Calibre shoots into the big time

KENT BLECHYNDEN/Fairfax NZ

TECHNICALLY INNOVATIVE: Calibre Equipment's Chung and Hayden Frew.

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Tucked down a driveway in the Wellington suburb of Newtown, alongside a bowling club and the SPCA, two high school mates are quietly building a niche but thriving manufacturing business.

Hayden Frew and Chung are the respective business and design brains behind Calibre Equipment, which makes machines for grading and testing timber.

The company began in 2005, when Chung – a mechanical engineer – was asked to build a machine to test the quality of timber, after new Government regulations made testing compulsory.

The machine was a success and in the next year or so he built and sold a further 30.

Today, Calibre Equipment is still making the quality assurance testing machine, used by customers to check the strength of timber once it has been processed, but it is their acoustic grader that has been in hotter demand.

The grader is for early in the grading process, and uses a mechanical hammer and microphone to create and record sound waves which are then analysed by the company's software to determine the stiffness of wood, Chung says.

"It looks at how acoustic waves propagate through the piece of timber."

Frew says the grader, which can test "green" wood and dry wood, is more accurate and efficient than normal methods – using human graders, or through guess-work.

"You can find out whether it is good or bad before you start grading it and processing it. That can save tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a sawmill."

The grader sells for about $200,000 while the quality assurance machine is between $20,000 and $50,000.

The pair say the company is the dominant supplier of acoustic grading and testing machines in Australasia, and their customers have included Carter Holt Harvey Australia, and Mitchell Brothers Sawmilling and Ahead Lumber in New Zealand.

Revenue has grown 300 per cent on average for the past three years, and Chung and Frew say several projects due to come to fruition in the next six months or so should see the business grow significantly.

Those projects include new products it is developing in collaboration with New Zealand and overseas partners, including a camera that can analyse knots in wood to determine its strength, and licence negotiations with firms overseas that could supply its machines into their markets.

Chung and Frew say grants and assistance from the Foundation for Research Science and Technology and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise have been invaluable for the company – which used the FoRST grant to develop the acoustic grader.

All Calibre Equipment's machines and graders are manufactured in the Newtown factory using materials sourced from local suppliers – which is important to the pair who met 23 years ago at Naenae College.

In fact, five of the Calibre Equipment's six staff went to the high school together, helping make for a relaxed culture, Frew says. "We don't always see eye-to-eye but we can work through that. We trust each other."

- © Fairfax NZ News