July 16, 2012 - Tour or Hamer Pellet Fuel plant and Wilson Lumber

We started off the day visiting the Hamer Pellet Fuel Company.  Being in the lumber business to begin with, the company realized at one point that they were spending a million dollars to have their waste sawdust disposed of.  They decided to take their waste and turn it into usable fuel my making pellets.

The making of pellets begins with saw dust.  Truck loads are brought in (at $60-$100 a ton) and the type of saw dust (oak, walnut, maple, etc) is logged in.  The different types of saw dust are then "mixed" by a loader and then put into a large dryer.  The dryer is a 55 million BTU burner that runs on saw dust.  (Click here to find out what BTUs are).  The dryer is capable of drying 15 ton of saw dust in an hour.  They also use wood chips BUT, they are chopped up and turned into saw dust as well.

Picture of the dryer (big blue drum)

When the saw dust is dry, then sent by conveyor to the building where it is mixed with vegetable oil and water and then put into the extrusion machine.  During this process the mixture is pressed out small holes which produces the pellets.

This is the large machine that produces the pellets

These are the pressing wheels inside that "squeeze" the saw dust mixture through small holes (at the bottom).

Here is an "outside" view of the small holes with pellets sticking out.

These pellet machines can produce up to 6 tons of pellets per hour.  How many pellets can they make in a normal 8 hour shift?

Once the pellets are made they are sent to be bagged.  The quality control is to check 1 in 50 bags to look for size of pellets and amount of dust particles per bag.  If too much dust is being created, they slow the process down. Why do you think slowing the process down would help with the amount of dust particles in the pellets?

Here is a video of the bagging process.

After bagging, the bags continue down the conveyor where a robot stacks them on a pallet and then the pallet is wrapped to keep it togetehr and keep the weather out.  Here is a video of that process.

This company was able to find a way to reduce both their waste and make money from their waste.  How is this helpful to our environment?

WILSON LUMBER COMPANY

Our next stop was just next door at the Wilson Lumber Company.  The company started in the early 1960's.  They got their first wood drying kiln in 1961 and by 1987 their kiln capacity was 250,000 board feet.   They buy their boards directly from the saw mills.

In 2004, automated stickers came out that helped speed up their process.  Sticks are used to separate the boards to help the drying process while in the kiln.  The picture below shows a stack of boards with stickers ready to go in the kiln.

This is a picture of one of the kilns being filled.

Enjoyable trip to the pellet plant today! Cool!!

Will be back shortly to comment on today's tours.  Meanwhile, check out the pictures from today on the facebook page I've created!

July 15, 2012 - Cathedral State Park

The start of our trip began at Cathedral State Park, one of only two virgin timber forests in West Virginia.  Back in the early days when timbering was prevalent, someone chose NOT to allow timbering to occur on their land and now we have this small plot of land with timber that has been allowed to naturally grow, prosper and die without the help of human intervention.

One of the first things I noticed as I entered the forest was that a lot of the trees had very few (if any) lower limbs within reach.  I was expecting to be able to reach for a limb and look closely at leaves so that I would be able to identify them more closely but . . . . there were very few close enough to reach (As you can see in the picture below).  This made it more difficult to look at the leaves to determine the type of trees we were looking at.

Another thing that I noticed was how thick the canopy of the forest was.  This may be the reason why the lower limbs were not present . . . no sun to reach them.

The types of trees most abundant in this forest were hemlock.  There were also a lot of maple and oak trees.  The first picture below is of a large hemlock tree.  You can see the massiveness of its base compared to Mr. Colegrove standing to the side.

Here is a large oak tree located near the edge of the forest. Notice the difference of the underbrush at the edge of the forest compared to the picture above with the hemlock.  The amount of sunlight coming to the forest floor at the edge of the forest definitely makes a difference.

We also did testing on the pH of the soil.  We chose 4 different places to test the pH.  We had to dig down about 3 inches through the leaf litter and peat to get to the soil.  The picture below shows the difference between the peat (on the right) and the soil (on the left).

We found that the acidity of the soil fell in a range of 3.5 to 4.5.  Proving that the acidic soil is perfect for the type of trees and shrubs growing here. . . hemlock and rhododendron for example. 

One of the things we've been doing is calculating the board feet that can be found in trees so we picked a large hemlock and did the calculations.  They're shown in the picture below.

WV Mapping

I found this while searching for resources to use in class.  Might come in handy so I thought I would share the link.  

WV Mapping

Additional Pages

Check out the links at the top of this blog that will take you to other pages.  One page is dedicated to the geared steam engines that were used in the logging process in the late 1800's and early 1900's. 

The other page is dedicated to tree identification and historic aspect of the use of each tree.

Hope you can find something useful.  Keep checking back because there is more to come!!

Saturday Hands on Learning

On Saturday, April 28, we went to Ritter park in Huntington to learn about tree identification.  What I found most interesting during this hands on lesson, was the fact that I really don't know a lot about identifying trees like I thought I did.  I also learned a great deal behind the history of different types of trees as well as their uses. 

I've taken pictures of the different types and I'm in the process of creating collages (kind of like I did with the trains) for each type of tree.  So keep coming back and checking for updates.  With school winding down some now, I may have more time to devote to this project.  Please have patience!  I'm planning to use my blog and the pages attached to it for a "webquest" for my students next year. 

Guest Speaker

Tonight we had Bob Withers. author and railroad historian, talk to us about the history behind the railroads and logging in WV.  He explained the difference between traditional steam engines and steam engines used in logging.  As many times as I've ridden the train at Cass, I didn't realize that the trucks were different.  I've learned so much AGAIN about WV that I had no clue about!  I think this class is going to be just as interesting as the Coal project!