Welcome to the first issue of PRODUCTIVITY TIPS, a series of three e-newsletters dedicated to helping professional woodworkers improve productivity, quality, safety and ultimately, the bottom-line of their businesses. PRODUCTIVITY TIPS is specially presented by the Wood Machinery Manufacturers of America in collaboration with Wood & Wood Products and Custom Woodworking Business magazines. Each issue features a compendium of valuable how-to tips, delivered in a Q&A format. Answers are supplied by resident experts of WMMA® companies.

As an added feature, the tail-end of each answer includes a hot-linked e-mail address of the expert responding to the question. This handy feature allows you to directly "ask an expert" any questions you might have on a related subject.

This month’s questions:

1. How can I maintain cleaner equipment when using today’s high-performance glues?
2. How can I prevent my wood pieces from shrinking and swelling?
3. What is oil carry over from a liquid ring vacuum pump?
4. I am using a frame saw (or band saw) for sawing veneers. My volume is growing and I can no longer keep up with my needs. What do you suggest?
5. How do I eliminate tear-out on my moulder?
6. Is cost the most important consideration when purchasing tooling?
7. Machining solid wood on a CNC router...
8. How can I prevent end splits and open glue joints?
9. Why should I use heat when applying sealer and topcoat finishes?
10. Is there a way to increase knife-life and decrease knife useage costs, while maintaining product quality?
11. How do we prevent burn marks when sanding?

Click here to see the PRODUCTIVITY TIPS archive.

Q: How can I maintain cleaner equipment when using today’s high-performance glues?

A: A glue release applied to a clean surface allows today’s aggressive glues to stick to the protective coating rather than the valuable application equipment. It makes daily, weekly clean-up easier. These temporary coatings need to be re-applied after each cleaning.

Ask an expert: e-mail Mike Ray, U•C Coatings, at miker@uccoatings.com

Q: How can I prevent my wood pieces from shrinking and swelling? My machine settings have to be changed constantly.

A: Wood shrinks and swells depending on how dry or humid the air is. A simple solution is to maintain a constant humidity at the plant and the raw wood warehouse to prevent wood from absorbing or releasing moisture.

Ask an expert: e-mail Michael Fonzo, Sales Manager, American Moistening Co., at mfonzo@amco.com

Q: What is oil carry over from a liquid ring vacuum pump?

A: Oil carry over is directly related to air velocity through the separator element in a liquid ring vacuum system. Vacuum levels are related to open space on a router table. Typically oil carry over will occur when a liquid ring vacuum pump's vacuum level drops below 15-inch HgV. This drop usually coincides with increased open area on the router table which increases the velocity through the vacuum pump especially the separator element.

Ask an expert: e-mail Peter S. Pfaff, Product Manager, Travaini Pumps USA at sales@travaini.com

Q: I am using a frame saw (or band saw) for sawing veneers. My volume is growing and I can no longer keep up with my needs. What do you suggest?

A: Those machines are great for very wide lamellas, but they are very slow. As your volume grows you may want to consider a double-vertical-arbor splitting-unit. Most of the top-line moulder manufacturers offer these machines. If your lamellas are up to about 3-inch-wide (species dependent) there is probably no yield difference between the technologies, and up to 5 inches or 6 inches is a tremendous productivity difference — 100 fpm compared to 5 fpm usually more than makes up for the very small kerf difference.

Ask an expert: e-mail John S. Schultz, President, Super Thin Saws Inc., at JSchultz@superthinsaws.com

Q: How do I eliminate tear-out on my moulder?

A: Try using helical tooling. To obtain an uninterrupted finish cut the tooling must be manufactured with one continuous blade (insert) with no splices. The helical blade will produce a smooth shearing action, like a scissors, when cutting. This cutting action will reduce tear-out in hardwoods, softwoods, irregular grain, MDF, LVL plastic, and with laminates.

Ask an expert: e-mail Ray Martin, Vice President of Operations, Great Lakes Custom Tool Mfg. Inc., at raym@glct.com

Q: Is cost the most important consideration when purchasing tooling?

A: When a decision is based solely on cost regardless of quality or value, the long-term cost usually turns out much higher. It's important to look at the quality and value of a product, as well as the overall cost of the tool. We have a customer that now buys a $9.50 cutter because our $49.00 cutter was too expensive. Yet, by their own records the $9.50 cutter needs to be replaced every two to three hours which involves 15 to 20 minutes of downtime. The $49.00 cutter ran for two days and was into the third day before requiring a change. The customer is happy to this day with his $9.50 cutters, but you do the math.

Ask an expert: e-mail Linda Wyant, VP, Her-Saf Products at linda@hersaf.com

Q: Machining solid wood on a CNC router most often requires a “dedicated vacuum fixture” to be created on the machine first to securely hold the lumber on the router’s vacuum table. While there are a variety of vacuum pods available on the market today they don’t always accommodate small thin solid wood parts.

