ABOUT US

The history of the world’s best sawmill scanning company.

In 1999 Joey Nelson founded a company to make sawmill scanning simpler, more reliable, more affordable, and easier to use. For over 20 years, JoeScan has been exclusively focused on achieving these goals for our sawmill partners.

As he was growing up, Joey learned all about the ups and downs of sawmill optimization through his father’s business. It could provide tremendous returns for mills, but the scanning hardware was often expensive, unreliable, and difficult to use.

While studying electrical engineering at Washington State University, Joey took an even stronger interest in the sawmill industry and laser scanning. A few years after working on a project to develop the L-51 laser scanner for Nelson Brothers Engineering, Joey decided to take the plunge and start his own company: a company that would be dedicated to designing and building better laser scanners for sawmills.

Joey built the first JoeScan JS-20 scanner in 2002. Since then, JoeScan has made a concerted effort to raise the bar for sawmill scanning. Subsequent models have increased maximum scan rate, become easier to install and calibrate, and simply made sawmill scanning better.

Joey and Robert Cecil at Starfire Lumber in 2002

Today JoeScan has grown to 11 employees. We are dedicated to carving out a niche with integrators and sawmills as a resource for fast, accurate and reliable scanning that delivers maximum performance – and return on investment.