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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Adverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
March 2018 #10224 Page #34
Technology, Progress, and Our Evolving Businesses The First in a Series on the Servo Revolution
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Steve Shrader, Business Development/Operations, Hundegger USA
echnology certainly has changed the way I do my job. In fact, in many ways, it’s changed the entire industry I’ve chosen to build a career in. When I graduated with a Construction Management Degree, the construction industry was wide open. But selling production saws for the Wood Frame and Heavy Timber world never entered my mind.
Back in the day, production saws were simple. Simple machines with hand cranked adjustments. Set-ups took time. The goal was to cut wood. A lot of wood. The term Sawyer was widely used in the industry to refer to someone who could keep the saw running. Sawyers created “cheat sheets” for each saw because you couldn’t trust the settings and they knew the tricks to maintain precise control. Now, we’re faced with a brave new world. But the goal of this article series is not to impress you with the advanced power of the servo—it is to impress upon you how technology is changing our businesses and our industry. We will all need to keep up, in one way or another.
Servo = The New Sawyer You’ve heard the word “servo” hundreds of times by now but probably haven’t spent much time thinking about the meaning. For a straight-up servo motor definition, we can turn to Wikipedia’s entry: “A servo motor is a rotary actuator or linear actuator that allows for precise control of angular or linear position, velocity, and acceleration.” That middle part is the most important— “allows for precise control.” And then look at what it can control—“position, velocity, and acceleration”—a powerful combination of elements. Taking that even farther, companies like Hundegger adopted the servo and computer numeric control (CNC) technology mainly to eliminate as much of the inaccuracies caused by human control tolerance, temperature changes, and wear in the mechanical saw system, and we strove to address how these conditions can affect performance. Then, added to this were two more abilities—monitoring to facilitate immediate adjustments and cataloging the unlimited data potential of CNC saws. So, it’s one thing to build an advanced product, but it’s another to have it accepted throughout an industry. In 2003, Hundegger decided to enter BCMC as an exhibitor with just a video. I will never forget when one of the most well known manufacturers of the multi bladed saws told me, “That idea will never work in the Truss Industry.” It was fun. Soon after that, the light bulb went off, and the same equipment manufacturer was building his version of a single blade machine. Servo motors improved accuracy by 30 times, and without a sophisticated hand cranked control. The industry realized that there was a whole new world of opportunities in search of tighter tolerances and faster set-ups. PHONE: 800-289-5627
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