A fire that breaks out at three in the morning can either be the end of a company’s story or the beginning of a better chapter. For Ray Portrey, president and co-owner of Hardwood Lumber Inc. in Exeter, Missouri, it turned out to be an opportunity to improve his company’s resaw process.
The fire – which swept through Portrey’s scragg mill building on October 29, 2024 – destroyed the equipment inside, though the building structure itself largely survived. What was lost was a fully operational Baker scragg and resaw line that Portrey had spent years building up.
A Decision to Build It Back Right
When the rebuild process began, Portrey and his longtime mill manager Jason Davis sat down to figure out their next move. Davis has been with the company for more than 20 years and is the person Portrey credits most for keeping the operation running day to day. With that kind of continuity, the two didn’t waste much time second-guessing their equipment choices.
Ray Portrey and Jason Davis decided to go back to Baker and upgrade the line with the latest innovations. “Working with Baker, it probably took us a couple of months to lay it out and configure changes. I’m really hoping down the road it makes us a better company.”
Portrey previously had two other Baker systems over the course of his career. He has tried another manufacturer and just found the Baker equipment runs well with minimal downtime.
Hardwood Lumber Inc. didn’t decide to just replace what it had; instead, the company’s managers chose to redesign the way logs move through the mill. This rebuild takes a deliberate shift toward higher recovery, cleaner flow and reduced labor dependence. The result is a dual-line resaw system that reflects a broader management philosophy: build the mill to match the realities of the pallet business, not the other way around.
Clay Hedrick, sales director for Baker Products, noted, “Like all customers we worked closely with them through this entire process helping from the start by providing any support we could with information they needed to start the recovery process with the insurance to coordinating final delivery and training.”
New Equipment, Two Lines, Better Yield
The rebuild is a significant upgrade from the pre-fire configuration. Rather than a single processing line, Hardwood Lumber now runs two parallel five-head resaw lines, with a new Baker scragg, Baker edger, Baker conveyor belts, double-end trim saws, dedusters on each line, and an AIT M2L stacker. Still on order at the time of this interview was a Baker board stacker that will complete the flow of material.
“Baker had an option where you could go left, right, or straight out,” Portrey explained regarding the stacker configuration. “A left or right wouldn’t work for us. The configuration needed to come straight out to accommodate the stacker and save room. Baker was able to achieve this.”
The two-line setup changes the whole dynamic on the stacking side of the operation. Previously, with a single resaw line producing 3.5-inch and 5.5-inch boards simultaneously, a large crew was needed just to sort and stack the mixed output. Now, one line can run 3.5-inch material while the other runs 5.5-inch boards, all pre-sorted before hitting the stacker.
“The old way when we had a single eight-head resaw line with a bunch of employees on the stack line, 3.5 and 5.5-inch boards would come at you piled on top of each other,” Portrey said. “I think it took a lot of people to sort that out. I think with these two five-head resaw lines, we can probably eliminate a couple of people on the stack line.”
The “Seven Block” — Baker’s Splitter Saw Improves Yield
The piece of equipment Portrey got most animated about wasn’t the scragg or the edger. It was a Baker splitter saw — a machine he hadn’t even known Baker made until they were already designing the new system.
“I told Clay, I go, man, I never knew you had something like this. You don’t advertise it. I got pretty excited about this equipment.”
The machine — which Portrey has taken to calling the “seven block” — solves a longstanding efficiency headache. The new scragg and edger are set up to produce three output widths: 3.5-inch, 5.5-inch, and 7-inch. When a 7-inch block comes off the scragg or the edger, it rides a conveyor in a horseshoe path — “straight, take a right, straight again” — hits the splitter saw, and lands back on the main chain as two 3.5-inch cants. No manual handling. No pulling 5.5-inch cants off the floor and reworking them later.
“We have some pallets that are heavy 5.5s and others that are heavy 3.5s,” Portrey explained. “We try to cut what the log yields. So, if we are focused on 3.5s, we just cut a seven out of it, and then we go split it on this seven block saw.”
The productivity gain is easy to understand; instead of letting 7-inch cants accumulate on the floor to be repurposed in a later shift, they go directly into the production flow as two usable 3.5-inch cants. And when 5.5s are needed, the operator simply intercepts at the 5.5-inch setting instead.
