Summary
• WJ Timber Treatments has invested more than £100,000 setting up the operation.
• The company operates two high-pressure tanks and a low-pressure vessel.
• It uses Wolman’s preservatives and has a high-pressure single-shift capacity of 170m³.

While Hull City Football Club is currently defying expectations and sitting pretty in third place in football’s Premier League, the city’s other major player – its port – continues to play in the top flight when it comes to imported timber.

Even though the city’s status as a regional centre for furniture making has long been relinquished, Hull remains the UK’s leading softwood timber port, regularly handling in excess of 1.5 million m³ of timber, in addition to large volumes of other forest products.

It’s all the more surprising then, that, until recently, the Port of Hull didn’t have a serviced timber treater on Alexandra Dock. It was certainly something that surprised Mark Eggleston, who believed it presented such a good opportunity that he invested more than £100,000 setting up WJ Timber Treatments.

“We had a look at the market in the Hull area and found that, although there is one company that treats its own products, given the huge volumes of timber that come through the port, there was no-one offering a specialist timber treatment service,” he said.

With big names like Jewson and Finnforest active on the dock, Mr Eggleston, who has a background in the timber and joinery industry, said it made sense to put a treatment facility in the middle, providing an opportunity for customers to have their timber treated immediately after import – instead of making an additional journey.

Wolman preservatives

The business, which officially opened in June, operates two high-pressure vacuum treatment tanks and a low-pressure vessel. The high-pressure tanks use Wolman’s Wolmanit CX10 inorganic copper and boron-based preservative, with one vessel concentrating on green and the other green and brown. The low-pressure service uses Wolman’s Wolsit water-based KD20 preservative.

Mr Eggleston chose Wolman because of the back-up it provided. “Although Wolman is part of the BASF Group, the actual brand is still quite small in the UK,” he said. “It has a small team of people who are quite focused and provide a lot of advice and help in terms of the technical issues involved. We felt that the technical back-up would be ideal for what we wanted to do.”

The plant has been busy since day one, treating products across the hazard class range, from fence posts to hazard class four, to fencing panels, decking, trellis products, joists, TR26 and joinery components.

In a single shift, WJ Treatments can high-pressure treat around 170m³ of timber but, if demands really intensified, Mr Eggleston said the plant would step up to running 24 hours a day. “We’re treating around 500m³ a week on the high pressure side,” he said.

Recent successes in picking up orders from the likes of big-name players like Jewson and Quayside Timber is evidence that the choice of Wolman has been a good one, although Mr Eggleston is also keen to stress that WJ Treatments will treat timber for anyone, from a smaller job right through to the biggest.

While he’s aware that the company is not breaking new ground in terms of technology, Mr Eggleston is concerned about showing people that what they are getting is a professional product.

His sister Lucy handles the administrative side of the business. “She has set up the procedure we follow for every order. Each pack we get in is given a unique job number and then each pack within that load is identified and labelled accordingly.

“Each charge is then given its own unique number, so full traceability is available from receipt to despatch. That means that if a customer comes back and asks us what we did to the timber we can trace it back to the species, moisture content and the amount of chemical taken up in that particular charge.”

As for the future, advancements from companies like BASF, providing textured finishes and higher water repellencies, could potentially open new markets in pre-treated timber. But, added Mr Eggleston, “there are opportunities in the market place to offer a good service to customers with what people expect in the 21st century from a business”.