HIGH PROFILE JoeScan’s carriage optimiser


Changing industry standards


JoeScan founder and


President Joey Nelson chats with International Forest Industries Editor Chris Cann about making scanning technology


more accessible


International Forest Industries: How did you get started in the scanning sector?


Joey Nelson 22 International Forest Industries | OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011


Joey Nelson: Originally, it was my father who had gotten into the sawmill automation business in the 80s with SAAB Systems, and later with several other vendors, before starting Nelson Brothers Engineering in 1992. When I was at college studying electrical engineering, I helped him design electronics for earlier scanning hardware. In 1999 I founded JoeScan, initially just to do contract engineering for Nelson Bros Engineering. After finishing college, I looked at some of the work that I’d done and realised there was probably a bigger market for those products and took that as a starting point for the development of the initial JS-20 scan head, which we launched in 2002.


IFI: What changes have you seen in the sector during the period you’ve been involved? JN: I’ve definitely seen a lot of changes. When we came in and started looking at what was already on the market for scanning technology, it was all very expensive, very complicated and not very reliable. Scanning systems required a lot of maintenance work. So we thought we’d attack those areas – our products were going to be simpler, lower cost and as reliable as possible. I was talking with an optimiser vendor at Ligna and he told me JoeScan had really shaken up the scanning marketplace, particularly with the lower price – we basically cut the price in half, without compromising on quality, and the competition has had to respond. This has opened up a lot of opportunities for sawmills. Previously it was


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