Cut-Line – Computerized Precision

Brooke: George, tell us about your Cut-Lines, what are the processes?

George: Well, Brooke, we start off with rough dried kiln lumber. We plane, rip, then cross-cut.

Brooke: I’ve seen furniture plants where lumber is cross-cut first, then ripped. Why do you rip first?

George: We rip first for the length. A shutter is a product of styles and rails. Styles require the longer length.

Brooke: After planing, the boards pass through a scanner?

George: That’s exactly what it is. It takes a digital picture of the top and bottom of each board and it does a laser profile of the edges. So it will come up with an optimization for our ripper.

Our ripper would move the saw blades to make an optimum cut on each board.

Brooke: George, I see two standard rip widths here, and the rest seem to be random.

George: We have two basic rips, one that’s the size of a 2″x6″ that we call a quad, and one’s the size of a 2″x4″ that we call a triple.

The quads and the triples go into our styles as louvers. The random widths we put into rails.

Brooke: These workers seem to be marking defects. How does that work?

George: Currently it’s a manual system. They mark the defect and the computer scanner picks it up and it cuts based on an optimized schedule.

However we have a system on order that will automatically scan the defects just like our scanner for the ripper.

Brooke: Here are the quads, triples, and randoms sorted by length. How do you get all the different profiles needed for your product line from just these?

George: That’s the beauty of the system – it’s all modular. So the answer is edge-gluing.