wood possible out of it quickly by computer-analyzing and rotating the log so that it’s aligned just right before going through the saw.”

“We also have an optimized board edger project that will be going in this fall,” added Stockdale. “And we’re rebuilding the cell walls on our boiler.”

Besides making milling more efficient, the new equipment was expected to increase recovery by as much as 10% and pay for itself within two years.

“We have another upgrade planned for November that will be the next phase downstream from the twin bandsaw which should help us be a little faster, more efficient, and produce better quality wood that is in specification more often,” Mallery added.

Along with improving the machinery, Stimson is also focused on improving workers’ skills. “We’ve been cross-training our people since last year,” said Mallery. “We’re bringing workers from our inland mills out to Tillamook and sending some from Tillamook inland to get familiar with their operations.”

The hope is that workers who don’t normally see the problems another mill faces might offer useful suggestions for improving its operations.

“For each level of skilled labor there’s somebody who is an expert, so Eric is our expert in boiler operations,” Stockdale explained. “He’s been traveling to other facilities and helping them fix up their boilers, what kind of schedules they should run on their kilns, just looking at their processes and helping them improve them. He’s been traveling for about a week and a half every other month over to Idaho or Forest Grove [Oregon] to help them make improvements in their processes.”

It doesn’t just help those other mills. “Eric’s been looking at other mills to see what improvements we can make here, too,” Stockdale said.

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Last updated on October 9th, 2026