FDM - May 2008

fdmonline.com

Cut pieces being offloaded from angular saw. HFL 33 features t win saw carriage, strip collector, and beefed-up material handling for input and output.

Laminated panels queued up for the angular saw. Greater capacity reduces forklift traffic and results in predictable output.

on saw efficiency

Cardell Cabinetry is changing its focus from builders to designers, with the goal of building a kitchen at a time.

“This company changes fast to meet demand, and it’s very responsive,” says Tom Moodie, director of manufacturing. Moodie adds that Cardell should be classified as more than semicustom. “If the customer wants an unusual cabinet, we’ll build it,” he says.

“We are focusing on moving from a builder mentality to the dealer business,” he says. “That will get us into the whole new world of kitchen at a time.”

Cardell is an integrated cabinet manufacturer, starting with dimension lumber and ending with a finished cabinet. Orders come in daily, are broken down into routings and cutlists, and two weeks later the cabinets are built and loaded into trucks.

“We want to make what the market demands,” Moodie says. “Right now, there’s more demand for a glazed finish, so we just changed our entire standard overlay product line so we can glaze a standard overlay product.”

Cardell’s primary operation in San Antonio includes a 450,000 square foot main building and more than one million square feet of space overall,

including the rough mill, flat

mill, (panel processing), laminating, door assembly, finishing, cabinet assembly and a separate drawer box operation named Timko, after the San Antonio street on which it’s located. A separate plant in El Campo, Texas, makes lower-end products.

Due to the housing slowdown, Cardell is down to one shift, which produces about 4,000 cabinets a day. There are 1,400 total employees, including 1,100 in manufacturing.

Closeup of screen showing jobs in progress. Automation and large capacity increase efficiency.

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Flat mill

Cardell’s biggest recent addition is the Holzma HFL 33 angular saw system. It has over two times the capacity of Cardell’s rear load saws, uses less space and less manpower, and has a built-in waste management system and off stacking system that is ergonomic and production oriented.

Brian Kosa, director of panel processing and door assembly, says that everything in the flat mill starts with incoming plywood or raw particleboard, much of which is laminated on a Harlan double-side line, or a Monco machine for thin material. Laminated pieces then go to panel processing, where they are cut to size. In addition to the angular saw, there are three HPL 33 Holzma saws.

“All of the heavy mill or Kanban products go through one of our two Celaschi double end tenors, one of which is dedicated to wall end panels, which also applies edgebanding, and