BLUE OX COMPONENTS - MIDDLESEX, N.C.

Material Flow Challenge:

Client with wide variety of truss building applications recognized a material flow bottleneck behind his automated saw. His original method of stacking lumber required (2) men to be in attendance to manually handle longer and larger cuts of lumber without risks of injury. His catchers were manually stacking onto a set of out-feed rollers. He wanted to reduce his labor investment by half and improve his productivity.

Equipment Solution:

A PCS design was implemented that integrated the existing out-feed roller system with an Atlas Auto-Stacker. The automated stacker exceeds the production requirements at (60) boards/minute, and stacks a broad range of lumber lengths from 3' to 20'. Lumber is auto-stacked on to powered rollers for further processing in a fashion similar to the original system.

System Benefit:

Client assessment of system described above includes both client goals. His production expectations for this particular saw and crew are consistently met by eliminating the bottleneck effect created by manual stacking. And he currently has (1) individual monitoring the machine stacking operation that originally required (2) people performing back-breaking repetitive motions.