With the introduction of particle and fiberboard as core materials in the furniture industry, which replace the more expensive solid wood panels, it became necessary to cover the visible edges of the furniture components. The question was how.
Panel edges are covered for cosmetic reasons, but also to protect them from accidental damage and moisture penetration. The unprotected edge of a particle/fiber board panel can be easily chipped at the top and bottom edges, especially with melamine laminates, and moisture can penetrate into the panel, which will swell the board and destroy its cohesion.
In addition to these practical reasons, a well-applied edge looks much better and provides infinite possibilities for product customization. The panel edges are small compared to the overall size of a piece of furniture, but by adding a different colour, a softer edge profile or even unusual dimensions, these edges can often define the look and overall craftsmanship.
The manual application of an edge requires skill, proficiency and time. To make this process easier and faster, most woodworking shops use an edgebanding machine. The variety of edgebanders on the market is enormous, and prices range from less than $10,000 to more than $1 million.
How do you find the right machine?
Some criteria will be determined by your production requirements, such as maximum required edge or panel thickness, the type of glue required for your materials, and the processing steps to get to the final shape of your edge. Each of these can be discussed in detail, but I want to focus on two aspects today: the speed of edgebanders and automation.
Automation
I often hear: “I don’t need automation, because I will only use the edgebander for a few hours a day.” At first glance this seems like a valid statement, but the time you are not spending with your edgebander is valuable time that allows you to complete other production processes (or just enjoy life). I will give you an example to demonstrate the value of automation. Imagine you want to apply thin tape to all four sides of a cabinet front. After the two long edges of the front have been processed, the end trim saws need to be adjusted for the short edges. If the panels are not completely square and the end trim saws are left to trim exactly flush, they will mark the already applied edge tape on the long sides. Even a slight thickness variation of the edge tape can result in such damage. To avoid this, most end trim saws are swiveled from 0° flush trim, to trimming at an angle of 15° - 25° to give the saw blade clearance to the tape on the long side. The end trim saws are located under the safety hood, which is locked when the machine is operating, which is mandatory under Canadian safety regulations. You have to turn the control voltage off and wait for the safety interlock to release the hood. This will take about 10 seconds to allow the saws and cutters to come to a complete stop. Then you open the hood, loosen each end trim unit and swivel and retighten each in the new position. This takes another 15 seconds. Closing the hood, restarting the machine and getting ready to feed the next part will require another five seconds. You may think 30 seconds isn’t bad and you don’t need to automate this process, but even if you only do this 10 times per day, it will cost you five minutes to angle the end trim saws and five minutes to swivel them back to flush trimming. That adds up to 10 minutes per day or 2,400 minutes per year (240 days/year). In other words, even a quick adjustment of a few seconds adds up to an astonishing 40 hours, or one week per year. In this example you will spend one week of your valuable time swiveling the end trim units. A simple pneumatic cylinder can do this job in a few seconds, activated by a button on the machine controller. Now add the times necessary to adjust a top and bottom trimming unit, a scraping unit or any other post-processing unit your edgebander might be equipped with, and you realize how quickly these times add up. How long will it take to change a top and bottom trimming unit from 0.5 mm thin tape to 3 mm PVC edges or even thicker solid wood edges? On many edgebanders these changes require adjustments to two or even three settings per motor. An experienced operator may not need to run test parts after an adjustment, but most will do it anyway to confirm a quality setup. The whole process will take about five minutes for a single changeover. Calculate how many times you will change from thin tape to PVC (or from thin tape to veneer or solid wood) and back and than multiply this number by five minutes.
If the number you come up with takes your breath away, you need automation for your edgebander. In addition to the time you’ll save, you will also bring consistency to your production, even if you have different operators run the machine.
In general you can say that if your products are diverse or you produce in smaller batches, you will require more setups and will profit from automation on your edgebander.
Speed of the machine
It is a common misconception that faster edgebander have a higher productivity. This is only partly correct. Many factors influence the output of an edgebander. The best way to measure the productivity of an edgebander (or any other machine) is the number of parts that can be processed in a given amount of time. The speed of a machine will obviously influence productivity, but there are also other important criteria such as minimum work piece gap, change over times (see Automation above) or infeed control.
The following calculation will illustrate this. You have to edgeband 1,000 shelves, each 500 mm long, and you have to apply thin tape to the front. Edgebander ‘A’ runs with 14 m/min and requires a minimum gap of 900 mm between two work pieces (this time is necessary to bring the end trim units back into the starting position for the next work piece). Every 1,400 mm (500 mm part length plus 900 mm gap) you can feed a new panel into machine ‘A’. You will process 10 panels per minute (14 m/min speed divided by 1.4 m) and will need 100 minutes for the complete job. Edgebander ‘B’ runs only 12 m/min, but needs only a 500 mm gap between parts. Every 1000 mm (500 mm + 500 mm) a panel is accepted, which brings the production to 12 pieces per minute. Machine ‘B’ will do the job in 83 minutes. As you can see from the above example the spacing between the parts has a big impact on the productivity of your edgebander. But how do you make sure you get that spacing just right? If parts are spaced too far apart, productivity is lost. If they are too close together, then the machine goes into an emergency stop, the parts have to be removed manually from the machine and the memory cleared by running the machine empty. Again this is a lot of wasted productivity.
The best way to address this is by opening and closing the infeed of the edgebander, so that the operator cannot physically feed a part into the machine before it is ready to accept it. This feature will keep your parts perfectly spaced and therefore your productivity at the highest possible level.
