PORT ANGELES — If the main boiler is the heart of the Nippon Paper Industries USA paper mill, its paper machines are its soul.
As such, the two — both built in the 1920s — work separately but in tandem, as the paper machines have for the 90 years that the mill — which became a Nippon facility in 2003 — has operated at 1902 Marine Drive.
The machines produce some 160,000 tons of paper annually.
Each machine is operated from a control booth by a machine tender who monitors the papermaking, which takes 39 minutes from start to finish for each jumbo reel.
Paper Machine No. 2, one of two such pieces of equipment in the plant, was built in 1922.
The rumbling mass of moving parts is dressed up with some of the ornate steel framework from Paper Machine No. 1, which was shut down in 1986 after 66 years of churning out product.
At 500 feet long and 13 ½ feet wide, No. 2 produces paper ranging from super lightweights used in the white pages of telephone books to very smooth heat-set grade-paper used for advertising inserts.
It is the machine upon which the newsprint is made for the Peninsula Daily News, which buys all its paper from the Port Angeles mill.
Its partner, No. 3, is about the same length but is 18 ½ feet wide. Built in 1927, No. 3 makes similar grades to No. 2.
As it is a wider paper machine, it produces more tons per day than paper machine No. 2.
No. 3 typically produces telephone directory paper.
With an annual wage of more than $70,000, the machine tenders hold the best hourly jobs in the plant, which employs about 200 people, but have reached a pay grade and skill level that takes several years to achieve, mill manager Harold Norlund said.
Paper porridge
Papermaking begins with a porridge of recycled paper — in which soaps and chemicals have bleached old newspaper for reuse — clay filler, kraft pulp and mechanical pulp from wood chips.
Water — heated by the boiler to about 115 degrees so that it splashes and steams at the outset of the process, at one end of the machine — dilutes the mixture to 99 percent water and 1 percent fiber.
The mixture is pumped onto a fine mesh screen, called a wire, that is in the forming section of the paper machine. In this section, water is removed by a vacuum.
The sheet that’s formed passes through three presses, then is steam dried over rotating dryer cans.
As the paper rolls off the machine and is calendered to a desired final thickness, a digital scanner hovers back and forth over the sheet, measuring variations in thickness, weight and moisture content, which are then automatically adjusted.
The paper is fed into a jumbo roll, also called a “parent roll,” then into a smaller cylindrical winder, where the paper’s width is cut to customers’ specifications.
During a recent tour of the mill, telephone-book paper purchased by AT&T was being manufactured for shipment to Portland, Ore., or Greeley, Colo.
The mill’s sole product 90 years ago when it was owned by Isidore and Harold Zellerbach was newsprint.
These days, 88 percent of what’s produced is telephone book paper, while 12 percent are other lightweight grades used for advertising inserts or newsprint and other paper products, Norlund said.
The expansion into products other than newsprint began about 50 years ago.
________
Senior staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
