Automated sawing & machining for Scottish fabricator
Pinefield Glass based in Elgin, Scotland, have just had a Stuga ZX3 installed and are already feeling the many benefits of automated sawing & machining for the first time. Fabricating the Eurocell Eurologik profiles Pinefield have been looking at automated sawing & machining for some time and chose Stuga for several reasons. In Scotland most fabricators talk to one another and it soon became apparent that with sixteen automatic sawing & machining centers in the Scottish market Stuga were the market leader by a long way.
Elgin has a very northerly position and it was vital for Pinefield to deal with a supplier that would be able to give them the back-up needed for their geographical situation. Stuga were well ahead of the competition in several respects with the most significant assets being as follows:-
- Stuga are the manufacturer rather than a dealer
- Stuga manufacture in the UK meaning they speak the same language and are in the same time
- Stuga use parts resourced in the UK so they don’t have to come from another country
- Stuga have six engineers in the field able to give back-up when needed
- Stuga have two additional engineers based at The Saw Center in Glasgow and available for urgent back-up when required. These technicians are properly trained on Stuga products by Stuga personnel
- Stuga sawing & machining centers have on-board camera systems as well as broadband diagnostics to give often critical help and get things moving very quickly when small issues occur
- Stuga software is written by Stuga using Microsoft Windows 7 (English language based) operating system and so is fully supported here in the UK
Pinefield Glass supply all sectors of the window and door market including retail, commercial, new build and trade so it is therefore important to the company that automation can be fully supported in order that the they can fulfill delivery promises on time. The Stuga ZX3 is capable of producing 650 to 700 windows per week and although this level of capacity is not yet required Pinefield are soon likely to grow as a result of this purchase.
The ZX3 comes with the Stuga rotary tooling system which gives it considerably more flexibility than fixed tooling heads with the ability to place a prep on any profile anywhere within three hundred and sixty degrees, profile by profile. The ZX3 also enjoys the benefits of a lateral buffer station working between the independent sawing and machining modules which means that sawing and machining almost never hold each other up as happens on machines with inline buffers or no buffer at all. It is this function that makes the ZX3 much faster than similarly sized machines that do not have this feature.
Once the Stuga warranty on the ZX3 expires Pinefield will be able to purchase the benefits of a service contract that is a major preventative maintenance feature offered to all Stuga customers. It is only the breadth and depth of Stuga backup that allows the company to provide this kind of total care option to its customers and be able to give a guaranteed fast call-out for those critical moments when things go wrong just at the worst possible time.