Established in 1886, East Bros has grown successfully by expanding into added-value products and the supply of imported hardwoods, in addition to its core activity as a sawmiller of British timber.
Located in the village of West Dean, the company’s 10-acre site includes three bandmill lines, kilns, a mouldings facility and a pallet production line. As well as cutting British-grown hardwood and softwood – mainly oak, beech, pine and Douglas fir – the fifth-generation family business also supplies imported hardwood from the US, Europe and West Africa, which can be reconverted through the mill to customers’ specifications.
East Bros offers a comprehensive range, covering heavy construction timber, fencing, pallets and packing cases, joinery and furniture timber, floorboards, decking, customised divan bedsets and non-standard mouldings. Deliveries are made throughout the UK on the company’s own fleet.
‘We pride ourselves on obtaining the best possible yield from our logs,’ said managing director Andrew East, ‘and we invest in machinery that helps us to achieve this.’
For the pallet production line, this has included optimised edging and cross-cutting solutions from Paul – which is represented in the UK and Ireland by Woodtech Machinery.
East Bros manufactures around 1,000 pallets a day in both standard and customised designs. ‘We used to buy 100,000 pallet boards a year, but we now produce everything in-house,’ said Andrew East.
The Paul edging line begins with an infeed conveyor which carries waney-edge boards that have been sawn from the log. A roller conveyor running at 90O to the line transfers the boards one at a time to the edger’s scanning station, where they pass sideways beneath a row of sensors.
These sensors measure the thickness and width of the board at set intervals along its entire length in a single pass, and this data is used by the edger’s computer to determine the maximum length of wane-free timber that can be produced. The board, which is narrower at one end than the other, then passes onto arms that move independently to ‘twist’ the board longitudinally so that it is aligned correctly for the circular sawblades.
Automatic adjustment
Paul’s edger has one fixed sawblade arbor and two moving arbors which adjust automatically to cut the required width. East Bros has fitted a set of three circular sawblades to the second moving arbor – the outer two blades cutting strips from any excess wood.
From the edger, the pallet boards are conveyed past a quality control point before being cut to length. East Bros has two Paul Model 14 optimising cross-cut saws, the first of which was purchased in 1987 while the second was installed earlier this year.
Cutting to an accuracy of +/-0.5mm at feed speeds up to 200m/min, the two saws demonstrate different aspects of Paul’s optimising technology, according to Andrew’s son Jim East.
‘The original saw is compact, with the measuring and cutting stations in the same machine body, and is set up to optimise by length. It measures the timber, checks the cutting list and tries to achieve the maximum length required. If the board is not long enough it tries for the next length down.
‘Our new Model 14 has separate measuring and cross-cutting stations, so the overall length is greater which means it can handle longer boards – up to 4m. This machine offers full optimisation, not only for length but also cutting out defects which the operator marks with chalk.’
After cross-cutting, the pallet boards move onto a long conveyor that spans three separate stacking stations. The first of these is occupied by Paul’s new SA20 automatic stacker – one of the first to be installed in the UK. The remaining two are currently used for manual stacking, but leave East Bros with the option to add more SA20s later.
As boards reach the SA20 they are first straightened and then transferred onto the stacking arms of the machine. As each layer is completed the arms retract, placing the boards on the lift table which then drops ready for the next layer. After a pre-determined number of layers (which can be set by the operator), spacing sticks are laid across the stack from hoppers at either end, to ensure stability.
‘Our investment in Paul’s optimising edger and cross-cuts ensures we obtain maximum yield,’ said Jim East. ‘Combined with automatic stacking, the system has given us efficient, cost-effective production.’
