Federal grant helps NW Montana wood products company

About a month ago, a new oven arrived in Ronan that weighs 84,000 pounds. It took two or three cranes to unload the beast and maneuver it into its new home at Tech Woods USA on Terrace Lake Road.

This Moldrup thermal modification oven is used by Tech Woods USA to produce hardwood gunstock blanks, as well as flooring and other wood products. The oven was purchased and installed with help from a nearly $1 million Community Wood Grant, awarded in 2023 by the U.S. Forest Service.

Tech Woods USA was the only company in Montana and one of only 19 nationwide to receive federal funding for projects that either create a community wood energy system or build an innovative wood product facility.

A Danish crew and technicians spent two weeks setting up the huge oven and answering questions from owner Marty Perkins and the rest of the Tech Woods USA crew. The oven was designed in Denmark and Singapore and manufactured in Vietnam.

When the Danish crew left, the oven had its trial run, observed by the company staff. Donna Perkins, Marty’s wife, stayed for a while, then Marty took a shift.

“We have a super-duper crew,” Donna said, noting that they came in at 2 a.m. and stayed until their shifts began at 6 a.m., when they went to work.

Marty Perkins and Ray Emery of Lincoln, Maine, started Tech Woods USA in 2018 and moved the business to its current home in Ronan in 2020. According to Marty, the business has since taken off. One of the company’s primary products is thermally modified gunstock blanks, which are shipped to gunmakers worldwide, including Browning, Remington and Winchester.

But Marty’s interest in thermal modification of wood was piqued when he traveled to Canada on a buying trip for a former job and saw a stack of blackened wood sitting outside of a business. The owner said it was an experiment, and they’d burned the wood intentionally. The blackened wood was still sitting outside in the sun, snow, and rain the next time he visited – not warped or misshapen.

The Perkins moved to the Mission Valley 30 years ago from Maine, where they had a logging business. Marty has experience as a welder, mechanic, logger, specialty log buyer and owner of a hardwood flooring business.

With a bachelor’s degree in Forest Management, Emery had worked as an industrial forester, real estate agent, specialty log buyer and owner of a company dealing in specialty wood products. He provides the Maine connection for hardwoods such as maple and walnut. Maple, Marty said, is the wood all the big gun manufacturers request.

When wood is thermally modified, or “cooked,” as Tech Woods USA calls it, most of the moisture is extracted, making the wood more durable, lighter, stronger, and easier to work with, according to Cari Carter.

Carter is the quality control person for Tech Woods USA; she also works as their media specialist and packs the blanks for shipping.

“A gunstock made from thermally modified maple could be left outside all winter, and it’s not going to warp,” Carter said.

From Maine to Montana

The process of thermally modifying wood begins when the maple logs are trucked from Maine to Montana and unloaded at Tech Woods USA. From there, the logs are milled into planks that range from 2.625 to 3 inches thick at the company’s sawmill by sawyer Frank Kurtz. He estimated that the logs stacked on a semi weigh 80,000 pounds and typically arrive in Montana from Maine in about three days.

“Everybody is piling up logs to send us. It’s very rare we don’t have logs to get cut up,” Kuntz said. “When we do get them, we’re gonna get a bunch.”

The wood is measured on the metric system, with the smallest stock they produce measuring 55 millimeters, or slightly under 2.25 inches thick.

The planks continue on to a kiln, where they are dried. Marty built the kilns with furnaces in six bays and powers them with scrap wood. Then it’s off to the oven to be cooked.

According to Troy Marsh, who has worked with Marty for 30 years, one-inch pine goes in for “the short cycle,” about 40 to 42 hours, while maple takes 46 hours and 36 minutes. When the wood enters the oven, its moisture content is usually from 10 to 12 percent.

“The percent of water the oven takes out of wood typically comes out between 6 and 8 percent,” Marsh noted.

After cooking, the wood goes to the marking table, where employees take a look at the wood, grade it, with five denoting the highest quality. Curl, which is the quality that gives a piece of wood a textured look, despite it being smooth, is another consideration for the graders.

“There are about 30 names for curl, such as bird’s eye or tiger maple,” Marsh said.

It’s a big learning curve for the workers at the marking table, since part of a board might be a grade five and the other end could be a grade three, and each gunmaker has its own requirements. These employees fit the patterns to the board, to utilize as much wood as possible.

They use a marker and trace around the template, stacking the boards for the bandsaw operators, who cut out the marked pattern while looking for defects in the wood, such as a knot or a crack.

Next, the stocks travel to the jointer and then the planer. Some blanks need to be sanded; others do not.

Finally, Carter inspects each blank. If they are flawed, they go in the discard pile. The blanks that meet Tech Woods USA standards are stacked on pallets, wrapped in industrial strength plastic and thoroughly banded so they arrive at their destination intact.

In addition to being shipped across the U.S., the blanks are also sent to gunmakers in Portugal, Japan and Italy.

“So many people don’t know what we do,” Carter said.

She describes the finished product as “gorgeous – you can’t get a carbon (stock) like that.”