The Idaho scimitar. [volume] (Boise, Idaho) 1907-1908, 1908-03-21
THE IDAHO SCIMITAR.
Wood DevOuring Machines.

New York Tribune Timber eating machines, big
and small, that slice and grind and carve and rip
battery of whirring and screeching monsters in
cessantly at work in every state of the Union
account for constant depletion or forests estimated
at forty-five square miles every day in the year
They are hungry, these machines; they have an
appetite for timber and many of the most eager
feed themselves without human aid And not always
the biggest and noisest eat the most There are
little, ratllke machines banded together that nbble
and gnaw swiftly that their teeth clean up the
equivalent of acres of forest in a day These just
supply the nation with trihe like excelsior per-
haps, toothpicks.
Like most other wholesale devourers, these ma
chimes waste much while they consume The giant
buzzsaw, humming and roaring its way through huge
logs in Western forest spills one-fourth of its meal
in practically useless Sawdust that must be burned at
extra cost One-third of all the trees feed goes
to the waste dump slabs, cores and corners The
smaller machines eat more closely, but make it up
on fnicky palate. They dsdain to touch the
leavings of another and demand their own peculiar
forest menu
A pretence at economy is made by such an ap-
paratus the machine, which peels off
strips of wood only One-thirty-secOnd of inch
thick, but days peelng up one hundred
thousand feet of lumber. The bulk of metropoli-
tan Sunday newspaper is fairly we'll appreciated,
yet few would guess that ffteen acres or spruce
trees contained in the news sheets and sup
plementS of a days issue.
Some of these timber eaters move about the
country hungrily like beasts of prey who have eX
haused the of subsistence in territory and
abroad in search of fresh field. The port
able sawmil is of this description Even with its
omnivorous appetite for anything that resembles lu
Der the food supply inevitably short, sooner
later, and it must go ten miles further on for
pasture.
toothpick factory not content with anything
cept white birch, must often pick up its belongings
and travel. Some years later it may return to the
old hunting ground, which has become stocked with
fresh growth of birch
In the great forests of the Northwest steel cables
drawn by 1OO-horsepower engines, drag logs to a
sEidway, whence they descend to the mills by gray
ty on a chute, foated down in a miniature artl-
fetal river, loaded by derrlCkS or merely
hauled along the ties Of a temporary railroad by
powerful locomotives,
At the mill the waste of the wide toothed circular
saw which must needs be heavy and thick to with
stand stressfu labor unsupported is essened by the
use of the thinner, steel band One of these
toothed and endless strip of steel IA in ches wide
and 81 feet long, whirls at speed of nearly two
miles a minute. There are also gangSawS, several
abreast that travel through a log at express train
speed slcing out all the boards that it contains at
one operation
Portland. Ore, which manufactures more um-
Der than any other city in the world, has daily
output of two million feet from its eleven sawmllls.
There are so many hungry machines waiting tor this
product that the od-fashoned method of seasoning
out of door for year two will not answer; so the
lumber is hustled into kiln and seasoned by steam
or hot air in four days.
The nlanne machines of the Pacific Coast con-
sumo vast quantities of raw lumber for ceilings and
hoors mou1dings and sidings They travel at a gait
Of sixty feet minute without stopping for knots,
although they do screech a little.