3 min read
When you’re working in high-volume window & door manufacturing, every detail matters—and every minute of downtime costs real money. From sawdust clogging up tooling to constant material changes, manufacturers face unique challenges that most outside industries never even think about. In this video, we break down how our quick-release tooling, active depth control, and intelligent screw feeding systems are solving those real-world problems on the shop floor—and why innovation like this is what keeps us excited to keep pushing the category forward.
Check out this video or read the transcript below to learn more:
It doesn't matter what you do with these things; there's sawdust everywhere. You go on a sales call or a service call, and you are literally knocking the sawdust off. That's just how it is. It smells good anyway!
One of the interesting things is that it really fouls the tooling up, bad. We have done some things to mitigate that. We have some air jets and so forth that are blowing air in certain areas to keep them clean. But, in the end, every few days you have to take them apart and at least hose them off.
Quick-Release Tooling
Going back to the quick-release tooling, it's very, very quick. I know that with a lot of our competitors, you have to get the tool maker out there or a maintenance guy with tools and take the thing apart… Time is money, right?
All that downtime is ticking away, and it’s costing the customer more and more. You think of the screwdriver that you put in place; some of the screwdrivers we have are 25 years old. Look what we’ve done to reduce the exposure for the customers due to downtime for just maintenance alone. It's a huge impact on the bottom line.
Understanding Industry Struggles
There are some pretty big names at Home Depot and Lowe's of companies that make windows and doors, and we pretty much exclusively do all the screwdriving for those companies. We have learned a lot from that, too.
For example, you will have a window company that wants to manufacture oak windows at eight o’clock in the morning and pine windows at ten o’clock in the morning. Of course, two different woods, two different hardnesses; what do you do? You really can’t go to torque, you have to go to position, and you have to drive the screw to a certain depth. That's where the active depth comes in. It’s very, very important.
Only to be coupled with six or seven colored screws. You might have the alabaster screw or the green screws. So, now it complicates the feeding. They can either take the whole feeder and empty it out and make sure they put the right ones in, or we can sell them multiple feeders for the various colors. And, we can do color recognition on the feeders to make sure the screws are the correct color before we send them out to the screwdriver.
That's what excites us, that’s what kind of keeps us going. Each one of these industries has something unique and very important to them that most other industries couldn't care less about. It's been really a lot of fun coming up with those solutions over time for these various industries.
