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Masterwood (UK) Ltd, St Andrew's House, 13 East Abercromby
Street, Helensburgh G84 7SP.
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MASTERWOOD TRANSFORMS PRODUCTION AT STAIR MAKERS
A Masterwood Project CNC machining centre bought by Longwood Joinery Ltd has improved dramatically the way the company produces staircases. The £100,000 investment, the largest in a single piece of equipment in the firm’s 30 year history, has allowed it to remain competitive and overcome the difficulty of attracting skilled staff.
The Wetherby, West Yorkshire business was set up in 1972 by the present managing director Barry Long. It specialises in producing purpose-made joinery that as well as staircases includes doors, windows and external features like barge boards. Its customer base includes some of the country’s biggest names in house building, such as Persimmon and Barratts, together with many smaller building companies in the area.
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Operator Steve Dodsworth takes off a staircase string
after it has been machined on the Masterwood Project.
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With a well-deserved reputation for delivering quality products on time, it has developed close relations with its customers; for example it has been supplying staircases to the regional Persimmon operation for over 23 years.
With the house building market remarkably buoyant, it is expecting to notch up a record £1.4 million turnover this year. “The demand for our products continues to grow, given added impetus by the fact that some house builders are now putting up three-storey houses, which obviously require more stairs than standard size properties,” says works manager Peter Long.
The decision to move away from traditional methods of joinery manufacture was prompted partly by the problem of recruiting skilled staff, a situation all too common throughout the industry nationwide.
Although there’s one apprentice who has just completed his training and another at NVQ2 level, not one student from local colleges enquired about apprenticeships this year. “Youngsters don’t seem to want to commit themselves to long-term training today, they want to earn easy money, quickly,” says Peter Long.
Further pressures on the business have come from the steady increase in wage rates, which has had a knock-on effect on margins, and from customers who insist that costs are kept to a minimum and are increasingly unwilling to accept price rises.
What all this added up to was that Longwood, which has 30 employees, needed to take decisive action in order to remain competitive. The solution came in the form of a one-man operated, highly versatile Masterwood Project 320RL CNC machining centre. It does not need skilled staff to operate it and can do the work of several traditional joinery machines, faster and more accurately.
Management spent several months looking at the various machining centres on the market before deciding that Masterwood was the supplier to do business with. “We must have had initial conversations with at least 10 companies,” says Peter Long. “We had heard horror stories from others in the business who had bought a CNC machine from one supplier with the software coming from a different company, and the problems this caused when something went wrong. Masterwood was able to supply the complete package - the machine and its own dedicated software – which was extremely reassuring to us as novices.”
Longwood’s Project 320RL is the 4.5m long bed version, ideal for handling the longest staircase components. The three axis machine features a tubeless type working table, with eight aluminium supporting bars and ten suction cups, fitted as standard. Unlike conventional beds it has no pipes that can become damaged during the machining cycle.
It’s fitted with a carousel type tool changer with eight positions for IS0 30 cones, has an X axis working stroke of 4500 mm, with a displacement speed of 100 m/min, a Y axis stroke of 1350 mm (with front router) and a Z axis workable thickness of 100mm for routing operations.
Longwood also specified an optional twin sided head for drilling door locks and hinges. However, it’s so busy producing staircases it has not been able to find time to use it on doors, which is the next step in its modernisation programme.
The Project is used to trim, cut to size, route, mortice, and tenon virtually all the staircase components, including the strings, newel posts, kite winders and treads. It has reduced by between a third and a quarter the time it previously took using a semi- automatic Ryburn stair trencher and other traditional machines, depending on the components.
Gone is the need to draw out a full size stair layout and then to draw out the kite winders etc by hand, labour intensive tasks that could take up to 1/½ hours to carry out. It’s now all done in a couple of minutes on a CAD program by Carl Morrall in the drawing office, who from working drawings inputs the final machining requirements on to a floppy disc which is given to the machine’s operator.
The software supplied was Masterwood’s own standard Masterwork, a Windows- based program that works with any PC. Incorporating universal CAD for design work, it’s ideal for both joinery and panel products. Longwood also uses the latest Masterstair program, claimed to be the most user-friendly staircase software available in the world, which offers remarkable simplicity of programming.
Peter Long is delighted with the advantages provided by the machining centre. “The accuracy, which is to .01mm, is always spot on which means that our joiners can now fit a staircase together correctly first time around, with no need to send back ill- fitting components for trimming or planing. A spin-off from this is that we are benefiting from significant savings in raw materials, which is important as disposing of wood waste is now a costly business.”
He adds that the arrival of the Project has radically altered and improved the way it approaches the production of staircases. “With the process now largely mechanised we consider we are in the business of manufacturing staircases rather than making them. We supply them ready stained and lacquered, each one bubble wrapped, with only the handrail to be bolted on, just like an item of furniture, not a piece of joinery.”
The long-term aim is to use the Project to build up stocks of stair components, ready to be fitted together as the orders come in, which was something that was impossible to do before.
As first time CNC users, the level of training and after-sales service provided by Masterwood was crucial to Longwood and was a significant factor in its decision to buy the Project. Operator Steve Dodsworth, supervisor Andrew Humphries and Peter Long – with a total of 75 years with the company between them - went to the Masterwood factory in Rimini where they had three day’s initial training.
This was followed by a further five day’s on-site commissioning and training from a Masterwood technician, with an additional five day’s training given on Masterstair, the specialised CAD/CAM package for staircase production. Both technicians who provided the training are extremely knowledgeable about all aspects of staircase component production using Masterwood CNC machines.
We were given a good grounding in CAD/CAM and were able to process components by ourselves by the time the technician left,” says Mr Dodsworth.
“Masterwood’s back-up service is also first class, with the Help Line staff in Rimini able to sort out any problems we may have over the telephone very quickly.” Another plus is that the two software packages are updated regularly, either by email or by disc, which allows Longwood to benefit from the latest developments as they are introduced.
“The investment we made in the Project, though relatively large for a small company like ours, was totally justifiable, as CNC operation is the way forward for the joinery industry,” maintains Peter Long.. “When you consider its many features and what it has achieved for us, I believe that pound for pound it’s the best value machine of its class you could hope to buy. It should have paid for itself in under two years, which is a pretty quick return for a machine of its price.”
Without it, he declares, Longwood would be going backwards compared with its competitors. “It’s no exaggeration to say that with all its advantages and the way it has enabled us to overcome the various problems we were facing, it’s going to help secure our future in the joinery market for many years to come.”
