North American Trip

28 Nov 2018

Nick Hornsey and John Sowerby have recently returned to the UK after spending a full week travelling across Pennsylvania and New York State in the Northern Appalachian region of the USA. With quality supply being crucial to our customers, this region of the Appalachian forest provides some of the very best American hardwoods we are able to supply. The purpose of the trip was to visit new and existing producers to appreciate market conditions and to have a better understanding of their capabilities whilst further improving our employees general knowledge of the American Hardwood trade from Logging and sawmilling through to kilning, grading and finished product manufacture.

The cooler climate in this area provides us with material with tighter growth rings which results in denser, more stable timber and uniformity of colour especially in species such as Maple, White Ash, Cherry and Oak. Supply in this area at present continues to be relatively tight, especially in White Oak, Maple and Cherry with most yards having low log inventories due to the unusually poor weather conditions during the summer. Nick and John visited a number of sawmills and concentration yards that provide a high grade random width and length lumber production for our general sawn timber requirements, in addition they were successful in finding new suppliers for dimension stock including laminated and semi-finished products manufactured with the very latest state of the art technology which we are now able to offer our customers.