Weinig – Your Sustainable Construction Partner
Current trends to offsite manufacture have seen many different systems appear in the press, but the one that seems to be gaining the most traction is mass timber – principally in the form of cross laminated timber (CLT).
One of the most compelling reasons for architects to use CLT is its ability to be manufactured from local resources, further enhancing the green credentials of an already environmentally friendly product. To date, in the UK there is one large CLT manufacturing facility to be installed at the Legal & General Modular Homes factory near Selby. This multi-million investment includes an integrated Weinig CLT layer production line with a capacity of 160m3 per shift, but not every plant needs to be on such a large scale.
The Weinig Group, worldwide leaders in machines for solid wood processing, is the expert in the field of CLT production and offers plants from 5,000m3 per shift/year right through to large industrial plants of 50,000m3 per shift/year. While the scale of these is impressive, the fundamental steps of production remain the same in all cases. The first step in any production system is to grade the timber and remove any defects that fall outside desired quality criteria for each layer. In low volume production plants this process can be done manually using a Weinig Opticut S90 defect cutting saw, or using the latest scanning technology with a Weinig CombiScan scanner coupled with a very fast through-feed saw model Opticut 450+. The output from these saws is a defect-free material in random lengths, maximising material yield.
These boards are then transferred either manually to a Weinig Ultra finger jointer, or fully automatically to an HS3000 finger jointer in high-volume plants to create the appropriate finger profile with automatic glue application. The individual lengths are then pressed together to produce the long ribbon of material matched to the size of panel being produced – typically these can be between 6m and 20m in length. These individual boards are then accurately planed to precise dimensions and in perfect shape with perpendicular sides and parallel faces suitable for edge gluing. Speeds of planing can range from 20m/min to over 100m/min, subject to capacity requirements and are typically performed on a Weinig Powermat moulder.
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