SCM fit-out for NT Joinery

Well known Waikato kitchen and joinery manufacturer NT Joinery recently reorganised their factory space to reflect its separate operating sectors of kitchen manufacture, solid timber work and aluminium joinery. Alongside the reorganisation they made a substantial investment in machinery upgrade, purchasing several SCM machines from NZ SCM agent Machines R Us. We spoke to co-owner Leroy Ward about the effect on his business.

“We needed to upgrade our machinery and manufacturing methods in our panel processing and solid timber work,” says Leroy. “We were running two smaller CNC’s in our kitchen business which were ageing and prone to breakdown and the solid timber side of our business in interior doors and coffin manufacture had far too much manual labour involved in it to be competitive.”

“We liked the look of the machinery on offer in these areas from the SCM brand and in talking to local agents Machines R Us found they had a model in their showroom that suited our kitchen requirements and timing requirements perfectly. We ended up buying that, a Morbidelli X200 nesting cell for our kitchen work and a Morbidelli M100 5-axis pod & rail, along with a wide SCM SD60 planer sander for our solid timber work.

“The Morbidelli X 200 has auto labelling and auto load/unload which on there own justify the purchase. The main saving here for us is labour, the auto loading is brilliant it picks up a sheet off the stack, automatically pre labels it and then drags it onto the flat bed, while that is being cut it selects and labels the next sheet, then pushes the cut components off the machine and the cycle repeats, virtually all we have to do is offload.

“This constitutes a radical change for us, previously both our CNC’s were going full time and 3-4 people were required to keep up, now we are only needing to run the Morbidelli X200 for around 40% of the day with nowhere near the same labour requirement.

“We purchased the Morbidelli M100 5-axis pod & rail to grow our interior door business and revive the competitiveness of our coffin manufacturing, both areas where previously we had been doing a lot of work by hand. It is a wicked machine, very cool and has made a big difference to our competitiveness in this area.

“It is incredibly accurate, very fast and able to do a lot more process work such as cut-outs which previously were very labour intensive. We weren’t competitive in much of this work before and had almost given our coffin manufacture away, now we are looking to expand. We also purchased the SCM SD60 planer sander to run alongside this machine, we are able to take panel straight off the sander and on to the CNC again time saving and a simpler process.

“The install of the machines went well which was no easy feat given the covid restrictions and difficulties around at the time.

Daniel Kees from Machines

R

Us was very good to work with, very attentive and proactive in ensuring everything was bedded down. It helped that we had CNC experience and are using the same software in Cabinet Vision, which we have been using for 4-5 years and fits well with the onboard software in these machines.

“The improvements for the timber and panel side of our business across both these Morbidelli’s have been substantial, increased capacity, improved quality, less labour content and more reliability.

“All of which means we have the efficiency required to maintain and grow with our customers ensuring that we meet their demands in this ever growing market while trying to minimise the disruption of supply to our customer as much as possible in this climate