A New Site for The Boutes Stave Yard

The staves used to make Boutes barrels will now be manufactured in Buxières-les-Mines in the Allier, at a larger site with better transport connections than the old facility in Louroux-de-Bouble, in the same department. The fitting-out of the site and the production areas will help to create optimal working conditions for employees.

The Boutes stave yard is entering a new era. The old, cramped facilities at the current site in Louroux-de-Bouble (Allier) will soon be consigned to the history books. After a lengthy search, the group's management found a new, bigger and more suitable site in Buxières-les-Mines. The new site is also located in the Allier, a department that Boutes was keen to stay in due to its famous dense forests, including not only the Tronçais but also the Marcenat and Grosbois. The new stave yard will be operational from the end of the year.

The management viewed several different sites, but decided on the one in Buxières-les-Mines because of the benefits it had to offer. These include an existing building, a tarmacked car park, easy access to the site via good quality roads (even in snow or ice), a responsive local authority and plenty of available land. The new site gives Boutes more than 5 hectares to play with and will mainly be used for storing undressed timber and rainwater tanks. 'We currently have enough undressed timber stored at this site for a year's worth of production,' explains Eric Barthe, Managing Director of Boutes. 'This wood must be constantly sprayed with water to prevent it from splitting and to protect it from wood-boring insects. We have therefore installed tanks to collect and recycle rainwater.'

The undressed timber is constantly sprayed with water. 'Spraying is carried out 24/7 from the end of March through to mid-November,' explains Pascal Faroux, Boutes' Stave Production Manager. 'To ensure that we have sufficient volumes of water, the rainwater is recycled using a closed circuit. The run-off from spraying is collected and transferred to a settling tank. It then goes back into a storage tank before being sucked up to spray the timber by automatically-controlled pumps fitted with a filtration system. If one of the pumps breaks down, then the other will continue to function as normal, meaning that spraying is not interrupted'. The two main tanks are similar in size to Olympic swimming pools. Beside the tanks are four areas for storing undressed timber that needs to be sprayed, which will stay there for between 8 and 12 months, as well as a stock of dry wood that is ready to be worked immediately.

There are currently no specific plans for one part of the site. 'It may be used to house our stave maturing facility, which is currently located in Marcenat in the south of the Allier. We are not ruling out the possibility of transferring this facility to Buxières,' explains Eric Barthe.

The new Boutes stave yard has larger facilities than those in Louroux-de-Bouble. 'We have extended the existing production workshop from 800 m2 to 1,600 m2,' the Managing Director continues. 'This building therefore offers more space and better working conditions by making it easier to move between workstations and thanks to its insulation and the installation of new machines. We wanted to reduce as much as possible the physical work done by the 15 employees who were transferred from our old site, who have been joined by two newly recruited members of staff.’

MAKING WORK EASIER WITH A CONVEYOR BELT

An ingenious system has been installed to take quartered wood to the sawyers' workstations so that staff do not have to carry it. 'This manual handling was difficult and dangerous, particularly given that some of our employees are approaching retirement,' observes Pascal Faroux. 'We therefore developed a kind of conveyor belt fitted with "drawers" for transporting and distributing quartered wood. Employees who work with detail saws will simply have to take the quartered wood they need from a drawer that will come straight to their work table at exactly the right height.'

The Boutes stave yard in Buxières also has a new 7 metre edger saw that removes sapwood and bark to leave only the noble material. 'This tool has been specifically designed for staves and has four blades – two fixed and two mobile,' explains Pascal Faroux. 'We also have a new band resaw that splits the quartered wood for quicker, optimal yield, as well as a log debarker. Thanks to this machine, only debarked wood will come into the workshop, saving employees time and creating a safer working environment.’

The overall layout of the site has been designed to ensure that vehicles can move around it in a safe and logical way. 'To the south of the site, we have created an entrance specifically for the lorries that deliver undressed timber in order to minimise the risk of accidents on the road leading to the stave yard,' continues Pascal Faroux. 'These lorries go straight to the wood storage areas. When the time comes to work the wood, the undressed timber is then transferred into the nearby log splitters. Once they have been made, the staves are transferred from the workshop to the loading area located in the northern part of the site. The logistical arrangements are therefore better than those in Louroux-de-Bouble, where the area in which vehicles could manoeuvre was cramped and lorries would often get in one another's way.’

In total, Boutes has invested more than 3 million euros in this new site. With room to expand, plenty of space, good transport connections and less manual labour required, the new stave yard has many advantages over the one in Louroux-de-Bouble. 'In addition to increasing our production, we also wanted to provide our employees with optimal working conditions,' explains Eric Barthe, a view shared by Pascal Faroux, 'For me, Buxières is a little piece of paradise in the middle of the forests!' The commune's industrial zone is called 'La Croix du Chêne' (the oak cross), so it seems only fitting that it is now home to a stave yard that works only with this noble wood.