Swift Caravans, one of the UK’s leading caravan and motor home manufacturers, has introduced automatic cross-cut sawing technology to solve a chronic bottleneck in its production.
The Cottingham-based company, which recently expanded into the static holiday home market, chose a solution from RW Machines after its three manual cross-cut saw stations could not keep pace with demand.
RW supplied a Reinhardt Slim Line optimising cross-cut saw and handling system, together with a Sotemapack Tirafilm cold shrink foil wrapping machine.
The Reinhardt provides optimisation, defect identification and removal, grading and fixed length cutting. Most of the timber cut is European redwood and whitewood, used to construct frames and fixed wooden furniture and fittings for the caravan bodies.
It serves 80 assembly line stations and processes 17 different cross-sections with timber sizes cut to 200 lengths. In any working day, up to 7,000 variations in specification can be accommodated.
Bundled timber lengths are transferred to the Reinhardt from the Sotemapack via a cross-conveyor.
Swift estimates the system has saved an estimated 5% in daily timber usage, representing a “substantial” saving on materials. It also says the Reinhardt is operating at only 70% of capacity, allowing for further growth in demand.
“We run an eight-and-a-half hour shift, with only four people now manning the entire cross-cut station,” said Swift senior production manager James Turner.
“We’ve repaced three 10kW motors with only one, which has substantially reduced the energy used to run a significantly better and much faster system.”
