Potlatch is a sawmill located in St. Maries Idaho. It has facilities for both lumber and plywood. The company was bought by Deltic Timber Corp. in 2018 after my time there.
I worked as a process control engineering intern. I really enjoyed working there. St. Maries is a small community and a lot of the economy revolves around the mill, so it is a tight knit working environment. I was specifically working for the sawmill. There were an other two interns working in the planer/grading cell and the plywood cell. During my time there I got to spend a bit of time in the other cells as well as out with the foresters to learn about the full production process from harvesting to shipping.
I worked on a few projects while I was there. The main two were scanning and cataloging all of the old blueprints so that the deteriorating physical documentation could be preserved and building a VBA script that collected data from all of the machines in the sawmill and produced reports on efficiency and track trends. I also spent a lot of time just walking around and learning about the intricacies of the machinery from the millwrights. During these walkthroughs I was able to identify several issues, such as derailed conveyor drive chains and damaged hydraulic lines, and order preventative maintenance to save the mill significant downtime and equipment damage.
I think my favorite day there was when the interns got to go out to the boilers and help do periodic maintenance. Seeing the application of boilers that I had learned about in thermodynamics was very interesting. It was messy and hot scraping slag out of the fire chamber and inspecting the liner. The most important thing I learned from that experience was the clever design of the augers that pushed sawdust into the boiler. Each auger was slightly shorter than the last. This allowed them to buy one new auger and cut the damage sections off of the others and re-use them. It struck me as a very clever cost cutting method that doesn't inhibit the functionality at all.