Gower Furniture has expanded organically and by acquisition since present joint managing directors Kevin Ohle and Richard Reynolds led an MBO in 1988. Today it is one of the strongest forces in flat-pack furniture, with manufacturing at Leeds and Halifax. The group also owns Smallbone of Devizes, which caters for the bespoke, top end of the kitchen market.

Gower’s customers include the UK’s large retailers of kitchens – Wickes, Focus Do It All, Jewson and, more recently, Homebase, where kitchens are tailored to customer requirements. A significant 10% of its products is exported to Continental Europe, with growing potential.

The secret of Gower’s success lies in its versatile production facilities, achieved by regular and heavy investment in state-of-the-art machinery. This enables the company easily to introduce attractive design changes, produce at competitive prices, offer fast delivery times and maintain a guaranteed level of quality and precision.

Gower says that its ethos is to establish a close working ‘partnership’ with customers and suppliers; ‘a good relationship ensures problems are resolved quickly and mutual trust and loyalty are established, which pay dividends to all those involved’.

Gower and Schelling have certainly both benefited by their close partnership – the Gower Group has 10 Schelling beam saws operating in its factories. Two of these are large, state-of-the-art show piece lines – one in Halifax installed 18 months ago and the latest, a new, high-speed line, started up earlier this year at its Leeds factory.

Increased output

The new line increases output at Leeds by over 20%, operates at 70m/min (20 cycles/ min), and is worked two shifts per day (a total of 18 hours). Gower measures production capacity in panels, regardless of size, and the line has pushed up panel production from 120,000 per week to around 150,000 since the line was installed. At the heart of the line is the Schelling FL high-speed cross-cut saw, with automatic sorting and semi-automatic stacking.

Why Schelling? ‘Because,’ says Leeds site manager Andy Young, ‘we need accurate, precision engineered, versatile, heavy duty machines to stand up to our demanding production requirements. Schelling has proved itself at Gower over many years for its performance, reliability and prompt service on various previous installations. It has been a reliable “partner” in business and gave us a feeling of confidence in production.’

The operation

The operation of the high-speed line starts with an automatic power transfer conveyor receiving cut strips of board from Gower’s existing strip saw, which is also due to be replaced with a new high-speed Schelling saw in October. The strips are fed to an automatic Mahros infeed system, which vacuum feeds at 70m/min (18 cycles/min) to an IMA combination edgebander. The strips are sized, edged and grooved as required on the edgebander and transferred to an automatic accumulation system at the infeed to the Schelling cross-cut saw.

The automatic accumulator forms the strips into stacks of panels to suit the book height of the saw, ready for cross-cutting. The accumulator copes with 3660mm length boards of 220-1,200mm widths. It can also form a double row, with no downtime, and stacks 16 strips/min at 70m/min, continuous flow.

After cross-cutting, component pieces are sorted automatically into sizes and moved on driven rollers to two operators at despatch to lift off and stack, ready for the next process.

The FL cross-cut beam saw offers Gower many beneficial features and operating benefits. It requires a low level of maintenance to achieve high up-time of the machine and provides 100% assurance on scratch-free operation. It operates continuously, without time delay, giving 15% more productivity compared with other systems.

Fast cycle times, high-speed servo drives with rack and pinion systems on the saw carriage and feeder guides, along with high precision magnetic tape measuring, obviate wear and accuracy problems.

Features of the saw include chrome tables, dust curtains, a sawblade detection system which highlights any deflection or deviation of the sawblade, a third sawblade for edge scoring, and an automatic sorting flap which gets rid of the trim cut and packing pieces automatically into a horizontal Vecoplan hogging machine and out through the extraction system.

Geoff Tighe, one of the main operators, says: ‘I’ve been involved in this line from day one of its installation. It was commissioned on schedule and has had very few teething problems. I’m impressed with its efficiency, performance and diagnostics.’

A major benefit of the high-speed panel line lies in the Schelling software – the Modular Control System (MCS). It has been developed by Schelling for use on its single line saws as well as the angular plants and is totally flexible, with modules to suit any complexity of line and number of axes. Hardware for the control system is supplied by Siemens.

Schelling’s MCS is a Window-based system with which most people who operate home computers are familiar. It is easier to use than DOS and is a building block for operators to use on single line machines or large angle plants – the configuration and use is the same. Prior to its introduction, an operator would have had to learn two or three different control systems, depending on the complexity of the line. With MCS, it is also easy to increase the capacity of a machine.

The advantages of MCS are numerous. It allows the operator to see a simulation of the whole machine working, ie all the board information, the input, vacuum loading, patterns, panels being cut and stacking. Information from other software packages can also be picked out and transferred to Windows NT without retyping.

Austrian link

A further advantage is that the system links directly to Schelling in Austria which operates a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week help hotline. Its specialist engineers can dial straight into the line and check the inputs and outputs on the control system. They can then correct problems remotely and quickly, to keep the line in production to the maximum extent, with minimum downtime. At the same time, the operator can be shown how to deal with problems when they occur, remotely from Austria. It can also be used for general operator training.

‘I am very impressed with the fault diagnosis system,’ says Darren Johnson, the engineering manager responsible for line operation. ‘It offers the means to overcome problems quickly and to keep to our production targets. We are only just beginning to realise the full potential of MCS.’

MCS is able to provide a fund of valuable management information on the office PCs wherever they are located in the company. It keeps management instantly in touch with production progress, ie what the saw is currently doing, the number of boards cut, downtime and the reasons for it, analysis of shift patterns, relative production from different working methods and systems, where a customer’s order is at any one time, and provide a host of other useful management information.

Gower’s Leeds factory is still on a learning curve but it is quite apparent that the line not only meets all the criteria for its purchase, but has a lot more potential besides – which will be tapped as more practical experience is gained.