Faced with growing order quantities and an industrywide shortage of skilled labor, many North American manufacturers have no choice but to automate wherever possible. This challenging situation has certainly been the case with Stove Builder International Inc. (SBI), a 350-plus employee company with production and distribution facilities throughout the United States, including South Bend, Ind., and Madison Heights, Va., as well as its 300,000-sq-ft (27,871-sq-m) headquarters and manufacturing center in Quebec City, Canada.
SBI is well-known for its extensive offering of wood stoves and fireplaces, which it began producing in 1960. Through numerous acquisitions, the company now represents Osburn, Drolet, Englander and several other brands of residential wood-burning appliances.
In late 2017, majority ownership of SBI passed to The Empire Group, parent company of Belleville, Illinois.-based Empire Comfort Systems. It was about this time that SBI began to see increasing demand for its products, a trend attributable to online sales, name recognition and expanded distribution.
Heating Up
Success doesn’t come without obstacles, however. Within a few years, SBI’s management analyzed the growth trajectory and decided to meet it head-on by investing in additional production capacity. As an established user of laser cutting machines and punch presses from machine tool builder Trumpf Inc. of Farmington, Conn., the company didn’t have far to look.
Engineering Manager Jonathan Vincent and Maintenance Manager Hugues Bergeron were part of the team that helped select the new machine, a TruLaser Center 7030, described by Trumpf as “the first full-service” laser cutting machine. “Roughly two-thirds of our parts are made from 3/16″ to 1/4″ thick mild steel,” Vincent says. “Our old CO2 laser couldn’t keep up, so we needed a machine that was not only more powerful but could deliver higher edge and surface quality.
Trumpf’s 12-kW fiber laser met both of these needs, producing close to double the previous output while eliminating the edge oxidation that typically occurs when cutting steel with a CO2 laser.
But just as importantly, SBI also wanted a machine that could automatically separate the parts from the sheet remnant or skeleton, then either drop them into sorting bins underneath or, for larger parts, pick them up from the machine table and stack them nearby. Because SBI has a STOPA large-scale material storage system (also from Trumpf), integration was equally necessary.
Visiting the Windy City
Andreas Bunz is the TruLaser Center 7030 integration team lead and head of operations at Trumpf’s Smart Factory facility in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. He makes a strong argument for the SBI’s “full service,” noting that the system was developed to address the complete laser cutting process, from drawing the workpiece and nest to delivering sorted and stacked parts, and does so with minimal operator involvement.
“Often with 2D lasers, if you cut small or complex parts with inner contours, there’s a lot of manual work required afterward,” Bunz explains. “Someone needs to break the parts out of the sheet, sort them into bins or pallets, and then move the skeleton to a scrap location, all of which is both time-consuming and error-prone.
“The TruLaser Center flips this traditional sheet-processing concept upside down,” he continues. “It comes equipped with a brush table and a SmartGate that smoothly drops parts up to 160-mm square into sorting bins beneath the machine, and because we support the sheet and parts throughout the cutting process, there’s no need for micro-joints or the risk of ‘tip-ups’ that can otherwise occur.”
Bunz adds that Trumpf has taken the “hands-off” concept one step further with a SmartLift function for large, heavy parts that don’t fit through the gate. In SBI’s case, these parts sometimes weigh as much as 70 lbs. (32 kg) and measure several feet across. Yet Guy Valois,v ice president of operations , brings up another crucial consideration when purchasing the new machine, one that echoes what Bunz stated earlier about minimizing operator involvement—reduced sanding.
“Many of the parts we produce on the TruLaser Center are customer-facing and need a nice surface finish,” Valois says. “The brush table prevents the scratching that typically occurs on machines that use slats or honeycombs to support the material. And since we no longer need micro-tabs to hold parts in place during cutting, there’s far less cleanup work on the edges.”
However, Vincent notes that his engineering team has paid a small price for these benefits. “The way you program the 7030 is a bit different than with our other lasers,” he says. “As Guy mentioned, we no longer have to use micro-tabs, so this has simplified the process somewhat. But with some of the parts, we’ve had to adjust the geometry slightly, as well as their position and orientation within the nest. “
Because the sheet moves rather than the laser—much like on a punch press—users must be more aware of traverse speeds with thin gauge material to ensure that the small skeleton between pieces doesn’t buckle, Vincent stresses.
“Even so, Trumpf’s Boost programming software did most of the heavy lifting. It wasn’t a huge adjustment for us,” he says.
The North Star
None of this comes as a surprise to Bunz. “The machine was developed as a standalone solution. That’s the big picture. You load a bundle of 5,000 kilograms or five tons of material and come back the next morning to sorted, stacked, ready to weld or bend parts.
“That said, it’s not the right choice for every shop,” Bunz cautions. “If you were to visit me at our Smart Factory in Chicago and say, for example, that you wanted to replace two older lasers with a single machine but were unsure of your future needs, I might point you to one of our other, less complex laser-cutting machines.”
That’s not the answer one might expect when machine shopping, but Bunz goes on to explain that the TruLaser Center is intended to be part of a comprehensive improvement strategy. It’s for shops that wish to expand their capabilities with additional automation and integration with other capital equipment, eventually leading to a lights-out production environment in which laser-cut parts are sorted, stacked, and ready for the next operation.
“We see this as the North Star for manufacturers pursuing a larger vision,” Bunz says.
The team at SBI-International is looking toward that North Star. The TruLaser Center 7030 became operational in late 2022. With the learning curve well behind them, they can now operate the machine unattended about half the time. Their two punch presses and two laser cutters—the 7030 among them—are already attached to the STOPA, as are some of the welding robots and, equally important, the company’s enterprise resource planning system.
The next step in the company’s efficiency journey is integrating the laser cutting system with its press brakes and welding line, a project that will be made much easier given SBI’s investment 14 years ago in the STOPA material handling system.
“By bringing in the remaining equipment,” Valois says, “we can look forward to a well-integrated production system, a central part of our long-term strategy for efficient, highly automated and increasingly lights-out processing of the components needed to manufacture our high-quality wood stoves and fireplaces.”
For more information on Trumpf visit www.trumpf.com or call 860-255-6000. For more information on Stove Builder International Inc. visit www.sbi-international.com or call 877-356-6663.