Creating a vacuum fixture may take only 15 to 30 minutes on the router but if you need only one part you must add the fixture build time into your part processing time. This can make it counter productive to make that part on a CNC router and employees will have a tendency to gravitate back to manual methods such as band saws, shapers and hand routers. How can we speed this process up?

A: One common method of machining “one off” solid wood parts on a CNC Router is a technique known as “onion skinning” or “sand to release.”

Remove the MDF spoil board from your machine completely and place a rubber gasket into your grid table about 1-inch in from the perimeter of your solid stock. Place the material right on the machine table over the gasket and activate your vacuum valve to pull the stock flat to your router table. Program your part normally, but allow enough stock to leave a 0.010- to 0.020-inch membrane on the bottom of your material.

Once machining is complete release the vacuum and bring the material from the router over to a widebelt sander. Flip the stock over and set your sander to remove the membrane you have left intact. This is a very fast and effective way to produce solid wood parts when batch quantities are low and do not warrant building a fixture board or setting up pods.

Ask an expert: e-mail Steven Mehr, Manager of Applications and Training, Komo Machine Inc., at smehr@komo.com.

Q: I edge glue solid hardwood lumber into panels of various sizes and get a significant occurrence of end splits and open glue joints. How can I prevent this?

A: End splits whether in the wood or the glue line are caused by moisture movement out the end pores of the wood and the associated shrinkage of the wood across the grain. It is common with wood that is too high in moisture content and/or a manufacturing environment that is too dry. It is also more common with very porous species such as red oak. If the gluelines are either not fully cured or under excessive stress, they may fail before the wood splits. The solution is to either control the wood moisture content to the recommended 6-8% or humidify the plant to achieve 6 to 8% equilibrium moisture content. Sometimes sealing the ends with wax or covering the ends while post-curing, with damp burlap or rags will help.

Ask an expert: e-mail Kent Pitcher, President, CP Adhesives, at kpitcher@custompak.com

Q: Why should I use heat when applying sealer and topcoat finishes?

A: Heat will provide consistent temperatures all year around. It will also even out temperature fluctuations from the cool morning to the hot afternoon. Since the fluid is warmer the particles atomize easier. The less air needed to break up the paint particle means the lower you can go with your air pressure, thus improving your transfer efficiency. Because the material is more consistent, you can be consistent with reducing the paint and therefore you can apply a thicker film per pass without sacrificing quality. Less reducer means less HAP emissions. Heat also helps in accelerating cure times in 2K materials.

Heaters were once recommended for circulating lines, therefore small to medium shops tended to be excluded, but not any more. A one-pass heater has entered the market making consistent heat available for everyone.

Ask an expert: e-mail Richard J. Van Dort, Director of Market Development, Kremlin, at rich.vandort@exel-na.com

Q: Many companies use 4-wing cutterheads on 6,000 rpm "non-jointed" moulders, at feed rates of 30 to 40 feet per minute. In these situations, is there a way to increase knife-life and decrease knife useage costs, while maintaining product quality?

A: In many applications, for feed rates of less than 50 fpm, 2 cutting wings will work just as well or better than 4. At these slower feed rates, running a 4-wing head in many cases will actually cause the knives to run hotter and dull sooner than running a 2-wing head. Try replacing 2 opposing wings in 4-wing heads with "filler" or "dummy" knives that are ground down to the height of the cutterhead and balanced. Run a few test pieces and see if you are happy with the quality, if so, you may have just cut knife costs in half!

Ask an expert: e-mail Jim Coon, Regional Sales Manager, Terminus Technologies Inc., at terminusjimc2@comcast.net

Q: How do we prevent burn marks when sanding?

A: Try a cooler operating abrasive, such as the “Blue” alumina zirconia instead of the standard “Red” aluminum oxide for your sanding needs. The “Blue” abrasives will outlast and out-perform regular “Red” abrasives. The “Blue” offers 2 to 5 times the life of the “Red” abrasives. The “Blue” is a sharper mineral, more uniform in nature, giving a superior and more consistent sanded finish. The “Blue” also sands much cooler, dramatically reducing the possibility of burning/melting, especially beneficial when sanding challenging stock such as hard maple and cherry.

Ask an expert: e-mail Bill Schroeder, Sales and Marketing, SuperMax Tools, at bills@supermaxtools.com

The PRODUCTIVITY TIPS series is presented by the Wood Machinery Manufacturers of America (www.wmma.org) in partnership with Wood & Wood Products and Custom Woodworking Business (www.iswonline.com).

The opinions expressed are those of the individual companies responding to each question and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the WMMA, W&WP and CWB.