Forest products businesses with shaving mill operations now have an edge when customers want dry shavings, thanks to a new dryer from Salsco. Sal Rizzo, president of Salsco, said the company’s new shavings dryer suspends the shavings in the air, rather than drying them in conventional fashion.

            “We suspend them for 150 feet of travel,” he said. “We treat them like snowflakes, and then introduce hot air into them. When they come out the other end, they’re dry. We can dry 50 yards an hour of shavings with a piece of equipment that costs under $100,000.”

            One thing that distinguishes the new Salsco dryer from many others on the market is that it isn’t a tumbler dryer.

            “It’s a conveyor system,” Sal said. “We blow hot air into it. It has a screen on top and the shavings fly around in the warm air. It has 40,000 air holes and six blowers, and we can put up to four and a half million BTUs of heat into the system if we need to.”

            Salsco has been testing the new dryer for the past year or so, until it finally met Sal’s rigorous standards for operating exactly as he wanted it to. The company only began selling the dryer this spring and summer.

            “We’ve had one set up at our R&D facility in Connecticut,” Sal said. “The first one will be delivered to CTW Forest Products in Windsor, North Carolina on the 25th of August. CTW already owns two of our shavings mills, and this dryer will work with those mills.”

            Sal said part of what led to the development of the Salsco dryer was the need for a different way of handling green shavings.

            “Every other dryer on the market takes bulk shavings and tumbles them, and introduces heat to them,” he said. “We take individual shavings and suspend them in air. It’s as if you held a single shaving in your hand and dried it with a hair dryer. That’s the concept we’re working with; we’re drying each shaving individually.”

            The dryer consists of three conveyor systems that are six feet wide and 50 feet long.

            “Each conveyor system has two blowers,” Sal said. “And each conveyor system can take one hot-air burner at one and a half million BTUs.”

            To make the new dryer more flexible for users, Salsco has designed it to be modular.

            “For instance, if for some reason we install one in a really harsh climate and have very green shavings that aren’t getting dry enough, we can add another section,” Sal said. “We look at the ambient temperature and the humidity where we’re going to install it, and size the equipment accordingly. The user can add another section onto it any time he wants to.”

            Another benefit of Salsco’s modular design is the price.

            “Most dryers on the market today range from $400,000 to $800,000,” Sal said. “It’s a pretty big deal to be able to install a dryer for under $100,000. This particular unit can do 50 yards in an hour; it’s sized to handle my large shaving mill. We can get shavings down to 8 percent humidity if the user wants to, but most people are getting bulk shavings down around 12 to 14 percent.”

            The concept, Sal said, revolves around getting the shavings as dry as possible with ambient air before introducing heat; this is part of the uniqueness of the whole design.

            “We would rather not pay for propane if we can help it,” he said. “When the shavings travel 150 feet with ambient air alone, we can bring them down 6 percentage points in moisture. So if someone is starting with shavings at 20 percent, they’ll come out around 14 percent from ambient air. The only time we really need to introduce heat is when we’re working with really wet shavings, or on a cold, wet day. That’s a real cost savings for our customers.” In other words, the new dryer is capable of getting the shavings dry with ambient air under most circumstances, and with heat can get them to a lower humidity than anyone can possibly need.

            Ben Twiddy, partner/owner of CTW Forest Products LLC, is looking forward to receiving the first Salsco dryer produced.

            “The core of our business is logging,” Ben said. “We do pine plantation logging; we do first thinning, second thinning, and clearcut. We actually have two logging operations that both contract logs for other companies.”

            Ben said the shavings part of the business is something that the company has eased into in the past couple of years.

            “We got interested in it because we wanted to diversify our business, and do something other than logging,” he said. “Logging exclusively can get pretty lean sometimes, so by adding shavings we can diversify and still stay in the wood business.”

            Ben said the company’s first foray into the shavings business was the purchase of a shavings mill in February of 2009.

            “It’s a 30-inch machine with a diesel engine on it,” he said. “It’s kind of a small machine that we bought used. We bought one with a diesel engine so we could test the water and if we decided it wasn’t working for us, it would be a little easier for us to get out of.”

            So far, however, Ben and his partners, Wayne Cale and Jimmy Witherspoon, have been satisfied with how their shavings business is developing. In March of this year they bought a second Salsco shavings mill—also with a diesel engine—this one a 60-inch machine.

