30 | Focus on North America: Kadant Carmanah
SMART STRANDING
Kadant Carmanah Design can trace its roots in general engineering back to 1913, but since World War ll, it has been most famous for its woodworking machinery. Today, that machinery is principally for the OSB industry and increasingly uses Artificial Intelligence, as WBPI consulting editor Mike Botting reports
M
ore senior readers (like me!) may remember the company as CAE
Machinery. However, when parent CAE decided to focus on its aircraft flight simulation business in 2003, it sold CAE Machinery to an equity business, which renamed it Carmanah, after the beautiful Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island. This new owner continued to invest in
the development of Carmanah’s range of wood processing machinery, with particular emphasis on OSB production equipment. In 2013, Kadant Inc, a large, diverse, decentralised US corporation with 28 subsidiary companies and a turnover in excess of US$1 billion, added Carmanah to its collection, renaming the company Kadant Carmanah.
Kadant Inc brought with it a strong capital expenditure ethos and Kadant Carmanah Design has benefited greatly from this. The business has been headquartered in Canada since it was founded, moving to Surrey, British Columbia, in 2011.
The president of the company today, Todd Macey, joined Carmanah in 2003 as head of product development and ran operations until he became president of Kadant Carmanah Design in 2019. “For many years, chippers, debarkers and pulp mill equipment repairs made up a much higher portion of the business than it does today. The changes started after the introduction of the disc strander in the mid- 1980s and continued to change as the OSB industry grew,” said Mr Macey. The company’s machinery range for OSB production includes: SmartRing stranders; SmartDisc stranders; Argus Smart-Connected Technologies; and chippers. For debarking of course there is the well-known Fuji King debarker (further details on all these products on
www.kadantcarmanah.com). “As a company, we focus on accurate fabrication, machining and producing high- quality machinery. Our machine tools are designed for the largest items we build and we work with selected local partners who do
a lot of the smaller CNC machining for us,” said Mr Macey. “Today, OSB accounts for well over 90% of our turnover. We are still fully committed to produce excellent chippers and debarkers, but these have gone from around 30% of our business to less than 10% combined today,” said the president.
A major breakthrough for the company came in the early 2000’s with the development of its Disposable Knife System (DKS) for stranders, and some years later came the introduction of the Integrated Scoring Knives (ISK), which has proved extremely popular ever since, said Mr Macey. The plate knife package is very heavy, at over 10kg and dangerous to handle, especially after sharpening. It is also very labour-intensive to manually build the knife packages and requires special skills and grinders to do this properly, he explained. “The Disposable Knife System is simpler and safer, with weights of less than 0.5kg for the disposable knives,” he said.
Above: KCD SmartRING Strander with Service Reps WBPI | October/November 2025 |
www.wbpionline.com
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