SHORTSVILLE, NY -  NEWwoodworks, the fine woodworking group at New Energy Works Timberframers, is expanding its custom woodworking capabilities with the addition of a Thermwood MTR-30 CNC router.

NEWwoodworks has specialized in handcrafted cabinetry, furniture, stairs, doors, and other custom designed interior furnishings. Incorporating the new CNC technology will increase the group’s flexibility in design and create greater efficiency...  Read the Entire Article at WoodworkingNetwork.com

Thermwood MTR 30 CNC Router

NEWwoodworks Thermwood MTR 30 Features:

• 18 HP vacuum pump
• Multi-function gridded vacuum top table
• Pop-up pins
• Touch screen
• Printer system
• 6 Position tool bar
• At-the-head tool changer

MTR 30 with Multi-function gridded vacuum top table

 MTR 30 with At-the-head tool changer

 Dimensions

This is a neat video from the HGTV Canada program "House of Bryan", showing the creation and installation of custom cabinets for host Bryan Baeumler's house. 

The machine making the cabinets is a Thermwood CabinetShop 45 with a 5×10 table, and is owned by Top Notch Cabinets, of Oakville, Ontario.

The members of projectione recently utilized the 3 Axis CabinetShop 45 CNC Router at Associated Fabrication in New York to create several cool projects.

The first is a combination of CNC Router and a set of drafting and art pens to draw abstracted versions of character sketches.  For more information on this process, please click here:

Click here for more information 

Bamco Custom Woodworking is a Thermwood machine owner:

Guelph Ont.-based cabinetmaker Bamco Custom Woodworking has received a $2.77 million loan from the Ontario government under the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Strategy (AMIS) program. Economic Development Minister Sandra Pupatello made the announcement in early October in Guelph.

"We proposed a project to the Ontario government whereby we would bring in some very high-end finishing equipment from Italy to help us create a 100% water-based finishing system," says Bamco president Bill Van De Ven. The equipment, he says, will also allow the company to create a high gloss buff-less finish. "Currently most high gloss finishes are sprayed on and then buffed to a gloss. This equipment that we bought is so advanced that you won't need to buff it - it will come out with a glass or mirror finish without the hands-on buffing."

Bamco will become one of the first manufacturers in North America to offer the environmentally friendly finishing process. "From a marketing standpoint we plan on targeting companies that would traditionally import that product from Italy or Germany - give them a North American solution," says Van De Ven.

Vice-president of business development, John Fazari says the finishing system also gives the company an edge with businesses in the U.S. "We're not competing with the American dollar so much as with the euro because this product is not available in Canada and the U.S. the way that it will be when we're finished."

Doug Weidner, brand director for Bamco's DolceMano cabinet series, says the new technology will allow them to offer a high quality "green" product. "It gives our dealers a huge advantage in the market."

The finishing system is expected to be up and running in early 2010. It's anticipated that it will help create approximately 70 jobs over the next five years.

Here is a reprint from an informative article published in Composites Technology about Bedford Reinforced Plastics and their application of Thermwood CNC Routers in cooling tower fabrication: 

Operators of chemical refineries, mining operations and power plants use cooling towers to reduce the temperature of process water that often contains corrosive chemicals. These large square or rectangular structures house equipment in which heated water trickles downward through filtration media while large fans draw air up through the wet media to transfer the heat to the atmosphere. Although cooling towers traditionally have been made with wood and concrete, composite materials are gaining acceptance due to their corrosion and rot resistance, light weight and ease of installation. "Redwood was used in the past because of its innate ability to resist rot. But, as good redwood became scarce, treated Douglas fir was substituted, and in addition to the negatives associated with the chemicals used to treat the wood, fir just couldn't hold up in the cooling tower environment," says Eric Kidd, cooling tower market manager at Bedford Reinforced Plastics (Bedford, Pa.).

Bedford has pultruded square tubes, angles, channels and deck board for cooling tower alternatives since the mid-1990s, says Kidd, including one of the world's largest - a 46-ft tall, 54-ft wide, 1,080-ft long (14.2m by 16.6m by 332m) structure at Barrick Goldstrike Mines Inc. in Carlin, Nev. Bedford supplied more than 600,000 lb (272 metric tonnes) of pultruded components made with Owens Corning Material Solutions' (Toledo, Ohio) continuous filament mat and E-glass roving, Ashland Inc.'s (Columbus, Ohio) fire retardant polyester and vinyl ester resins and polyester surfacing veil. Drilling the thousands of fastener holes and cutouts that enable assembly and fastening of the tower's skeletal structure is a huge challenge. For that task, Bedford employs five 3-axis, CNC-controlled routers from Thermwood Corp. (Dale, Ind.). Configured with overhead moving gantries, the machines have bed sizes that range from 5 ft by 10 ft (1.5m by 3m) to 5 ft by 40 ft (1.5m by 12.2m). According to VP of marketing Jason Susnjara, Thermwood is the only CNC router manufacturer that supplies its own controller programs with the machines, enabling customers to seamlessly integrate CAD/CAM designs with the controller and postprocessor.

Bedford considers automated drilling and cutting to be essential to optimizing finished-part production rates, hole consistency and location accuracy. The former, says Bedford, reduces product lead time, permitting the company to meet tight customer deadlines. The latter ensures that tower structures assemble correctly on site, without delays for part rework. 

Recently we asked ourselves a simple question - Why should someone purchase a Thermwood CNC Router over any of the other options on the market?  To us, this seemed like a no-brainer.  Of course they should purchase one of our machines, because they are superior to all the others, right?  Well, we think so, but that answer to such a simple question doesn't really explain anything about our advantages or help a potential customer understand the entire support system and huge range of unique tools and time-saving capabilities built into our control and machine.  We just take these powerful advantages for granted, and assume everyone knows about them....but how can they if we don't let them know?

Our next task was to come up with a concise listing of these features/advantages that could be easily understood without needing to go into complex detail just to explain everything to someone.  That proved to be easier said than done.  We stood back and started listing everything we have that gives our machines, control system, training and service and support programs a huge advantage over anything offered by our competition - it was a very long list! 

We spent the better part of a week refining this list into three main points (each also being broken down into further information).  The concise reasons we came up with are that someone should purchase a Thermwood CNC Router because we offer Better Machines with More Features and Better Support.  Anyone can say this, right?  But we can also prove it with facts.  To do this, we created a new area on our site that goes into further detail on this subject.  It breaks all of these areas down and explains everything in further detail. 

This exercise was a positive experience for us in helping to focus our message into a simple statement that includes everything a Thermwood customer receives as part of their machine purchase.  without sounding too "sales-like":

The bottom line is that Thermwood systems install fast, start up quick, are easier to use and maintain, produce more and last longer. 

The following two videos are provided by a customer of ours (John Cox's Creature Workshop - http://www.johncox.net/) in Queensland, Australia.  They show the creation of a character (Big Girl) on a Thermwood Model 67 CNC Router.  This character was used in a commercial for an Australian confectionary company.  The first video shows the making of the character and behind the scenes of the commercial shoot, and the second shows the final commercial.

When a customer purchases a Thermwood CNC Router, they become part of our large Thermwood Customer Family. We created this Thermwood Customer Family video to show our appreciation. This video has been updated to show our newest Thermwood Customer Family members with their Thermwood CNC machines in their facilities.