Wood&Sons Pellet Mill Tour! 

In an industrial, farming or residential application? How have the products and usage changed over the years? Fascinating.

We are a professional exporter of mechanical equipment and products from China, producing and providing biomass pellet production lines, dryers, pellet machines, components, and biomass fuels. Looking forward to working together

It's hard to make money on a small scale from virgin wood. If you have a planer and or sawmill and you can process just the shavings and sawdust it's way better. I ran a mill with about third of a ton out put an hour. We mostly processed the sawdust and shavings we had previously paid to dump as landfill so the economics were amazing. As our pellets became more in demand we tried to add feedstock from the woodchip we produced but found it was barely viable with a wood shredder or grinder. I had wanted to try a shavings mill but didn't get the chance. I am certain it is a better method that needs far less energy. Maybe you should look at trying it. My thoughts were. Far cheaper for the cutters which can be resharpened and take far less time to change. Less power needed to produce comparable volumes and far less effort in the hammer mill stage. Finer shavings dry much quicker and are more even moisture content. Smaller pieces in the feedstock with consistent moisture reduces the risk of crumbly pellets and the loss of volume at the screening stage. Beyond that my advice is never try to reuse any fines from processed pellets. If you have a dryer running on biomass put it in there. I have seen how the pellet mill can just churn out ton after ton of dust as there is no lignin to make any thing bind. Hope you do well. I really enjoyed the time I spent doing it, especially as I got higher and higher outputs. We also had variation in moisture and the species we worked so for us every hour of every day could call for adjustment. Luckily it was computer controlled but it only played up when I was at the other end of the sawmill.

@@richardlee2488 we have a wood transformation company, we have a planer bf we did try with shavings, but our machines are not made to make pellets with wood shavings, it’s configured for wood chips and yes we have a saw mill

Our machine is big enough for us, it’s 4 tons a day and we make pellets only 1 or 2 days per week,

Also, our production line has 2 kinds of crushers, the first one is a knife mill, it’s like a big planer head that crushes the chips in smaller particles, then it’s sucked by a blower and goes into an hammer mill, then sucked up by another blower to finally go in the cyclone then the feeding screws and finally the pelletizer

@@RWRKofficial as I said before we mostly used the planer mill waste. The knife mill you mentioned sounds like a drum chipper. Depending on the screen size you can adjust the output size but as the screen gets smaller so does the output. We actually ran everything through 2 hammer mills before pressing. I was asked to visit another producer that had installed 2 Mills like ours but he could not make pellets. He had his own trees chipped and dried by a contractor and then fed his materials through a single hammer mill before the presses. It was a disaster. He had tried for six months before contacting us. In that time he had destroyed a dozen dies. Huge blow outs with the dies bulged out from the pressure. His problems were poor moisture control and the feedstock was still to coarse. Similar to the material used for chipboard with very little fine stuff when it came out the hammer mill. The pellet mills were banging and crashing as they tried to force the stuff through. They even had to rebuild one mill which had bearing failure in the few months it operated. Our mill by comparison was though not quiet was running on more like wood flower and sawdust and was super smooth unless it was a bit dry. You could mostly hear the sound of the pellets as they fell down a chute from the press to the cooler and from the cooler into a hopper where they waited before packing.

It's not that soft, especially when it comes out as pellets. Western red cedar is soft to the point that I could not make pellets from it and even mixed it could mess things up. All the pine and larch and Douglas fir I did were brilliant but oak and Ash were way better. I didn't get a chance to try beech or sycamore in any volume but think they should be good and birch is normally just chipped and sent out as power station fuel in England.

@@richardlee2488 Thanks, loved the vid, Lots of power to make pellets for sure.

@@rterry2752 just to be clear. This is not the business that I worked or work for. I ran a pellet mill that was in England and was manufactured in Italy. The basic process is the same but geographical differences in the timber can occur. Siberian larch is hugely different from the European larch because of the difference in climate. The hardwood in England is probably similar density but if it could even grow in the tundra it would be tiny by comparison.