Think of a moulder or four-side planer today and a simple picture appears in your mind of a sound-proofed box that you feed wood in one end and it comes out a different shape at the other. That is not a bad mental image and the basic box will remain. However, it is what is inside that box that really counts to your business – what it does and how it does it.
The view that a moulder takes a rectangular piece of timber, turns it into a shape over its cross-section and produces this shape parallel down the length of the board is already outdated. New developments allow you to produce 3D patterns down the length of each board. Structured profiling, introduced by Weinig a couple of years ago, now allows you to produce completely random, never repeating profiles for products such as flooring and cladding. A completely new innovation which brings a new range of products to the hand of the interior designer from a moulding machine that produces it economically and efficiently.
Not to stop there, the innovators and technicians at Weinig took up the challenge to produce a perfectly symmetrical and repeatable pattern on profiled boards. Sounds simple but, in fact, technically complex from an engineering perspective, this feature now exists on the Powermat range of moulders. On a throughfeed moulder it is now possible to produce a repeatable 3D pattern longitudinally on a board. Subject to the number of heads equipped with this programmable oscillating feature, complex interweaving designs with interspersed machined features can be economically produced at speeds of typically 16m/min in hardwoods and 20m/min in softwoods. This machine will be exhibited for the first time outside of Germany at the W12 exhibition..
This clever product development now gives marketing people a whole new bag of tricks to offer to the market – imagine simple fencing boards transformed with swirling patterns, cladding with sweeping curves machined in the face, interior panelling with regular relief features breaking up the slab-like appearance and you start to get a sense of the creative opportunities available. And we are not even talking of the future of moulders – this is the here and now in the world of Weinig – so the picture of what it does inside the sound-proofed box is already starting to dissolve.
Simple four-side planing has already undergone a revolution with the 2011 launch of the Cube. Never before has the woodworking machinery business seen such a simple but clever machine transform the preparation of timber for further processing. This is genuinely the first ever industrial machine that can be operated by virtually anyone after 20 minutes of instruction and will produce planed material with unquestionable quality, perfect precision and be right first time. A revolutionary machine like the Cube deserves a revolution in presentation, which is what you will see at W12.
The future
But everything described above is available now, so what’s next? Our customers from all round the world, consciously or subconsciously, tell us what’s next and we already see a blurring of the boundaries between what a traditional moulder could do and what the CNC processing centre can do. Consider the already developed 3D profiling feature and start to think of the repeatability not down the length of one board but component by component. Maybe this is how you will produce tapered components, shaped components and some 3D designs in the future at a production rate far higher than a conventional CNC router. Some technical challenges will occur but as manufacturers look to drive down costs by producing components faster and more efficiently, this boundary between the ‘moulder’ and the CNC will increasingly blur.
In the world of window component manufacturing, the flexible Conturex has transformed the economics of this industry. Central to the success of this machine is the workpiece holding system mimicking the human hand, which totally differentiates this machine from a traditional CNC. If this PowerGrip workpiece holding system is applied to applications for producing shaped components in a throughfeed manner, then manufacturers will have the best of both worlds. A work-centre that produces as fast as a moulder with the flexibility of a CNC router – is this what the box of the future will enclose?
