Hamar’s L-743: A Great Tool for Sawmills!

Idaho Forest Group (IFG) is a family-owned lumber producer based out of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. I am the head filer in the Grangeville mill, one of six sawmills IFG owns and operates in Idaho and Montana. The mill recently got the Hamar Laser L-743 Ultra-Precision Triple Scan Laser and we’ve been using it to align our sharp chain machine center and curve gang line. It’s been working very well, and there are a lot of things we really like about it already.

When we do alignments here, the filers work with the maintenance team and the optimization technicians. All the team members involved really like the repeatability and simplicity of the L-743. It’s a great tool for sawmills! It has 3 automatically sweeping laser planes, so we can set up the laser just once in the center of the machine and get data for elevations on bed chains, anvils and scan chains. We can also check the spike rolls, chipping heads, vertical anvils and bandsaws to our center line in the machine centers. This used to take many more setups and a lot more time using optics. Also, we really like the R-1308 digital readout because we can make adjustments in real time. We’ve been extremely happy with the L-743 and will be using it to align the other machine centers and the planer in the near future.