Hyne 125 Years And Dressed In Diamonds

7 September 2007
Australian timber industry icon Hyne has turned 125 and to celebrate staff at the new Sydney Wholesale complex turned on a birthday party.
It was a chance also to launch the new Hyne logo, a streamlined and updated version of the famous red diamond logo.
With a proud heritage dating back to Richard Matthews Hyne in 1882, Hyne is the biggest timber production company on the east coast.
Hyne Sydney Wholesale at Prestons is purpose built and designed to provide a comprehensive wholesale supply source. According to branch manager Mark Davies, the new 7000 m2 warehouse provides the latest and best products for timber merchants and manufacturers from Hyne’s own production and from plantation sourced material from around the world.
Hyne has more than 1150 employees across 20 operations from Cairns to Melbourne and all timber is sourced from sustainably managed plantations.

A3P Revisits SP Grading Systems

In December last year, the Australian Plantation Products and Paper Industry Council announced it would not be pursuing introduction of structural pine (SP) grades.
“Since then, the industry through A3P has continued to assess how it might utilise the SP grade project outcomes to improve the current grading systems,” A3P CEO Neil Fisher said.
A3P manager Peter Juniper says there has been background work undertaken by the industry in the areas of quality assurance and structural property compliance and that this work has now positioned the softwood sawmilling sector at the forefront of contemporary structural timber production technology.
“Significant advances have been made to the benefit of consumers and our judgement is that the industry’s customers will have noticed an improvement in consistency of product grading over the past couple of years,” Juniper said.
“And there is more to come,” he says. “Many producer companies are considering introducing new grading technologies and work is progressing on the development of standards to cater for this need. The production of a guide for verifying structural properties is under way and it is expected that this will also help address recent concerns about the reliability of visually stress graded products.”
Most structural pine produced in Australia is machine stress graded and it is in this area that the major gains have been made in recent years. A ‘Generic Manufacturing Specification for Mechanically Stress Graded Products’ was recently produced via the FWPRDC to assist producers in adopting these grading system improvements.
A3P producer members have all adopted the latest technology and they all also subscribe to a rigorous, independent third party audited product certification program called Plantation Timber Certification (PTC). This program is accredited by the Joint Accreditation System – Australia and New Zealand (JAS-ANZ).”
According to Juniper, further work is in hand to ensure this program is responsive to new developments as they arise.
As part of this work, A3P member companies recently considered the introduction of an MGP grade lower than MGP10.
John Hayden, chairman of the A3P Solid Wood Forum, says that this initiative will now not be pursued. “After detailed assessment of the various resource, production and market considerations a decision was recently taken to remain with the current three grade MGP system,” he said.
“We recognise that other stress graded products will continue to play a support role at this end of the structural product range.”
Concurrent with this ongoing work, A3P member companies will be concentrating on ensuring that all structural products are adequately assessed with respect to structural property compliance and that such products will be supplied to the market certified fit for purpose under the PTC program – as indicated by the PTC logo on these products.

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