            “We have both shavings mills set up in a separate building in our log yard in Windsor,” he said. “We have our office there as well. We used to have a sawmill there. We swamp logged and cut cypress lumber and manufactured cypress mulch, but we phased out of that business when we went into hill logging on the pine plantations. We were fortunate enough to be able to sell that sawmill just before things really got bad in the industry. That was when we made the decision to be very careful what we do with concrete and three-phase power, because those things are easy to get into but they’re awfully permanent.”

            The shavings mills are fitting very well into the company’s overall operation without the necessity of looking for any additional resources.

            “We bring in tree-length pine pulpwood from one of our logging operations,” Ben said. “So we’re able to utilize what we’re already cutting.”

            According to Ben, their market still is developing and maturing.

            “We’re still experimenting,” he said. “Our main market will be horse people, who use the shavings in stalls. We’ve also done a little with a poultry company, and we’ve done a fair amount with a shavings broker who has dealt in shavings for about 25 years.”

            Ben said the purpose behind adding the dryer is to increase both their market base and their shaving sales.

            “One issue with green shavings in a pile this time of year is that they can do what we call, ‘Going through a heat,’” he said. “What happens is that they get hot and mold. We think that drying them is the way to go, so people can store them better and they’ll have a longer life. They’ll also be more absorbent when they’re dry.” If the business goes as Ben hopes it will, the company may move into bagging shavings at some point; however, he said, that’s in the future.

            The biggest immediate advantage to the dryer will be for CTW Forest Products’ horse farm clients.

            “We deal with a lot of little horse farms, and they’re happy to have us because shavings are harder and harder to get,” Ben said. “So many pine sawmills have shut down that the farms have trouble finding shavings. However, dry is definitely the way to go. It will be more expensive initially for us to do that, but we feel that it’s important.”

            After having the Salsco shavings mills, the step to a dryer from the same company was a simple decision.

            “Initially, the reason we bought the Salsco shavings mill was that the 30-inch one is portable,” Ben said. “You can pull it with a three quarter ton truck. We found that any time we had a problem we could call Salsco and they were really helpful. So when we decided to increase our production, we decided to go with a 60-inch machine. One of my partners and I went up to Connecticut and visited with Sal, and we were really impressed with him and what he was doing.”

            That closed the deal on the 60-inch Salsco shavings mill.

            “Now we have Sal’s cell phone number, and any time we’ve had any little issue with either machine he’s been extremely helpful,” Ben said. “The reason we decided to buy the Salsco dryer is that we believe in Sal; it’s just that simple. If there any issues with the dryer, we know he’s going to stand behind it.”   

            Another logging contractor who’s already in the shavings market with a Salsco shavings mill is Kerry Clary, owner of Reedy Creek Wood Facility in Gasburg, Virginia. The core of Clary’s business is Aubrey L. Clary, Inc., a logging company Kerry’s father started in 1948.

            “He passed away in 1994, and I’ve been running the logging company ever since,” Kerry said. “We’re a logging contractor, and we haul to mills. We move about 200 loads a week.”

            In 1998, Kerry saw the potential in the roundwood market, and opened Reedy Creek Wood Facility to meet that need.

            “I operated it for about ten years, and then the market dropped off and I closed that down,” he said. “Then I looked around and saw the market for animal bedding, such as shavings. It was a good fit for us, because I wanted a new market that wasn’t tied to the paper market or the housing market.” He purchased a 60-inch shaving mill from Salsco and in early 2010 began selling shavings in bulk to poultry and horse farms in his area.

            “Salsco is very accommodating,” he said. “The company definitely helps its customers. Any problems I have, they’re there for me. It’s equipment that we can work on ourselves if we need to, and we can get parts locally for it. That adds up to less down time when we do have a problem. If we can’t deal with it ourselves, Sal is just a phone call away, and if we need a part he’ll overnight it to us. So they offer good service and good support.”

            Although Kerry doesn’t plan to add a dryer in the near future, he sees the potential profit in bagged dried shavings and likes the idea of having one from Salsco.

            “Even though the shavings operation is a small part of our business, having a dryer would get us into more of a niche market and increase the profitability of that segment of the company by ten to fifteen percent,” he said. “It would definitely change my clientele. I would have more of a customized client base, and by being able to bag and ship shavings we would be able to sell them anywhere in the country.”