FDM - November 2006

The first automated line Royal
Cabinets installed in 2003 for its
frameless cabinets is the Biesse
Stream combination panel
line, which has five separate
machines that handle all the
panel processing after the
panels are cut to size plus 4mm
on a Holzma panel saw.

The panel processing system has a bi-lateral feeder in an L-shape because it’s twice as long as the room it’s in. The room would not accommodate the unit placed end-to-end.

for frameless cabinets

that handles a number of operations, including building the face frames for the company’s face-frame line of cabinets.

Improving accuracy

“We wanted to get better accuracy and tolerances of the sizes of our parts, because with frameless cabinets the tolerances are so small that your panels need to be the right size and squared,” says Smith. “By going to that line, we picked up accuracy, speed and easily took care of bottlenecks.”

The first automated line the company installed in 2003 is the Biesse Stream combination panel line, which has five separate machines that handle all the panel processing after the panels are cut to size, plus 4mm on a Holzma panel saw. The line has a supervisory computer that communicates to the five machines information that it receives from a group barcode ticket. “The supervisor computer communicates to those other

machines about the part it’s running and sets up automatically,” says Smith.

To maximize efficiency, parts are grouped together with machining information on one work ticket. There is a feeder, two edgebanders, a horizontal boring machine, a horizontal doweling machine and a stacker.

The edgebanding line is set up a little differently. Most edgebanding lines are set up with two edgebanders set side by side on either side of a turner in order to edgeband all sides of a part. “We have a bi-lateral feeder, so it’s in an L-shape, and the reason we did this is because it’s twice as long as the room,” says Roan. “The size constraints of the room that it was going in wouldn’t allow it to go in a straight line.” The performance of the machine was unaffected by the altered configuration.

Some parts don’t require all machining operations. “If it’s a part,

Phone time clock

What do you do when you have 90-plus hourly employees in the field? How do you keep track of them, their hours, the trucks that are carrying your cabinets and the jobs that are being done?

Royal Cabinets is using phones that have a data plan and a GPS function. “For all the hourly people there will be a time and attendance application on their phone, so they’ll use it as their time clock,” says Clay Smith, president of the company, located in Pomona, Calif. “In addition

to clocking in and time-stamping, it’s also taking their GPS location and giving it to us, so we know if they’re on the job or not. And then when they move to another job, we’ll know that, too. We’ll actually take their time and do job costing and divide up their time accurately by the jobs that they’re on.”

When trailers are picked up or dropped off, the phone has a function to indicate that. There is also a barcode on the trailer that is scanned in.

like a side or an adjustable shelf that doesn’t get doweled, those parts just flow through the horizontal boring, no operations happen and it just acts as an expensive conveyor,” says Smith. “When it does have to bore and dowel, we don’t have to double handle it. And we don’t need a whole secondary line to move to for different operations. For us it works well. It saves on another feeder and stacker and it saves on space.”

Doing things in stages

Royal started the automation process with an end in mind. It was only after the panel processing system was complete and working that the company could bring aboard the assembly line, which does all the hinge and glides assembly, as well as gluing.