Austrian natural furniture manufacturer Team 7 relies on the COLLEVO+ belt sanding unit from BENZ Tooling for sanding the edges of solid wood panels for its furniture products.
This has reduced the capacity required for the edge sanding machine, thereby increasing overall productivity in production.
Austrian natural wood furniture manufacturer Team 7 made a name for itself in the 1980s as a pioneer in the production of ecologically manufactured natural wood furniture. What makes Team 7 furniture so special is that the entire value chain is controlled by the company—from trees in its own 74-hectare forest to a sawmill, a panel factory, and two furniture factories, right through to sales in its own flagship stores or through partners in over 30 countries worldwide. The company consistently follows the “green path” and stands for combining eco-consciousness with contemporary lifestyle in its furniture.
„Thanks to decades of experience, we can meet every customer requirement individually. Our furniture is unique. It is the result of state-of-the-art technology—such as machines and aggregates—combined with craftsmanship."
Stefan Weilbold, Head of Operations Engineering at the Ried plant at Team 7
Production takes place on six different machining centers and three drilling machines. The batch sizes of the individual parts produced are rather small, at 1-2 pieces. This is due to the fact that the variety of parts increases with individual customer requirements. A total of around 650,000 individual parts are produced on the CNC machines each year—and the trend is rising.
„Machines and tools are usually designed for standard processes. However, Team 7 manufactures furniture that is individually tailored to customer requirements – this is one of the biggest challenges we face in production. Due to the wide variety of requirements, our units must be universally applicable. Only then can customer requirements be optimally met.
The many variants mean that a lot of tools are needed, which in turn means long set-up times. That's why we think very carefully about which tools really make sense."
Simon Hohensinn, Team leader CNC
The purchase of the COLLEVO+ belt sanding unit from BENZ Tooling really made sense for Simon Hohensinn. Previously, large and bulky wooden parts had to be sanded by hand using an edge sanding machine. Depending on the size of the wooden parts, this required up to two employees.
With the CNC belt sanding unit, the edges can now be sanded fully automatically on the CNC machine, requiring only one employee to work on the edge sanding machine. The other employee was assigned to another task. “After all, there is plenty of work for us,” says the team leader. “Overall, we were able to shorten our production flow thanks to the belt sanding unit, as manual processing was drastically reduced.”
Another advantage of the unit is that it eliminates the risk of damage to the heavy natural wood panels during transport from the CNC machine to the edge sanding machine.
At first, Simon Hohensinn and his CNC programmer Thomas Aigner encountered some initial difficulties. “We had zero experience in machine sanding on a CNC machine. Hardwoods such as cherry and walnut caused us particular problems.” The result was unsightly longitudinal marks.
But the clever Team 7 tinkerers soon got to the bottom of the “problem”: the oscillation speed at which the unit removes material in conjunction with the feed speed. “Once we understood the connection, we simply wrote a program for the machine software that regulates the feed and oscillation speed depending on the type of wood,” Thomas Aigner reports proudly.
Through this learning-by-doing approach, the team built up enormous expertise in CNC sanding over time. “Today, we even sand panels with a thickness of up to 78 millimeters, which is very, very thick.”
BENZ units were introduced into Team 7's production line back in 2000, when the company purchased its first HOMAG machine. Some of these units are still in use today, 20 years later. “The units are very reliable; we've never had any major problems,” reports CNC team leader Simon Hohensinn. For this reason, the company will continue to rely on BENZ Tooling's unit technology in the future.
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BENZ Tooling is one of the world's leading manufacturers and suppliers of components and systems for tool and machine tooling technology. The company employs about 300 people and is represented in over 30 countries worldwide.
