Lico Sawmill and Hardwood Flooring Machinery in the United States

Thirty years in one shop, on one problem

Lico has been in Saint-Georges, Quebec since 1993, and in their own words they have spent over thirty years on the design and manufacture of sawmill and wood processing equipment and nothing else. That focus is the reason a Lico line tends to fit a building rather than approximately fit it. The company describes its own approach as optimization and adapted solutions, and both halves of that are literal: the optimization is scanning and computer-decided cutting, and the adaptation is that the machine is drawn around your plant.

The range they name is edgers, trimmers, lumber handling and stacking systems, supplied both as standalone machines and as integrations into a sawmill that is already running. They build for plants across North America and Europe from a shop of eleven to fifty people, which is the size where the person who engineered your line is still reachable.

Every line is assembled and run at their plant before it ships. For a mill owner that matters more than it sounds, because the alternative is finding out on your own floor, with your own crew standing around, that two sections do not agree with each other.

Which Lico this is, and which it is not

Search for the bare company name and the first result is usually a CNC lathe manufacturer in Taichung, Taiwan trading as Lico Machinery Co. Ltd, founded in 1979. They are a completely separate business and we have no connection to them.

The company on this page is Machinerie Lico Inc., Saint-Georges, Quebec, founded 1993, at licoinc.net and on LinkedIn as Lico Machinery Inc. The two names sit side by side even there, where the Taiwanese company appears separately as Lico Machinery Co., Inc. If you arrived here looking for a lathe, you are in the wrong place. If you arrived looking for a rip line, you are in the right one.

What optimized actually buys you

An optimized machine scans the piece in front of it and lets a computer choose the cut. A non-optimized machine runs the setting it was given. Both are real products and Lico sells both, which is why the word is worth using precisely rather than as decoration.

On a rip line the difference shows up as recovery. A fixed-blade line forces every board through the same spacings, so the board that would have yielded seven strips gives you six and the difference goes out as offcut. A DEL line scans each board and cuts a pattern for that board. Lico publishes rip yields up to 93 percent, measured at the ripsaw on the lumber fed to it. Logs are the large majority of what it costs to run a mill, which is why recovery beats labor savings on almost every payback calculation we are asked to run.

The same logic runs through the range. The board edgers position with servos behind a scanner. The crosscut line defects to length against a grade solution rather than a mark. The merchandising line scans and cuts for the highest-value combination it can find in the piece.

Getting a Lico line into a U.S. mill

Machinery is a walk-the-floor business. Layout constraints do not show up on a drawing, so scoping starts with a visit: we travel to the plant, walk the flow, and measure what the building will actually take. From there Lico's own application engineers configure the line and the numbers come back through one contact.

Installation downtime is the question that follows price, and it is a fair one. It is measured in weekends rather than weeks on a station swap, and that is the sort of thing to pin down early, in the same conversation as payback.

Lico covers the length of a hardwood flooring plant or a sawmill's dry end on its own, from the tilt hoist that opens a stickered package through to the stacker that closes the line. That is why most conversations start here and widen out.

The handoffs are where the money is lost, so they get engineered before anyone orders steel. An EBI optimizer running on Lico equipment is a normal configuration in the plants we serve, and Lico lists EBI, OSI Machinerie and Cresswood among its own supplier partners.

In practice a line reads left to right: Lico moves and cuts the lumber, EBI grades and scans it, OSI planes it to thickness, and Cresswood takes what comes off the floor at the end. One quote covers all four, which is the thing a direct-sales manufacturer cannot do without pulling in three business units.