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Burns Wood Products in Granite Falls, NC manufactures shaped plywood for manufacturers that need curved doors, drawer fronts, table aprons, primarily any products where bowed plywood can be used in its production. They provide ready-to-assemble products to the marine, home interior, toy, and leisure markets. They’ll also produce other custom wood products, just about anything that will fit within their wood-working capabilities.
With 40 employees and 40,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing space, the 25-year-old company produces part quantities from 15 to 2,000. To produce unique shapes in wood, the company recently added two five-axis router machines and one three-axis machine. To control these machines, they use Mastercam CAD/CAM software that allows the wood designers great flexibility to produce the desired wood shapes and contours they need. After designing the component, the information is downloaded to the routers to produce the parts.
Wood is cut by the router as thin veneer strips called plies that are put through a glue spreader, pressed together, and built up layer by layer to get the desired thickness for the final production part. Then they are placed in a workholding fixture that consists of a top and bottom block shaped to the final form of the part and a vacuum fixture to hold down the wood. The workholding fixture along with the wood is then moved into a radio-frequency press, like a giant microwave oven, that uses microwaves to dry the wood. These vacuum workholding fixtures are made by the company and are also produced using the routers. Steam bending, which at times is used to bend wood, is not used by the company, says Programmer Travis Buchanan.
For surfacing Buchanan says, “When we do simple curved plywood as well as ones using compound angles, I need to mill those vacuum fixtures so the part seats properly in a particular location. I might be milling a vacuum jig in the shape of a human face for instance. In fact, if you’re sitting in an office chair right now, you most likely have a curved-plywood back inside that upholstery, and I’d machine those parts in that seat. I also machine all of the press forms that we press those parts in. Those surfaces are milled out on the router.”
Buchanan mentions that two features that he uses that are very important to him in Mastercam are Backplot and Verify. He uses them to make sure he doesn’t have a crash. He also likes the surfacing toolpaths in Mastercam. “I really like the five-axis toolpaths that are available. Being able to control the tool in a five-axis curve with line control has been a real useful feature for me. I like the fourth-axis buttons that I can lock the machine down to a four-axis cut. I really think the axis limitations was an efficient feature that Mastercam added. If I need to machine something, and say the knuckle on my five-axis is going to hit, then I can just tell it to not let the A axis go over 45 degrees, and modify the toolpath to hold that 45 degree angle with the A axis.”
Buchanan also mentions that there is a lot of support from Mastercam, including the Mastercam forum, and it’s all easy to use. “It does the job for me,” he adds.
With the addition of the CNS routers, Mastercam, and a digitizer, Burns Wood Products can now give its customers optimal choices to develop products and shorten lead times. The company’s goal is to continue to study technological advances and add them as necessary to stay ahead of the competition and give its customers quality products. |