General Info:
The company has grown steadily since Jerry started it in the mid-1970s. Swift Creek is located on about 50 acres and now has about 50 employees. Swift Creek is located in Amelia, Va., in the county of the same name, a rural community about 60 miles west and slightly south of Richmond. Although Swift Creek manufactures some 48x40 pallets, it is essentially a specialty pallet and wood packaging manufacturer. The number of footprints and pallet sizes is in the hundreds, according to Jerry. The company also manufactures skids and dunnage and in the past has also manufactured wood containers. The company sells to manufacturing companies mainly in Virginia although in the past it has supplied customers as far north as New York City and as far south as South Carolina. Industries represented by customers include printing, chemicals and groceries. One of the companys milestones over the years was investing in automated pallet assembly equipment. The company first purchased a Campbell nailing machine in 1981 and later added a Viking pallet assembly system. It has upgraded its Viking machines regularly since then and currently is running a Viking Turbo 505 that was purchased in the late 1990s. In addition, a few years ago the company invested in a nailing machine supplied by Storti, the Italian pallet and sawmill machinery manufacturer. Swift Creek works mainly with hardwoods. The company buys mainly logs and cants. It purchases tree-length logs from logging contractors at the gate and buys cants from sawmills in Virginia. It also buys some heat-treated pine and plywood and a small volume of pre-cut stock. Jerry has relied on Sharp Tool for circular saw blades for about 20 years. He has continued to do business with the supplier because of the "quality of the blades, " he said. As an example of the kind of service and products Swift Creek has received from Sharp Tool, Jerry recalled when he installed a Tipton scragg mill in 1992. Swift Creek was experiencing some difficulty related to the saws of the new scragg mill. Paul Morette, president of Sharp Tool, designed a super strobe saw blade for the scragg mill, and the blade was a success. In fact, Swift Creek continues to run the same blade today. The company buys logs up to 15 inches on the butt end and a 7 inch top and 4-inch, 6-inch and 8-inch cants in random lengths. In the log yard, tree-length logs are loaded onto a deck and cut to bolt length by a large circular bucking saw. The bolts feed to the Tipton scragg mill. The scragg mill consists of two pairs of two circular saw blades; the first set of blades removes two slabs, the logs is advanced and turned 90 degrees, and the second set of blades removes two other slabs. The scragg mill feeds inline to a West Plains Resaw Systems end-trim saw. Cants are sized, if necessary, on a Baker Products two-head horizontal band resaw system. Wood has been plentiful this year, Jerry noted. "Our cant inventory is real good." The plant has two main resaw lines a Brewer Inc.-Golden Eagle gang saw line and a Pendu Manufacturing gang saw line. The Brewer Inc.-Golden Eagle gang saw is located in the same mill with the scragg saw. Cants are singulated by an unscrambler and feed directly inline to a Brewer cut-off saw and then inline to the gang saw. The Pendu gang saw line is located in the companys other main building; it operates similarly with an unscrambler and cut-off saw and also feeds inline to a Pendu automatic stacker. In addition to an assortment of cut-off saws for cutting material to length, the company also is equipped with a Storti machine to reclaim boards from slabs, a Newman chamfering machine, West Plains notcher, and an L-M Equipment Co ( U.S. ) cross-cut package saw. The company operates three machines for grinding or chipping residual material: a Cresswood grinder, Morbark chipper and WHO tub grinder. Along with sawdust, the material is sold for boiler fuel.Swift Creek is heavily involved in heat-treating pallets for export app