Thin Kerf Technologies (TKT) was started about 9 years ago by Dave Roper, who was later joined by Terry Howard. Dave provided consulting and design services to the sawmills and sold instruments.
About 1990, TKT started to represent Key Knife, supplying chipping knives to the sawmills. In 1993, Bruce Lehmann joined the company to develop new products and to consult for the industry.
TKT is betting that its future growth will come from specialized, hi-tech products. One project, completed in 1994, was the development of two computer programs for optimizing the design of saws. So far, more than 130 copies of these programs are in use at sawmills around the world.
Currently, our biggest investment is the "BoardRunner" - a device for measuring how accurately lumber is sawn.
The "BoardRunner" is placed on the edge of a board, and as it is pushed along it measures the thickness of the board at intervals of 2 inches (50 mm).
The thickness measurements are stored on an on-board computer for later downloading to a PC.
The development has taken almost two years and a lot of money.
The future of TKT depends on forest industries moving to introduce ways
to get the best possible value from their logs.