A traditional joinery company which has supplied timber products to Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle has gone the CNC route by investing in a Masterwood Atlas KL machining centre.
Canterbury-based Denne Joinery says it is already benefiting from overall savings of around 25% in man hours, helping it to win new contracts, including more business with its 200-year-old sister company Denne Construction.
Denne Joinery is one of the first UK companies to install the Atlas KL, which is part of a £250,000 investment.
General manager Stuart Robinson said: “It’s capable of carrying out all the processes previosuly needing five or six different traditional machines, and does them much more quickly and accurately.”
The Atlas has a 5.2m-long bed and features an additional tool changer for large tools up to 320mm in diameter, giving it the ability to scribe and tenon up to 125mm.
The specification also includes a 17kW liquid-cooled router head, 14-position tool carousel, a rear horizontal head and vertical and horizontal drilling heads.
Other features include a C-axis control on the main router head, a tubeless bed system with pneumatic clamping devices, digital readouts for fast positioning of pods and a built-in waste conveyor in the bed.
Denne is using Masterwood’s MasterWorks CAD/CAM software package and the MasterStair program to boost staircase design and production. It has also bought the Auto Desk Inventor CAD drawing software package, featuring 3D modelling facilities, which produces cutting sheets automatically.
Denne used the Atlas for making staircases, formers for curved deskwork, as well as routing out panels for cupboards and other units.
