Laser against ink coding
The incumbent mechanism, and how the method gets selected.
Timber and wood processing
Brand every board. No ink, no solvent.
The grade, the treatment and the run come straight off your PLC, so nobody types a code at shift change. The brand goes into the timber at line speed.
- Two consumables: a lens window and an extraction filter.
- No head cleans, no purges, no viscosity checks at 2am.
- Formed in the fibre, so strapping and a wet yard do not take it off.
Why mills move off a coder
There is no traceability law for timber here, so mills buy on cost and uptime.
Method selection: small character coding
On a substrate that will not react, or where a mandated colour is part of the code, we specify continuous inkjet at the scope. The same applies where the spend is a few drums a year.
- Ink and make-up solvent are a permanent annual line item. Solvent evaporates while the line runs.
- A blocked head is line time, and it never happens at a convenient hour. The chain backs up and the graders stand.
- A ghosted brand is your name in front of a merchant. The pack gets unstrapped and re-branded in the yard.
What coding costs you now
Four rows that read low in a mill. Fill them in before anyone books a call.
| What to measure | Why it reads low | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Ink and solvent, all heads | A mill rarely runs one coder. Green chain, planer, docking saw and packing station each carry a head. | NZD per year |
| Make-up solvent on its own | Solvent evaporates while the line runs. An open shed swings twenty degrees between a winter night and a summer afternoon. | NZD per year |
| Chain minutes lost to the coder | Downtime logs code the stop against the line. Get it from your shift leaders: cleans, purges, shifts held below rate. | Minutes per year |
| Packs re-branded before dispatch | Unstrapped, re-branded, re-strapped. The cost is labour and strapping, and it lands in the dispatch bay. | NZD per year |
Where the head goes
Position decides more than source selection.
- Step 1
After the moulder
Dressed, dry and consistent. The best marking condition on the site, and where the top of the speed range is available.
- Step 2
At the green chain
Identity attaches before the timber is sorted, so grade and run travel through the yard. Harder condition: moisture, lower contrast, more variation.
- Step 3
At the packing station
One mark per pack instead of one per board. Room for a full brand plus a Data Matrix, and the cheapest place to start.
- Step 4
On the board, at full speed
Every piece carries identity that survives being re-sorted, re-stacked and split across three orders. This is the case that drives the head count.
Your timber, row by row
Timber is not one material. Moisture, resin, density and finish change how the mark forms and reads.
| Substrate | How it marks | Engineering notes |
|---|---|---|
| Dried sawn, dressed | The best case. Clean contrast, and fine text holds. | Fine text and 2D codes both work here. |
| Dried sawn, rough sawn | Marks well. The saw pattern breaks up fine detail. | Minimum character height goes up. A Data Matrix needs a larger module to grade to ISO/IEC 15415. |
| Green, off the green chain | The hardest case on site. Surface moisture absorbs energy and escaping steam disturbs the mark. | Validation runs on your own green stock, at your own moisture range. |
| LVL and engineered wood | Very good. Uniform density, consistent glue lines, a flat face. | A Data Matrix crossing a glue line can lose symbol grade, so codes are placed deliberately. |
| Plywood | Good on the face veneer. Flat and predictable. | Veneer thickness sets how deep the mark can go. |
| Treated, H3 to H5 | Works, and this is where the hazard text lives. | Treatment chemistry changes the mark colour and the fume, so extraction is reviewed per product. |
| Posts and poles | Workable, and the least forgiving. Curved, variable diameter, irregular finish. | Focus tolerance is the constraint, not power. How the piece is held matters most. |
| Resinous or dusty faces | The mark is fine. Resin chars differently and dust sits on top. | An air purge across the lens, and a protective window on your own dust schedule. |
The engineering detail
For the engineer, the maintenance lead and the health and safety manager.
What the brand carries
Producer identity, grade and standard text, treatment and hazard text, date, shift, run and pack number. A Data Matrix to ISO/IEC 16022 where pack identity has to reach dispatch. Every element adds strokes, and strokes set the ceiling.
Speed, and what sets it
Beam time is path length, not area. A typical brand holds across 40 to 120 m/min on one head. A full height dense brand, 40 mm high and 600 mm long, tops out around 75 to 85 m/min. Above that the specification is a second head on the same encoder.
Integration, and what breaks
The Control Layer reads the agreed PLC tags and nothing else. Ladder logic stays untouched, and the station dials out over TLS, so no inbound path is needed. It runs from a pull-ahead cache, so a maintenance window upstream does not stop the chain. Records queue locally and replay in order. If the cache runs dry it stops marking. It never invents a run number.
Fire, dust and Class 4
The mark is a controlled thermal process inside an enclosure with extraction on it, and the extraction is part of the scope. Enclosure, interlocks, beam containment and a rated safety circuit are specified to IEC 60825-1 and ISO 11553-1.
Support when the line stops
Support is a severity tier scoped with the system, in plant language, with a named escalation ladder. Critical spares are held on site. On the first install your existing coder stays until your team stands it down.
For the rest of the committee
This gets decided by more people than were on the call.
Start here
Engineering specifications
Material matrix, source selection, symbol grading and the speed model.
Integration architecture
Connection patterns, failure behaviour and network posture, for IT.
Programme assurance
The document set, the acceptance gates and the handover pack.
Send us a piece of timber
Post a board or a pack end in the condition it arrives in. Send the wet, rough, resinous one, not the pretty one. You get back a numbered report: parameters, grade and process window.
Last updated August 21, 2026