Snows Timber operates from two large sites, totalling 21 acres, in Glastonbury and Andover; both sites are over 100 years old and offer products and services by an experienced workforce with specialist expertise in traditional timber milling, grading and truss production skills, passed on from father to son. Today, it is a market leader in its field, offering innovative and unique services manufactured using modern state-of-the-art equipment.
Wide-ranging services from Snows include carcassing, roof trusses, decking (Snow-Dek), Ecojoist engineered flooring, timber frame wall panels, and its primary activity of sawn and machined softwood, in a wide variety of sizes, planed all round, and mouldings – both standard and bespoke. It is also a specialist in timber preservation and strength grading. The company has built up a relationship of trust with its customers and aims to provide a quick turnround of goods, usually two to three days.
Investment
The vast majority of goods are machined in its mills and the company has a fleet of vehicles from artics to crane-offload to give a reliable and flexible delivery service to customers.
To keep pace with demand and to grow the business over the next five years, Snows has invested in the latest machining technology, giving special attention to its milling facilities at Glastonbury. Here, it has installed a new automated Weinig Hydromat line which is operated at 80m/min and manned by two to three people only. It was commissioned in December 1999 and has been up and running for just over a year.
Production director Paul Trevelyan said: ‘We needed a versatile high-speed moulding line, specified to our requirements of quick setting between jobs with minimum downtime and the ability to mould and bundle at top running speed. High quality finish is essential as is reliability and a prompt back-up service. We needed the right partner to work with, who would support us long term and guarantee success, so we picked Weinig who can supply everything from one source.’
The high-speed line comprises a seven-head, heavy-duty, Hydromat 23 with jointing on all heads, infeed and outfeed conveyor systems for automatic transfer of timber, bundle forming and strapping for small bundles, stackers for continuous stacking, and a large pack strapping machine with heavy load roller conveyors and mini pack stacker at the end of the line.
At the heart of the line is the Hydromat 23. Its spindles guarantee extreme smoothness and concentric running for accuracy and finish. It features continuous chainless feed, pneumatically controlled feed rollers, a machine base constructed of distortion free casting to reduce vibration, setting accuracy of mechanical numerical displays of 0.05mm, an enclosed safety shell for noise protection, hydro-outboard bearings, hardened machine tables, and many more features that provide efficient, flexible production for just-in-time delivery.
The Glastonbury line caters for three or more changeovers a day and is used to meet orders for shorter runs – because of its flexible characteristics.
Waco line
The Andover mill, which was purchased from FJ Reeves about four years ago, provided Snows with a 120m/min Waco line with a big capacity production facility. Snows has since modified and updated the line and, though not as versatile as the new line at Glastonbury, it is highly productive on longer runs. The high-speed Waco moulder has seven heads and provides a good quality finish.
It is a bigger line incorporating a band resaw for splitting timber and features automatic stacking. Bundling of stacks, however, is controlled manually. The line is kept for long run work with no more than two changeovers a day to maximise efficiency on production. A further advantage for Snows is that Waco is part of the Weinig Group so after-sales service for both lines comes from the same source.
Both Glastonbury and Andover production lines are backed up with stand-alone moulders for jobbing and special orders. Two Weinig Unimat moulders are used for this purpose – one at each location.
Following its recent investments, and with the further advantage of having an ‘experienced and loyal workforce’, Snows Timber says that it now expects to ‘continue to expand at a steady rate for the foreseeable future’.
