JULY 30, 2009 10:43:00 AM
JORDAN NOVET
STARKVILLE — Dan Seale has been developing TimTek for six years now, and the engineered wood process has evolved the way a good cookie recipe emerges.
In the last three years, though, people just haven’t been building houses as often as they used to, causing would-be demand for the product to slump.
“It is brutal,” said Seale, a professor in the forest products department at Mississippi State University, as he sat staring at a graph showing drooping numbers of pine shipments on a computer screen Tuesday in one of his many workspaces on TimTek Road on campus.
To say the market is suffering is an understatement, he said. “It’s hemorrhaging,” he said. “It’s worse than suffering.”
And yes, the problem has worsened since a recession took hold of the economy last year.
One effect? A $140 million TimTek equipment staging facility in Meridian built to produce equipment for TimTek machine centers — which in turn could construct engineered lumber products commercially — would be operational by now, resulting in the creation of about 300 new jobs, but is not.
Read complete article at Commercial Dispatch.
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