The story of this year’s TTJ trophies is one of timber and technology. It’s also about creativity in pandemic lockdown.
The trophy concept evolved out of multiple electronic exchanges of inspiration, ideas and sketches between the TTJ team and leading wood processing technology producer SCM, notably the latter’s showroom manager Duncan Smith who had the job of actually making the finished article.
The final design was very broadly based on the 1974 World Cup trophy, although, rather than 18 carat gold, fashioned in prime grade US maple and cherry, selected and sourced by the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), of which more later.
The trophies comprise a circular base and a curving flame-like upright piece, machined convex on the face and flat on the back. The TTJ and SCM logos, the award category and winners names are all precisely machined into the timber.
Mr Smith’s role is to demonstrate the capabilities and operation of SCM’s cutting edge machinery to potential customers, so you might think he would have had time on his hands during lockdown to dedicate to the task of producing the trophies. But not a bit of it.
“Understandably we haven’t had as many people visit our showroom for demos,” said Mr Smith. “But what we’ve done is mount cameras at key points around the machines so we can show them in operation remotely, including making components sent in by customers. It has worked better than we could have expected and demonstrations are actually up 25%, with a good proportion translating into actual sales. It seems that companies in the lockdown have been looking at their machining capacity and particularly their productivity and efficiency, and consequently decided to upgrade to new equipment.”
SCM wanted to use the trophy manufacture itself as a further demonstration of its CNC machining centres’ possibilities and the model it chose was the Accord 25FX.
“It’s a very versatile solid timber machine, which can be tailored to the needs of a wide range of users; from small to medium sized joinery workshops, to large-scale manufacturers, with work tables ranging up to 1680mm by 6360mm, and over in special execution,” said Mr Smith.
“It’s what we call a pod and rail machine. The vacuum cups, or pods, are mounted on rails, which can all move independently of each other. The operator loads the section of timber, then the machine takes it automatically to the part of the table where the head can work on it most efficiently. And it can work on completely different products at the same time. You could be making stair parts on one side, window components the other.”
The Accord range also features SCM’s Mach 5 device, which can switch tools in five seconds for minimal downtime, while the twin machining heads have independent routing units, the rear working through 3/4 axes, the front through 5.
In common with the wider Accord range, the machine’s PRISMA machining heads can work at up to 10° below the workpiece supporting surface, enabling them to operate around the component.
“The software is SCM’s Maestro 3D, which anyone with just the slightest acquaintance with a PC can quickly learn to use and which interfaces easily with other systems, such as Alphacam or AutoCAD,” said Mr Smith. “Once you’ve set up the profile, the machine establishes the toolpaths and you’ve got 100% precise repeatability.”
The 25FX generally is operator friendly, he added.
“We’ll hand hold customers in the commissioning period, but even users completely new to this sort of technology are soon up and running,” he said. “One window and door maker who bought an Accord previously pretty much just used coping saws and chisels, but after two or three weeks they were competent users. Making the leap from manual working to this level of automation transformed the business.”
To achieve the right degree of curve for the convex face of the trophies and, at the same time a smooth finish, the Accord’s machine head made multiple passes over and around the timber, front to back, left to right, then switching 45° to work bottom left to top right and vice versa.
“Another challenging aspect was the SCM logo routed into the base, which required a 230mm-long tool to work in an area 20mm wide,” said Mr Smith. “But we were very pleased with the end result. And once everything was set up, the machine was making the main body of the trophies in around five minutes, the bases in just two.”
The maple trophies actually took marginally longer than the cherry versions as the timber is that much harder, so the Accord 25FX was programmed to process it at a couple of metres per minute slower. But Mr Smith was impressed with the way both species worked and the finish achieved.
“The timber was really good quality,” he said. “No knots, no shakes, no sap. Lovely stuff!”
Which brings us to the selection of these two species for the trophies. AHEC put them forward as part of its ongoing focus on promoting use of a wider range of US hardwoods, with both maple and cherry less used across Europe than they were in the past.
“As they’re among the most prolific species in the US forest, we as an industry naturally want to sell more. We make no bones about that,” said AHEC European director David Venables. “But there’s also an irrefutable environmental case for utilising a wider selection of timber. To make sustainable use of the forest resource, we have to accept what it provides. We can’t keep consuming more of the same handful of species, or it will ultimately lead to supply stress.”
As part of its market education and communication drive for lesser used species, AHEC featured maple and cherry, plus red oak, in its recent Connected design project. This involved nine designers across Europe and in Japan creating furniture in these timbers in lockdown and liaising remotely with Benchmark Furniture in the UK to bring them to reality. And Benchmark supplied the timber for the TTJ trophies from the same stock as used in Connected.
Besides highlighting the aesthetic and technical performance potential of these hardwoods, AHEC used Connected to draw the attention of an increasingly environmentally sensitised market to the weight of evidence now available of their sustainability and legality.
This includes the organisation’s online interactive forest map, which shows US hardwood forest and species distribution, growth and timber removal. The principal commercial species are additionally backed by American Hardwood Environmental Profile (AHEP) documentation, which provides proof of origin, legality, sustainability and carbon footprint for any shipment to any destination worldwide.
The AHEC website also features its LCA tool, which can be used to calculate the range of environmental impacts resulting from the growth, harvesting, processing and transport of the range of species. This includes a calculator which tells you how long a cubic metre of a particular variety takes to regrow in the US forest: and it’s 6.12 seconds for cherry and 3.31 seconds for hard maple.
As part of its communication drive, further information on all the above, plus US hardwood grading, application case studies and more, has been included in its new Guide to sustainable American hardwoods publication.
So in short, the winners of the 2020 TTJ Awards will be recipients of trophies which, through state-of-the-art machining and environmental validation, are perfectly and demonstrably sustainably formed.
