Great play is made by our present political masters of their development of entrepreneurial skills but the story of Browns started in the early days of Thatcher in 1983.
At that time, Peter Brown, a skilled woodworker, decided that the road to success was to be master of his own destiny. He had established that the way the wood panel industry was developing was similar to the automobile industry and the requirement would be for reliable manufacturers of component parts for the cabinet industry, be it for kitchens, dining rooms, lounges or bedrooms, to establish a supply chain and satisfy the just-in-time production method.
For many of these ranges the door is probably the most valuable component and the one with the highest value; after all it is the door which is seen first and which creates the impression of quality. So for Peter Brown, doors were the chosen product.
This decision in 1983 has proved a most rewarding choice, as was the decision that every component produced must have quality as the primary consideration.
The initial workshop in 1983 was a shed of some 500ft² and the equipment installed to produce the doors was primitive, but the high quality demand was met by the skills of the operatives.
Meeting the sales budget
Remember that, at the time, the established players in flat pack were installing high volume panel saws and edgebanders – many of them grossly oversized for the sales volumes which were being achieved.
The outlook of Peter Brown was then, and still is, to install machines capable of producing the amount of doors to meet his sales budget and, if the budget was exceeded, there were always more hours in the day for the machines to run.
The first machines to be installed were a Magic panel saw and a hand operated edgebander, with extraction being provided by a Henry circular vacuum cleaner. Even at that early stage of development, health and safety were given their due regard.
The quality of Brown’s Doors created an increasing demand, so additional space and machinery was required and to date, five sites have been occupied, each one bigger than the previous one. Nowadays the company occupies a 60,000ft² factory in Cramlington, Northumberland and has planning permission for a similar sized expansion to be built this year.
Production machinery has progressed at the same rate as the buildings and now comprises five panel saws from Schelling, Biesse and Casadei – a vast improvement on that original Magic. These saws cut to size the 80 tons of material, principally MDF, processed each week. The two Schelling saws are new and have been installed side by side in the factory. The smaller FM-H model has a cutting height of 80mm, clamp opening of 93mm, 80m/min feed speed, and a saw travel speed of 120m/min. The larger capacity FL machine has a 127mm cutting height with clamp opening of 135mm, and a heavier duty 26hp saw motor. Both have Windows NT control with video diagnostics and can be linked by modem to Schelling’s Austrian head office if a problem occurs.
The shaping of the doors is mainly carried out on eight Rye and Biesse CNC routers, with an additional five Trio machines currently on order. Fladder sanders are used to clean the doors prior to membrane pressing, which is done on two Wemhöner presses and one Burkle machine, with final cleaning by Schroder brushes.
Machining centres
The five new machining centres are NC-Triax machines, four of which are identical, with one machine having 2×13 spindle drill blocks, and have been installed to allow rapid machining of panels with different sizes, with fast machine set up without using clamping jigs. The working surface area is a maximum of 6800x1530mm and each table consists of 10 mobile rails, sliding on guides, which can be manually located along the table, plus 50 pods (10 of which are smaller for more precise positioning) which can be manually fitted using a scale, and then vacuum clamped. Each machining centre is fitted with CMS Easywood software installed on both the machine CNC-integrated computer as well as the office installation, and which was designed specifically for the production of furniture parts, doors and panels.
This range of machinery creates around 12 tons of waste each week, the dust element of which is extracted by a system progressively installed by Indusvent Engineering of Manchester. The disposal of this volume of waste material not only presented the company with a handling problem, but would also incur a large financial penalty in transportation and tipping charges if landfill was the chosen disposal method.
Always one to seek out the most effective method of resolving a problem, Peter Brown investigated a variety of disposal methods and concluded that recycling the waste into thermal energy was, for him, the most effective solution both from an energy and financial standpoint. The equipment selected to effect this was a Moldow/Mawera system with the thermal energy being used for factory and office heating when required and dissipated to atmosphere in the warmer months.
Suitable size
The off-cuts from the saw section are fed into three Mawera RMZ300-200 hoggers with 5m3 capacity feed hoppers and the patented Mawera rotor with their round rotating cutters giving equal wear and extended life. Each unit is capable of reducing 1.5 to 2m³ of solid off-cuts an hour to a size suitable for burning. Prior to being metered into the boiler, the reduced waste and dust from the extraction system is fed into a 60-ton storage silo which holds sufficient fuel for 300 hours continuous operation at maximum output of the Moldow/Mawera MPHW boiler.
Environmental criteria
With an operating range from 10-100% output the insufflation fed boiler, which complies with all Environmental Protection Act (EPA) legislation at all outputs, is fitted with individual variable speed control of fuel feed, primary and secondary air fans and the flue gas fan. All operations are computer controlled with overall government achieved from the boiler output.
Flue gas cleaning is by means of a multi-cell cyclonic separator capable of ensuring particulate emissions well below the 200mg/m³ limit imposed by the EPA. All emissions are monitored with the results recorded for inspection by the appropriate local or national government authorities.
The 850kW thermal medium-pressure hot water from the woodwaste boiler is circulated round the factory and offices into unit heaters and radiators and the output has more than sufficient capacity to deal with the next phase of Browns expansion.
In the opinion of Peter Brown, the boiler plant’s operation has met all the technical parameters established while the financial return on the investment by eliminating tipping and fuel costs has proved more than viable.
