You run a good mill. What's missing isn't effort, it's visibility. A point of yield here, a little extra repair putty there, over-dried veneer you'll never get back. None of it shows on the floor. And most of the mills that closed the gap started with a retrofit, not a new line.
Three technologies. Three sets of facts. Three North American mills that already did it. Pick the one costing you the most, or read all three — about a minute each. Or cut to the chase and talk to the Raute NA team.
1 / 3 · Veneer drying
Quality, sheet after sheet
Panel quality is decided in the dryer, not at the press. Uneven moisture gets paid for twice: once in the wood, once in the extra hours it takes to run the sheet again. It also caps what pressing and sanding can deliver downstream. Ask an operator who runs Raute’s drying line, and all they'll talk about is what comes off the other end.
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15% less energy
Per cubic foot of veneer produced. Single-point exhaust, minimized fugitive emissions.
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10% more drying capacity
Optimized hot air circulation, and better dry veneer recovery from the same wood.
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90 sheets a minute, 1 operator
Thin veneer line, infeed to stacking. Thick veneer 72, screen 64.
Coastland, Delta BC: scaling dry veneer to meet demand
Coastland supplies veneer for LVL, plywood and beam producers across North America and Asia. They took the Veneer Drying Line R7 as a complete solution. What convinced the team was the level of automation and process control built into the dryer.
The machines behind those numbers
2 / 3 · Panel repairing
Less material. Fewer hands. Better panels.
Repair material and manual handling are the two costs that scale with every shift you run. Panel repair is a craft your people have mastered, but not even the most skilled pair of hands can hold a spec for eight hours straight. An automated line scans each panel and fills only what needs filling. That's where the 65% saving comes from, and it holds at 3 am.
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65% less repair material
Versus traditional repairing. Every surface analyzed, every repair optimized, with no over- or under-filling.
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16 panels a minute
3/16" to 1-1/2" thick, up to 8 x 13 ft, in a footprint of roughly 33 x 98 ft.
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1 operator, 24/7
Machine vision and high-speed motion control hold the same repair quality on every shift.
Rayonier, St. Maries Idaho: improving panel quality with the Panel Repairing Line R7
Rayonier is among the largest lumber manufacturers in the US, the St: Maries facility producing roughly 150 million board feet of plywood a year. Rising chemical costs and a shortage of skilled labor sent them looking for a better way to repair. They chose the Panel Repairing Line R7 — and now one operator holds the same repair quality across every shift.
This reference was originally completed before the merger with Rayonier, when the St. Maries facility operated under the PotlatchDeltic name.
The machines behind those numbers
3 / 3 · Analyzers
You can’t fix what you can’t measure.
Most mills learn about a quality problem when the panel leaves the press. Analyzers move that moment upstream, to where a correction still costs almost nothing: every sheet read for moisture, defects and surface features, then routed to the grade it actually deserves. You can tell a customer what you'll have before you have it, and know by the end of a shift whether a process change helped.
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Over 95% grading accuracy
Surface, micro and color models, with AI-assisted defect recognition.
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Moisture to ±2.5%
1 to 30% range, 6 to 10 sensors per unit, sheet by sheet. Thickness ±0.020", sonic ±3%.
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3-in-1
The first in the industry to combine visual, moisture, and strength analysis in one compact system.
Tolko, Heffley Creek BC: boosting recovery with scanning and composing
Tolko’s Heffley Creek mill produces 28 million square feet of G1 and G2 veneer a year. A camera analyzer on the Green Veneer Composing Line R7 maximizes recovery and builds taped joints strong enough to survive drying, so the gain is not lost two steps later.
The machines behind those numbers
Raute's Analyzer Portfolio
Veneer Moisture Analyzer R7 - Drying (MVA3)
Veneer Visual Analyzer R7 - Composing
Start at the step that’s costing you most
Most of the gains shown on this page began as a retrofit: an analyzer on an existing dryer, a repairing line dropped into an existing footprint. Columbia Forest Products modernized its veneer patching in Hearst and reported rapid ROI on the line they already had.
You don’t have to buy a line to close the gap.
Meet our experts in APA Annual Meeting and EWTA Info Fair
Join Raute at the APA Annual Meeting & EWTA Info Fair to discuss practical ways to improve productivity, quality, and operational visibility. Let's talk about your goals and challenges.
Talk to our experts
No forms, no gatekeeping. These five cover North America. Call or email any of them, tell us which line you’re asking about, and we will put the right specialist on it.