Daniel Taylor Ltd. of Congleton, Cheshire, installed the top of a range new technology Weinig Variomat moulder/ tenoner recently, to manufacture high specification windows and joinery for their quality, top of the market new build bespoke homes, and for restoration work. Since then the Variomat performance has exceeded their expectations, and has provided major benefits in production flexibility, speed of production, quality of finish, accuracy and repeatability.
Daniel Taylor Ltd has over 30 years experience in the building trade and joinery manufacture. The small company comprise just seven skilled people – all hands-on – including David Taylor at the helm. They get involved at the design stage, if required, and work alongside architects and designers. With their wealth of experience in a wide variety of projects, they can also advise on technical and historical aspects if needed.
The company are very successful and busy and have a full order book for future work. They therefore decided to look into the benefits that new technology machinery could bring, without having to increase the size of the company. Once they saw the Variomat in action at a demonstration at Weinig in Germany, they knew immediately, it was ideal for their purposes.
The Variomat fitted with the work done in their joinery workshop, where they produce windows, doors, architectural mouldings, kitchens, bedroom and bathroom furniture – in short, everything needed for their buildings. It clearly met the highest customer specification standards required.
Previous to installing the Variomat, they used traditional woodworking methods and standard machinery – all done by hand: marking out, planing, mortising, tenoning, and spindle moulding. And all requiring a lot of time to set up and a high degree of skill. It took three weeks to make a batch of sashes and frames for 50 casement windows. Now, with the Variomat, it takes just one week.
The Variomat at Daniel Taylor has five moulding heads and a fold-away tenoning package, plus all the features of the top of the range model featuring: a memory system with a capacity of up to 99 dimensions; and PowerLock HSK tooling on two heads with conventional cutter heads on the three others. This allows profiling and tenoning on one machine, thus replacing four separate standard machine operations.
The tenoner package comprises a multi- function table and all the necessary tenoning equipment to produce any longitudinal or end-tenon – on one machine. This give a major advantage in making windows, solid doors and door frames, cabinet doors and bespoke joinery orders. The tenoning assembly folds away quickly into the lower machine casing at the front of the machine and can be placed on the machine table when tenoning is required, in a matter of minutes.
“The Variomat has made a huge difference to productivity. We can manufacture orders much faster than before, to a higher standard of quality, accuracy and consistency. At present we are concentrating on windows, but are tooling up for doors and kitchens next. I’m very impressed with the ease with which we are producing everything”, said Mark Buxton, workshop manager.
