Customer Stories

With the help of Wood-Mizer LT40 sawmill Herbert Butterfield built a small barn out of white pine and ash on his family farm in Charlotte, Michigan. In this barn he made a sugarhouse for maple syrup production.

Richard Wigink has been running his company in Holten, Netherlands for over 30 years. He was initially engaged in a tree surgery. Richard always found great value in the trees he removed, often created various articles from them and was glad to know that the tree continues to be valuable and serve for many years. Today, it continues to pursue the same goal.

Simostranda Stav & Laft is a timber frame construction company located outside of Oslo. The company is operated by Sveinung Bergan and Einar Holm, who have worked together as partners for 22 years.

Kim and Christian Zibulla family from the small town of Berkum in Germany run a global engineering company. The fascination with the old half-timbered architecture led them to the situation that several years ago they purchased at auction a dilapidated building listed as an architectural monument.

Many Wood-Mizer owners do unique interior projects from wood. Eric Means is one of DIY people. When a 90 cm diameter black walnut tree was cut down by the electric company, Eric Means realized the potential value and was determined to salvage the wood. “I milled it with my Wood-Mizer hydraulic LT40 and ended up with beautiful slabs,” said Eric.

Miroslav’s company is an excellent example of how a sawmill can grow steadily, investing as needed and growing production capacity without incurring too much risk all at once. Even though the company had six sawmills in operation, Miroslav eventually found that he still needed to increase productivity. So he decided to step up to a Wood-Mizer WM4000 sawmill.

Thomas Orderud, owner and operator of DesignIce, started harvesting ice from a local lake in Southeastern Norway about 15 years ago. Today Thomas can supply “everything from ice cubes to ice hotels” from his frosty 400 square meter workshop. Even in the winter he keeps the temperature at a steady -5 degrees Celcius (23 degrees Fahrenheit) so his 500-600 ton stock of ice blocks stay frozen solid.

Brampton Woodworks is an English carpentry workshop that specializes in building wooden footbridges and footpath signs. Recently, the number of orders from local authorities was increasing and they needed to purchase a new sawmill which would increase capacity and boost productivity. After thorough research they settled on the new Wood-Mizer LX450. “We found that the LX450 offered us larger capacity, we can put larger saw logs on,” says Robert Jeffrey, owner of Brampton Woodworks.

In Dunfermline, a little village north of Edinburgh, Scottish Wood has grown substantially over the past 20 years. They are a social enterprise - a charity which owns a sawmill and supplies local builders with locally grown timber. “We are primarily a hardwood sawmill. We cut homegrown, Scottish grown hardwoods and also some larch and Douglas fir,” Jim Birley from Scottish Wood says.

Just outside of Edinburgh, Scotland, Sandy Crook has retired from his full time tree surgeon business to spend more time with what he really enjoys, seeing timber turned into final products. With his full complement of Wood-Mizer sawmills and new MP360 planer/moulder, he can do everything in-house.

Specialising in the manufacture and distribution of fence posts, panels, pallets, battens and trellis throughout the UK, the team has developed a reputation for quality first and foremost, but also flexibility which Brian says sets them apart from other large mills. The latest addition to the team – a Wood-Mizer WB2000 wide band mill – is helping the company shelter itself from the volatility of the timber market while upping production at the same time.

The night was dark and stormy. August is still the dry season, but a tropical thunderstorm accompanied by lots of wind was bearing down on Kikongo, a small village deep in Congo. I was far away in the capitol city of Kinshasa that fateful night, so my wife Rita alone worked to close all the windows and put the barrels out under the water spouts to capture the precious water after months of no rainfall. In the midst of the storm, she heard a tremendous earth shaking crash outside the house. A tree had fallen close by, she knew that right away...

In June of 2017, due to an unusually dry summer a devastating fire quickly spread engulfed the area around the village of Knysna, South Africa. The fire killed seven people and destroyed over 1,000 homes and businesses, leaving at least 10,000 citizens without a place to live. Daniel Hennessey, owner of Timber Village Furniture Manufacturers in Knysna, was among those affected by the fire.

In the East Coast region of Malaysia, in the State of Kelantan, just outside of the town of Kota Bharu, Mohd Nazmie lives with his family. He’s a schoolteacher. And he’s a woodworker and sawmiller. He salvages trees that otherwise would have been burned. He produces and sells live-edge furniture for friends and local clients. Thanks to a daring investment in an LT15 sawmill, he has opened up a whole niche industry to himself.

How the Philippines developed a plan to salvage illegally-logged timber that was left rotting after being apprehended by authorities, using the valuable timber to produce...

Guitars are Jorge Simons’ passion – the entire journey from selecting the standing Spanish cypress tree to seeing the final instrument in a musician’s capable hands. He runs the Madinter Factory, located just outside Madrid, which specializes not in actually building guitars themselves, but rather in supplying private and commercial guitar makers with all the tools and materials to build their own guitars.

In order to interview Mr. Hutter for the article and video, we packed all our video gear onto the train and began the ascent of Mount Rigi. Known as a ‘cogwheel’ train, the train rests on tracks like any other, but has an additional gear that attached to a cogged track between the two smooth ones. The gear locks into this cogged track, pulling the train up the unusually steep mountainside railway to the summit of Mount Rigi.

“The idea came from a trip through Norway and Iceland where my wife and I saw quite a few green roof structures on sheds and commercial buildings,” he said. “It triggered an idea that I wanted one at home.”

After 25 years working as a carpenter, John Price starting Smithfield Joinery in the year 2000, his son Leigh joining after his military service. Seven years ago, they implemented a woodland management plan for their acreage. They wanted the woodland to be able to work for itself – to be beautiful and useable at the same time. To do so required thinking about the future of the woodland, how it would be used, and how to maintain it.

Developed by missionary philanthropist John Enright, a co-op style honey initiative, is taking off in Zambia, and improving lives for the 10,000 individuals already involved.