Established in 1896, the Barking-based family-owned company is one of the oldest timber importers in Britain and the largest independent specialist hardwood importer in London.

Supplying greater London and the south-east, the Blumsom Group offers kiln drying together with specialist sawmilling and moulding capacity, backed by “comprehensive timber stocks of prime quality hardwoods and softwoods”.

The needs of small joinery companies, builders and the public are catered for by The Blumsom Timber Centre, which operates from Barking and provides an off-the-shelf service for most joinery components and materials, including panels products and flooring.

A century of progress

The company has clearly come a long way since its humble beginnings; a hand barrow pushed the length of Curtain Road, east London. And its latest major investment takes it even further forward.

The modern timber milling facility now supports over 40% of the Blumsom turnover. New investments in technology include: new computer systems; a hi-tech boiler to burn wood waste from the mill; a new computerised kiln to dry wood for underfloor heating; a new extraction system; and two key products from the Weinig Group – a Dimter S50 optimising and defecting cross-cut saw, and the new generation Weinig Powermat 1000 moulder and tooling system.

These investments, says Blumsom, put it in a leading position to benefit from the new developments set to take place in and around the 2012 London Olympic Village, which is forecast to create huge opportunities for local manufacturers.

“The Dimter S50 optimising and defecting saw and the Weinig Powermat 1000 moulder will ensure that we meet the highest quality service, with fastest turnround times,” said mill manager Gary Hoy. “They also offer complete cutting flexibility particularly to meet short runs on bespoke orders.”

The Dimter S50 cross-cut saw is billed as both versatile and productive, providing “high performance, flexibility, economy, precision and safety”. It is “maintenance free” and, says Weinig, requires no setting, adjusting or changeover time. Blumsom finds it copes with heavy sections easily and is simple to operate, requiring very little physical effort.

High spec model

Blumsom has installed a high spec model to suit its particular type of work which revolves around its core hardwood business. Flooring is a significant percentage of production and achieving perfectly square ends is vital. Therefore, the company took the option of special side pressures on the S50 which guarantees this and it brings in outside contract service work for this purpose too. Another major benefit to Blumsom is that the Dimter saw replaced four conventional cross-cut and chop saws previously used – yet still provides extra cross-cutting capacity, as well as the ability to defect timber to add value.

“Another important benefit of the Dimter optimising cross-cut is its high speed cutting ability which pays particular dividends on large runs of small sizes – down to 50mm,” said Gary Hoy.

Time and money savings

The Dimter has saved waste, time and money and the spare cutting capacity, says Blumsom, enables it to offer a competitively priced, prompt cutting service. “Midday orders, are completed by late afternoon and it’s the fast service, quality, precision and squareness of cut that attracts customers,” said Robert Blumsom.

The seven-head Weinig Powermat 1000 moulder has recently been installed at Blumsom, with all the high-technology tooling and toolroom equipment comprising: PowerLock tooling system for short set-up times; Rondamat 960 grinder and PowerCom plus tool setting equipment.

The Powermat 1000 was commissioned in January this year and, although it’s up and running, it will be a few weeks before the operators reach peak performance and it replaces three existing conventional moulders. It is the ideal moulder to service the top end of the market – a niche business for Blumsom, which supplies and machines hardwoods such as cherry, American black walnut, wenge and purpleheart.

The 12,000rpm cutter heads allow top feed speeds with a perfect finish – providing the capacity of three conventional moulders. The PowerLock tooling makes exchanging and replacing tools virtually instant, at the press of a button, without any downtime.

Management tool

The PowerCom system is a key management and administrative tool to achieve maximum efficiency. It offers the advantages of the Memory System plus almost unlimited memory for profiles and tooling measurements. Weinig has solved the problem of making a fast and accurate set-up of a profile never run before. Once the tooling measurements and the dimensions of the new profile are entered on the touch screen, the PowerCom software calculates where the cutterheads should be positioned, which is then displayed on the electronic readouts. The cutterheads can be moved into position manually or automatically by the motorised spindle system. Electronic DigiSet is on all tool positions.

The Powermat 1000 moulder offers a variety of optional features. Blumsom’s model incorporates two right spindles for small size work and seven cutterheads for greater versatility in moulding.

Blumsom says it now has the most up-to-date moulding and cutting technology, and is prepared to use it!