WOODLAND — Fifteen years does not seem a long time, but Ralph Hicks, plant manager for the Georgia-Pacific Corp.’s Oriented Strand Board Plant, views 1980 as “relatively ancient history, in the OSB business, at least.”

G-P built its first OSB plant at Woodland in 1979-80. The plant used spruce and fir to make waferboard, a building material made from wood flakes.

Then in 1988, “we discovered we could orient the flakes to strengthen the board,” Hicks said. The OSB plant switched to poplar that year. According to Hicks, “popple is now the most excellent wood for making OSB here in Woodland. We do mix other species, especially softwoods, at times in the process,” and G-P will introduce soft maple as an alternative fiber source.

“You can see how the technology has changed in just 15 years,” he said. “We can make a stronger board, and the technology’s always improving to allow us to make it even better.”

Hicks described how the plant makes OSB from wood flakes. Oriented strand board has three basic components: wood, resins, and wax. The wood is cut with a log’s grain to produce flakes, or wafers, and when the plant made waferboard, flakes were spread almost haphazardly to produce a board. Flakes are now oriented, hence the name oriented strand board.

The G-P Woodland Forestry Department purchases the logs used in the plant. According to Hicks, 85 percent of the incoming wood arrives tree-length and 15 percent in 8-foot lengths.

The logs are stacked behind the OSB plant in the woodyard shared with the adjacent Chip-N-Saw Mill. Logs are debarked and are sawn into 8-foot lengths. The bolts are then fed into a new strander to produce wood flakes. These are then dried and mixed with a phenolic resin and a wax in the blender.

Before reaching the blender, each flake is sprayed with a “slack wax, with the consistency of hot paraffin,” Hicks said. Inside the blender, tumbling flakes are mixed with a dried phenolic resin, which attaches to the wax.

G-P produces oriented strand board by alternating three layers of flakes: a first or bottom layer (spread lengthwise), the core layer (spread across the bottom layer), and a second or top layer (spread lengthwise). The desired thickness of the final product determines how many flakes will be laid down in each layer.

From the blender, the flakes ride a conveyor belt to the formers, which lay down the appropriate layers “in a continuous moving mat that’s 8 feet wide,” Hicks said. As the rough mat approaches the loader cage, a device resembling a bread oven in a bakery, a flying saw cuts the mat into 16-foot increments.

Each piece, or mat, slides into a separate platen until the cage fills with 16 pieces. The cage is pulled into the press, where the cylinders set below the bottom platen push upwards, squeezing each piece against the upper platen to a predetermined thickness.

The platen surfaces are internally heated by oil to 400 Fahrenheit. The heat activates the dried phenolic resin, which “goes through a liquid stage before spreading through the mat, and finally into a solid stage, doing what you could call a little bit of spot-gluing,” Hicks said.

Depending on the product, the pieces may remain in the press for three to six minutes. The press then slowly decompresses to release the steam built-up inside the OSB when heat evaporates the moisture in the flakes.

Once removed from the press, the 8-by-16-foot pieces are cut into four 4-by-8-foot boards. The boards are stacked in the warehouse for shipment.

The American Plywood Association, which rates the OSB produced in Woodland, views the material as a structural panel used in roofs, walls, and floors. The OSB plant produces both sheathing and the trademarked Sturd-i-Floor, made as a tongue-and-groove board.

The thicknesses available from the Woodland plant are 1/4 inch (not “span-rated,” according to Hicks), 3/8inch, 7/16-inch, 1/2-inch, 15/32-inch, 19/32-inch (sold as 5/8-inch), and 23/32-inch (sold as 3/4-inch). The most popular product is the 7/16-inch board used for roofs and walls. The 5/8- and 3/4-inch boards sold as flooring material are sanded on one side “to achieve a common thickness,” Hicks said.

Georgia-Pacific markets its OSB through its own distribution centers to retail customers like Home Depot and HQ. Oriented strand board also sells well with companies that make manufactured housing. Woodland-produced OSB is sold primarily in the Northeast and the Midwest.

Because of its structural strength and light weight, OSB “is popular with builders,” Hicks said. “You can heft a sheet of OSB and find it’s not at all heavy to carry. This is important for workers who are going to be carrying OSB sheets all day at the construction site.”

Since opening its Woodland plant, G-P has built other OSB plants in North Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, and West Virginia. Demand has increased over the years, Hicks said, and G-P plans to bolster production in Woodland this year by installing two new dryers and the attendant burners.

The OSB plant employs about 98 hourly and 20 salaried employees and runs around the clock, seven days per week. The wood waste produced by the plant is burned in the power plant, called a Central Utility Unit, that the OSB facility shares with the Chip-N-Saw Mill. The power plant employs 13 people and burns only hog fuel (wood wastes).

As at all other G-P operations in Woodland, the OSB plant stresses safety on the job. “We’ve got four goals that we always keep in mind,” Hicks said. “Safety is No. 1, protecting the environment is No. 2, product quality is No. 3, and production is No. 4.

“We won’t take short cuts to achieve any of these goals, and safety is always, always No. 1,” he said. The OSB plant has a safety steering committee, comprised of labor and managerial employees, which routinely meets to discuss safety-related issues, and all employees regularly undergo safety training.

“We have an exceptional safety program that has helped to create an injury rate lower than that of office workers,” Hicks said. “Our reportable incident rate is 2.1 now. That’s down several times from the past few years.”