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Swinerton decided a number of years ago that it wanted to be a significant player in the burgeoning mass-timber market.

Since launching Swinerton Mass Timber, the firm has contributed to delivery of a large number of projects featuring cross-laminated timber, mass plywood and other products. Then, in March, as an evolution of Swinerton Mass Timber.

The company’s former equipment rental warehouse in Northeast Portland has become a 23,000-square-foot fabrication facility that includes a custom-made Biesse five-axis computer numerical control (CNC) milling machine capable of handling glued-laminated beams as long as 60 feet.

鈥淲e’re a complete design-build firm, doing work nationally on mass-timber structures, and as a subcontractor and vendor to other GCs and owners,鈥� Timberlab President Chris Evans said during a tour of the plant off of Northeast Columbia Boulevard.

In addition to providing design-build timber structures and fully coordinated mass-timber supply packages, Timberlab offers licensed timber engineering and mass-timber product development. The new fabrication facility is where much of that work takes place.

鈥淭he whole intent of this Biesse machine is to handle beams that are needed for long-span office buildings and tall timber buildings,鈥� preconstruction manager Erica Spiritos said. 鈥淚t’s really to eliminate any dimensional constraints that we would otherwise have on CNC machines that are operational in the region, or even in the country, and build capacity to handle the fabrication for the type of members that are needed in the buildings that we are increasingly building.鈥�

While most fabricators of cross-laminated timber or similar products also incorporate CNC milling into their workflow, Timberlab now has the ability to fabricate or mill complicated designs into the rough, manufactured glulam beams and columns that support most mass-timber structures.

鈥淥ur whole thing is about being flexible, so part of this was to provide a needed resource within the industry,鈥� business development manager Sam Dicke said. 鈥淭he glulam manufacturers near us are without secondary fabrication ability to make it into a component. So, this is really about cutting pieces to make those pieces into building components and bring all those glulam manufacturers into the commercial mass-timber market that they might not otherwise be in.鈥�

Much of Timberlab’s efforts are intended to simplify and shorten the time frame of construction on jobsites by focusing on details like connections, sealants and preconstruction work. For example, a new tracking and quality control system uses colored labels with QR codes that identify every unique piece of mass timber for a given project. Each piece corresponds to its counterpart in the project’s 3D model, which allows immediate tracking and improved quality assurance.

Meanwhile, the colored tag affixed to every finished piece of mass timber shows which certification program may have played a role in the procurement process. Timberlab uses FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) certified products, as well as noncertified products.

鈥淭his allows our crews in the field to scan this QR code and know exactly where this beam has been and where it needs to go,鈥� Dicke said, 鈥渁nd they can relate it back to the model.鈥�

The Biesse CNC machine is currently being put to use for the massive Terminal Core Redevelopment project (T-Core) at Portland International Airport, as well as another project at the University of California, Santa Cruz, involving glulam beams as long as 50 feet.

The T-Core project is taking up much of Timberlab’s time these days. The shop crew is fabricating 36,000 pieces of FSC-certified Douglas fir lattice supplied by Sustainable Northwest Wood, as well as Freres Lumber mass-plywood panels to frame 18 massive skylights.聽 These components, paired with nearly 400 80-foot-long glulam arches and a mass plywood roof diaphragm, will comprise the airport terminal’s new ceiling 鈥� all sourced from sustainably managed forests and manufactured by mills and laminators in Oregon or Washington.

鈥淚t’s 36,000 pieces of 3-by-6 Douglas fir members that all have a different geometry to conform to the undulating roof structure,鈥� Spiritos said. 鈥淚t’s very precise geometry, so we’re fabricating those pieces and also the mass-plywood skylights.鈥�

It’s a lot of work for a small shop crew, production manager Martin Chabot said.

鈥淭here are six of us in the shop, but it’s about to go up dramatically,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e’re going to start an evening shift to be able to keep up. We’ve been full-on for the last two weeks in here, and obviously the planning for longer than that. But we could be nonstop just focusing on T-Core full time and it would be a year without doing anything else.鈥