Thread: Automated milling and joinery

Here's a link to a short youtube clip of the automated milling and joinery machine described in the first post of this thread.
First minute or so it's just docking the ends of roofing beams at an angle. If you look closely at the ends of the beams being held in place you can see the circ saw come up from under the bench.

At about the one minute mark the clip switches to where my cousin stuck a shorter test piece in and did a couple of things with the other tools.

1) Preps the curved splayed end with the cutting rotor.
2) Drills a rounded mortise in the side with a big drill bit
3) Drills some holes
4) Cuts a tenon on the end with the rotor
5) Rotates the piece by 90º
6) Finishes the curved splayed end using the big router tool

If you hang out to the end you can see a nice close up of the curved splayed end.

Sorry the video is not that clear. It was made with a cell phone mostly behind a dusty safety screen - and with that sort of rotating metal you can see why I was keen to stay behind the screen.

The language being spoken is the local dialect.

Oh yeah and here is the link.

Here is their latest project.
Bridge.jpg

It's an 30 m long single span covered wooden bridge.
Bridge2.jpg

The main support is provided by the 2 full length curved (25 m long) laminated side members which are 300 mm thick and 900 mm high.
Bridge3.jpg

Here is the setting for the bridge. It was taken to the site on a truck - the rear steerable jinker of the truck was only physically connected to the prime mover by the bridge itself and a control cable - this enabled the truck to get through some very tight turns in the valley.
Bridge4.jpg
Thos mountains behind are the Palle di San Martino.

And some detail of the bridge itself. All of those curves and joints are cut by the machine.
bridgedetail.jpg

Along the sides of the bridge will be suspended these wooden flower boxes - these were also carved automatically by the machine and then assembled by hand.
flowerBoxes.jpg

Their bread and butter is roff replacements and When they replace them they usually keep some of the oldest dates carved on the previous roof beams to see if their roof outlasts the previous one. Trouble is they will be dead by the time they have to replace theirs!
oldeRefuges.jpg

All of sawdust generated by the machines are fed into a hopper like this.
sawdust.jpg

And fed to a furnace which they use to heat the factory in winter.
furnace.jpg

Waste wood and old rooves and wood are chipped and recycled through the furnace and the heat also supplies other factory units shown in the background here - they also built all the rooves of those factories. They make as much money selling heat to nearby factories and houses as they do from the rooves.
waste.jpg

It was a fascinating visit and I wish I had taken more and clearer photos of the machine itself operating although much of its operation is hidden.

Incredible! Thanks for sharing that Bob, it puts a perspective on things.

The wood is all local alpine timber(White or Red Abete [Picea abies] and Larch).
There are some dozen mills and major woodworking plants up and down the valley. Like most houses and premises in the Alps the premises are incredibly tidy.

Here are 3 mills close together
Woodvalley.jpg
X is RC Legno

Here is a close up of Y which is the mill my dad worked in from when he was 13 till he went to Australia in the 1950's
tidymill.jpg

Here are some Abete logs at that sawmill.
sawmilllot.jpg

The situation with woods here is very interesting. For hundreds of years and up until WWII the locals used to run 3-4-6 cows per family. The method they used was the typical alpine meadow system run all across Europe. Families would group cattle together in small herds and take them up to mountain meadows in late spring and leave them there for summer and part of autumn, and then bring them back to stables for the winter. Large sections of mountain meadow were mown (by hand) to generate hay for the winter.

Mountain meadows are not all natural and large areas of woods had to be cleared to create pastures. Heating was (and to some extent still is) by wood so keeping the meadows clear provided pasture and wood. Here's some roadside timber waiting to be picked up for milling.
Pickuplogs.jpg


Typical firewood stashes for the winter.
firewood.jpg
These are the off cuts from another cousins joinery business
IMG_6603.jpg

These days most cows are housed in intensive lots and fed grain and other feed so mountain meadows are no longer used. As a result they are reverting very quickly to woods. The woods are recovering so quickly that within another 50 or so years most of the mountain meadows will have reverted to forest. So these meadows now generate significant amounts of forest which is superbly managed to a sustainable level. They generate enough wood for themselves and even export some to other parts of Europe.

They also use every bit of the trees they take down and chip the waste to run large thermal electric generators to generate electricity and hot water for heating. I visited one of these big wood chip heating plants and will post some pics about it when I get the rest of my photos sorted.

Here are a few more pics which feature wood.

Here are some typical houses showing use of timber in balconies and ballustrades.
Balconies.jpg

This is the joinery cousins place
PPhouse.jpg
This houses look big but they also probably house 2-3 families each.

Wow, Bob, that's amazing. What, if any handwork goes into this or is it really just Lego in wood? I do worry about whether anyone other than hobbyists will have hand skills in a few generations...
thanks for sharing

Fascinating - loved it - many thanks for putting it up.

Originally Posted by jmk89

Wow, Bob, that's amazing. What, if any handwork goes into this or is it really just Lego in wood? I do worry about whether anyone other than hobbyists will have hand skills in a few generations...
thanks for sharing

Yes - it is all lego - they even use the LEGO term themselves. We have had this discussion on the forum several times before and yet when you see it I contend this is still a very highly skilled operation in many ways.

Like any wood work, the primary skill is in the design. For my cousins this means create a correct design and the machine will cut it correctly. I asked Rocco how many mistakes the machine has made and he said regular servicing and maintenance means the machine has made zero mistakes in the 5 years or so they have had it.

All the mistakes are made by the designer or operator, so the constructing carpenters have had to fix quite a few in the early days. This is no different to the other important woodworking skill of "recovering from mistakes". Because of this, these guys are still pretty hand skilled, whipping up a perfectly workable blind angled dove tail in a 300 x 150 mm beam using a small chainsaw and a 1.5" chisel! The other interesting "recovery" tool they have a is a portable hand bandsaw that can make a cut that is about 450 mm deep. They used to cut curved splayed ends. However, as the mistakes become fewer and fewer these days most contracts go through without a hitch so hand skills are definitely dropping away.

While the assembly is foolproof (every joint is numbered), fast efficient assembly still very skilled - eg some designs are quite complicated and knowing what to do when is still skilled.

What the machine enables them to do more often is more complicated joinery like the half blind angled dovetails that give angled structures more strength.

Like most changes in technology I reckons it's a case of shifting the skill set to different skills. There is no question the final product works extremely well for the user even if it is less satisfying to people like us

Thanks for the post. I found it really interesting!

I wonder if we have toys like that over here?

Good pics Bob, keep them coming.

Originally Posted by Pat

I wonder if we have toys like that over here?

Good pics Bob, keep them coming.

These machines are made by a company called Hundegger www.hundegger.com and according to their website are setting up an Australian website.

Many thanks for that Bob. It's always good to see stuff from other countries. You are right about that view from the front door - who would want to leave that valley..... or do any work!

That was brilliant, thanks Bob. I love the bridge.

thanks for showing those photos Bob, it would be interesting to know how they started and moved into massive machinery like they have. It's a long way from a chain saw and chisel. and what a wonderful part of the world.
les

Very interesting Bob, thanks for that.