Wood Processing Yard

Located 200m from Hooke Park’s main campus, the timber processing yard is where raw timber sourced from the surrounding woodland is initially prepared for use. The processing yard hosts the site’s large sawmill, which can be used to break down logs into square sawn sections, in addition to Hooke Park’s bulk wood chip store which holds 400m3 of biomass fuel – providing heat and hot water to the entire campus. The sawmill is a WoodMizer LT40 ‘Super Hydraulic’. This machine is a lightweight, fixed machine that can handle logs up to six metres in length and half a metre in diameter. This type of machine can take a ‘raw’ log from the forest – that is to say, the main trunk or stem of a tree minus its branches and leaves – and turn it into regularised, dimensioned sections that can be used in construction or be processed further in the workshop.