The Daily Post : News |
Wednesday, June 19, 2002 - 3 |
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 From refugees to innovators are father-son pair Carl and Jake Peterson, of Peterson Portable Sawmills.
Portable sawmill wins Fieldays prize
By Cherie Taylor
Necessity was the mother of invention when the Peterson family arrived in Rotorua as refugees from Fiji’s military coup.
To prove the point, Carl Peterson invented a portable sawmill which won a share of the first prize in the 1988 National Fieldays Farm Invention Award.
Fourteen years on, a second generation Peterson family member continues the innovative trend, with Jake Peterson following in the winning wake of his father’s sawdust.
Last week Jake Peterson’s Innovator ASM scooped the Prototype Award 2002 at the Mystery Creek Fieldays. He won a similar award at last year’s Fieldays with his Rhino Can-Hook.
The ASM mill was designed after market research in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which showed there was a gap in the market for a completely automated swing blade portable sawmill, Peterson Portable Sawing Systems marketing executive Rosie Coward said.
“It’s a new generation swing blade which promises to bring a new dimension of ease and productivity to the portable sawmill industry,” she said.
The new Innovator was truly portable and a fully automated swing blade sawmill which utilized technology to cut both horizontally and vertically, removing the previous board cut in the one process, Ms Coward said. It is a one-person, push button, computerized mill.
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"The operator could sit in a deck chair running the mill with a remote control" |
“In fact so simple is the act of cutting logs into dimensional timber that the operator could sit in a deck chair running the mill with a remote control,” she said.
“It’s a mill that won’t break the budget, but gets the job done with minimal effort.
“We knew our existing manual mills were capable of cutting high volumes of timber, but due to manual fatigue the volume was not consistent so we decided to automate our existing mills.”
Unable to find employment or gain access to business finance when he first arrived in New Zealand, Mr Peterson senior began developing and refining an idea he had for a portable sawmill.
His primitive, but simple movable sawmill entry in the Farm Invention Awards at the 1988 National Fieldays, won a share of the first prize.
As a result, he was offered an NZ$8,000 government grant to construct a commercial prototype sawmill.
This, in turn, led to the family being given permanent residency and Peterson Sawmills, with Rotorua its base, was created.
Today, the family employ 18 staff and the way things are beginning to pan out for the business, there are sure to be more positions created at the Rotorua factory, Ms Coward said.
“The last 12 months have been the busiest ever with 150 units through the doors, despite a temporary downturn following the September 11 events,” Ms Coward said.
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