Effect of a chipper-canter knife clamp on the quality of chips produced from black spruce

Chipper-canters are designed to produce wood chips and lumber in a single-pass operation with very low sawdust production. The performance of chipper-canter knife clamps on chip thickness of black spruce was evaluated. Effects of knife clamp angle, the distance between the knife edge and the knife clamp edge, as well as wood temperature (season) were evaluated. In this study, regardless of the temperature, better results were obtained when using a knife clamp angle of 30 degrees. However, the optimum distance between the knife edge and knife clamp edge is 22.5 mm during the winter (temperature between −5°C and −10°C), and 15.9 mm during the summer (temperature between 19°C and 23°C)...