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Don't accept compromises

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When you get home from the barber, you don’t expect to re-cut your hair because it is still too long, you expect your hair to be perfect.
Most of us expect a perfect job from a professional; with machines it should be the same. A designated machine is supposed to do its job perfectly and one should not accept compromises.
For example an edgebander is such a designated machine, designed to apply a banding to the edge of a panel. When the panel exits the machine, it has to be perfect. At several shops I have observed that ‘a machine almost doing its job’ is considered acceptable. It seems they considered it normal to clean the surface of work pieces, to remove squeezed out glue or to ‘chisel away’ a lip of edge material. It is not!
The work pieces have to be ready to be shipped out or ready for assembly. It’s not that you should not check the quality of your products, but don’t expect to have to work on the pieces you have just processed. Either your machine is missing a necessary aggregate, like a pre-milling unit, a separation detergent applicator, a glue line scrapper, or the machine is not properly set up or a combination of both.
The woodworking machine industry has developed aggregates and components for almost every demand/application. Unless it is a ‘one time odd requirement,’ there is no reason to accept any compromise. This statement is valid for all machines in your production - the table saw, the drill, the moulder as well as the edgebander.

To stay with the example of an edgebander, the pre-milling unit gives you a perfectly prepared edge for the subsequent banding process. Any marks of a scoring blade or pulled out chips from the nesting process will influence the quality of the banding application. The pre-milling unit provides a perfect, crisp, chip free and step-free edge. The visibility of the glue line will be minimized, the adhesion maximized, the service interval of your glue applicator prolonged and no touch-up of chipping defects is necessary.
Panel cleaning is the most common and unnecessary work done after applying an edge to a panel; some places even have specialized workstations or whole departments to clean work pieces coming out of the edgebander. Why? Have the various trimming and scraping steps left a noticeable lip of banding material? Is glue squeezed out and is now on the surface of the work piece? Often these problems can be minimized by the right adjustment of the machine: amount of glue, force of the pressure rollers, trimming and scraping units.
The types of tools, and of course the sharpness of the tools, also have an influence, but even the sharpest tools and the best adjustment of the machine can’t completely eliminate the aforementioned problems. The reasons can be variations in the materials; the thickness of the banding is fluctuating as well as the work piece itself and PVC chips from the trimming process can stick on the work piece and create a bump in the edge.
To overcome these influences, the industry has developed aggregates, such as the glue line scraper; a sharp tool, which scrapes off any overhang and removes, squeezed out glue from the surface. Specially developed agents tackle the problem of glue on the surface, such as a separation and cleaning agent. A separation agent, applied as fine coating on the surface of the work piece at the entry of the edgebanding machine, prevents the squeezed out glue from touching the surface. The glue line scraper can easily remove the, by then solidified glue. A cleaning agent, applied in front of the buffing unit, will remove the coat of separation agent. Aggregates, like the glue line scraper or the separation/cleaning agent applicators, can be retrofitted to most machines.

When talking about quality, I have heard many times ‘my customers are not too picky.’ That may be true, many end users don’t see the difference between good and improvable quality. However don’t accept compromises and drive our industry to new quality standards.
To avoid later surprises demo your material on the machine you’re looking at, before you make a final decision.

Christian Vollmers is the president of HOMAG Canada Inc. He can be reached at Christian.Vollmers@ homag-canada.ca or visit the website at www.homag-canada.ca

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