“I feel there’s a big benefit,” Portrey acknowledged, with the kind of understatement that comes from a man who says he’s been lifting 5.5s off the floor and reworking them by hand for decades.
Davis is already experimenting with running large fletchings — the bark-side pieces that fall off after edging — through the seven block as well, recovering usable material from what would otherwise be a low-value byproduct, such as mulch.
match the realities of the pallet business, not the other way around.
From Log to Deck Board: Reviewing the Sawing Process at Hardwood Lumber Inc.
The flow through the resaw plant starts with raw logs cut to bolt length outside the building on a Baker slasher saw system. The bolts come in and drop one at a time onto the log deck and are then fed into a Baker three-sided scragg. Slabs come off and go to the edger, where they can be edged to 3.5-inch, 5.5-inch, or 7-inch widths. Center pieces from the scragg go through the appropriate conveyors to the trim saw line and then land on the seven-block resaw line. Any 7-inch material — whether coming from the edger or the scragg — routes through the seven block splitter and rejoins the main chain before hitting the resaws.
The species mix is what Portrey calls “native Missouri hardwoods” — primarily the red oak and white oak families, sourced from some of the same logging operations that supplied the mill before the fire. The operation is approximately 95% hardwood, with a small portion of pine processed on a buy-and-reman basis.
Portrey commented, “I didn’t like being at the mercy of somebody else’s lumber,” Portrey explained. “If we were going to keep our pallet customers happy, we needed our own sawmill.”
“I just thought, well, just let the stringer guy do the stringers. I’ll do deck boards,” he said. The focus on one product type has kept the operation lean and avoided the waste issues he observed at stringer-focused mills, particularly as heat treating requirements tightened.
The cut stock produced at the Exeter scragg mill supplies Hardwood Lumber’s own pallet facility — which operates under the name Pallet Lumber LLC. Cut stock deck boards, not stringers, are also sold to outside customers across Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Illinois.
The Pallet Side: Woodpecker Machines and a Converta Kiln
On the nailing side, Pallet Lumber LLC runs two Woodpecker pallet nailing machines sold and serviced by Midwest Machinery & Automation. This includes one standard configuration and one stretch model.
“I thought the Woodpecker was even simpler to operate than our previous machine and able to do larger pallets,” he said. “No PLC. The Woodpecker nailer is very user friendly to operate.” For a self-described low-tech operator who jokes that he hands his cell phone to his wife when it acts up, the mechanical simplicity of the Woodpecker line is a genuine selling point. When something needs diagnosis, Wayne Wagner and Patrick Costello at Midwest Machinery and Automation handle the service calls.
Heat treating is a significant part of the operation: roughly 80% of pallets shipped out of Exeter go through the heat treat chamber, most of it driven by export requirements under ISPM-15. The facility runs a Converta Kiln capable of handling 1,200 pallets per charge.
operates under the name Pallet Lumber. The company also sells cut stock deck boards, not stringers, to customers across Missouri,
Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Illinois.
Forty Years of Hard Knocks
Portrey started in the pallet business in 1987 after leaving the military, running a pallet recycling operation called Palleton of Kansas. This business at its peak was moving more than 25 truckloads of recycled pallets per week. Portrey opened the mill in Exeter in 1998, initially conceived as a way to supply the Kansas operation with hardwood deck boards from Missouri. Today the recycling operation still runs in Kansas while the Exeter facility focuses entirely on new pallets and cut stock.
At 65, Portrey runs a facility with 38 to 40 employees when fully staffed, and he credits much of the day-to-day success to Davis, who handles maintenance, production management and employee training on the equipment.
“We just basically give him a cut list, and he makes it happen. We take that lumber over to the nailing side, and they make that happen,” Portrey said.
Pre-COVID, the operation was approaching 350,000 pallets per year. Like most in the industry, Portrey felt the demand softness that set in during the third quarter of 2023 and has managed accordingly. The fire, paradoxically, may have presented a moment to reset and modernize at a time when market pressure was already pushing operators to find efficiencies wherever they could.
Building a Better System
The redesigned resaw system positions the company to meet future demand with greater labor efficiency, improved yield recovery, flexible width production and streamlined material flow.
With two Baker resaw lines, integrated splitter capability and direct stacking, the Exeter facility now operates with a production philosophy built around adaptability.
The rebuild didn’t just replace equipment. It created a system designed to make better use of every log that enters the building – and every person who works inside it.
