New process makes for quick construction

Dangling from a crane in downtown Whitefish, a 40-foot-by-8-foot wooden floor plate weighing 4,400 pounds slowly swings into place — not your typical piece of construction material.

But it is precisely the type of material that a new company, Innovative Timber Systems, aims to showcase as the first commercial construction project of its type in the United States.

The goal is for a 5,000-square-foot, two-story building to be erected within five days this week in a narrow lot behind the Great Northern Bar.

“We’re on pace,” said Innovative Timber Systems founder Pete Kobelt, looking on as most of the first level came together after less than two days of work. “We’re feeling pretty good about it right now.”

“As you can see, it’s clicking together like a Lego set,” said Andy Hamer, owner of the Sawbuck Do Jang, the business that will occupy the building.

Fitting all the pieces together is a bit tricky, however.

“We don’t have a lot of margin for error. It’s a super-tight site and we can’t be closing off this street for a week,” Kobelt said.

In all, the building will involve 144 panels of varying widths and dimensions, the largest of them being complete wall panels and floor plates.

Through a process of pressing and fingerjointing boards of widely varying dimensions together, the prefabricated solid wood panels are known as Cross Laminated Timber, a product that has been widely used in Europe for the last 20 years.

“The real prize for CLT is its capacity to replace concrete and steel in low and mid-rise commercial buildings and deliver high-performance buildings faster and more sustainably,” Kobelt said.

“You can do things that you couldn’t do before and you’re doing it with wood,” he said, noting that architects and engineers are looking for new materials or for new ways to use traditional materials. “We’re sort of giving them both.”

The panels used for the Whitefish project were imported from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, but Kobelt and his partners aim to change that. The goal for Innovative Timber Systems is to fabricate CLT panels using Montana wood products at an industrial site on the north side of Columbia Falls.

“The goal is to get a factory built,” Kobelt said.

That will require costly industrial equipment, and, according to Kobelt, the Whitefish project is a tangible milestone for investors, along with engineers and architects who are interested in doing similar projects across the country.

But until now, there haven’t been any commercial CLT projects in the United States. Innovative Timber Systems has been involved with two non-commercial CLT projects that have been completed.

Kobelt was involved with the construction of a home for an architect in Vancouver, British Columbia, that took seven days, as well as a church bell tower in North Carolina that took three days.

“We’ve worked on others but those were collaborative,” he said. “This one is 100 percent ours.”

Kobelt is bullish on Montana’s ability to provide the timber to run a successful CLT operation.

“We’ve done the wood basket studies,” he said.

Germany and Montana, for instance, have roughly the same amount of forested land. Montana produces about 700 million board feet of timber annually, but Germany produces 12 billion board feet per year, most of it in value-added products.

Kobelt acknowledges there are substantial differences in forest management goals, but he believes Montana can produce more and that a CLT plant would help reinvigorate the state’s struggling wood products industry.

For Hamer, the CLT project was an attractive option and he is pleased with the design of his new building.

Hamer said the project is “more expensive in some ways” than a stick-built structure would have been, but he is looking at the benefits. “I get the wood finish as a part of it. I’ll have a lot of exposed wood in the interior. And I like wood.”

For more information on Innovative Timber Systems online, look for:

http://www.smartwoods.com

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.