A cool thing we've just completed is adding our Production Sharing Members to Google Earth.  Google Earth is a free download, and once you have it, you can click on the Production Sharing Members map of your choice and view all of the Members that list their services on an interactive map.  This tool allows you see see at a glance Members who are in your area.

For more information, please visit the Production Sharing Area our website.

About Production Sharing - This is a free listing service that Thermwood offers any of our CNC Router Owners where they can list their production services and allows any eCabinet Systems Member or other interested parties to contact these Production Sharing Members and have their jobs machined out on a CNC Router quickly and cost-effectively. 

AWFS^®Fair 2009 announced that the most recent show, "proved to be the place for the entire woodworking community to come together, show support and strengthen the industry.  Exhibitors reported strong buyer interest, especially from international delegations." 
 
"The show exceeded my expectations by far; our sales have been great," Gaspar Tellez from Laguna Tools, Irvine, Calif. wrote in a post-show survey.
 
AWFS said that it added value to the show with new features on the show floor like the Green Desk, smartSHOP and shredding program and had a strong line up of educational seminars. The new features were a huge success and will be expanded and enhanced in the years to come. AWFS, along with exhibitors WEIMA America and Delmac, also showed local support with donations of products made at the Fair to several Las Vegas charities, including The Animal Foundation, The Springs Preserve, Greener Vegas and Habitat for Humanity.
 
"The show was much better than we expected.  We came in hopes of gaining market share so that when things turn around we'll be a few steps ahead of our competition," said Mike Serwa from Vortex Tool Company, Schofield, Wis.
 
Guatemala and Mexico proved to be the two most active international delegations, in terms of purchase orders, according to Ana Druk, who heads AWFS' International Buyer Program.  Buyers from the two countries were on the show floor each day, making purchases of both equipment and supplies.  
 
"The show was excellent for us," Brent East from Thermwood Corporation, Dale, Ind. agreed. "Both the number and quality of buyers were much better than I anticipated."  
 
Two new countries sent delegations of buyers - Iraq and Mongolia.
 
"New buyers seem to be most interested in distributorship opportunities, purchasing small tools and education materials.  The leaders of the two new delegations both stated that they will be back in 2011!" said Druk.
 
This year's fair hosted 9,000 registered attendees and close to 600 exhibiting companies.  Woodworking industry professionals, drawn from 52 countries from around the world met, networked, attended some of the more than 50 education sessions and conducted business over the course of four whirlwind days. 
 
Overall, the show proved to be a success, according to Archie Thompson, AWFS Tradeshow Chair, National Sales Manager of Spectrum Adhesive.
 
"The signs of life turning up in the housing market suggest that our industry really has passed the worst of this economic downturn. Two years from now, we will look back at these tough times and remember how we were able to pull together as an industry and survive," said Thompson. "When we return in 2011, we'll be celebrating the 100th year anniversary of AWFS and the resurgence of our industry."
 
More than 165 students entered into the Fresh Wood national woodworking student design contest, and 46 were able to make the trip to Las Vegas with their teachers. For the first time ever, two high school students were awarded the Best of Show and People's Choice awards.  Several TV crews taped live interviews with the students.
 
The woodworking media came out in full force. Many reporters were live blogging and podcasting from the show floor.  Chris Grundy, host of the show "Cool Tools" on the DIY network filmed on the floor for two days," covering new products and doing exhibitor interviews.
 
In 2011, AWFS®Fair will return to the Las Vegas Convention Center, July 20-23. Please check http://www.awfsfair.org/ for updates.
 
About the AWFS®Fair: The full-scale AWFS®Fair has become a critical hub for international commerce in the woodworking industry. The AWFS®Fair brings together the entire home and commercial furnishings industry, including manufacturers and distributors of machinery, hardware, lumber, construction materials and other suppliers to the furniture, cabinet manufacturers and custom woodworkers. 
 
For more information, visit www.awfs.org/.

Thermwood Corporation is proud to announce a new compact series of automatic edgebanders from Fravol.  The B Series from Fravol is constructed using a steel frame and designed to be compact but versatile and easy to use.  The BEE can process banding up to 3mm thick PVC and comes equipped with a 1kg (2.2 lbs.) Teflon lined glue pot, 3 pressure rollers, end-trimming unit, top/bottom trimming unit and a glue scraper.  Fravol has been in business since 1963 producing heavy-duty, versatile, and easy to use edge processing machines for the woodworking industry. 

For additional information, please contact Thermwood Corporation

Phone: (800) 533-6901  E-mail: sales@thermwood.com  Web: www.thermwood.com

Purdue University has two Thermwood routers, and recently had a student win first place in furniture design at AWFS: 

Leah Kenttamaa Squires, a student at Purdue University, West Lafayette, recently received a First Place Award for her entry SAKURA HANA in Fresh Wood, a national competition for woodworking projects sponsored by the Association of Woodworking and Furnishings Suppliers (AWFS). Judges Dan Hershberger, AWFS Board Member, left) and Randy Johnson, editor, American Woodworker (right) presented Kentamaa-Squires with her award at AWFS Fair 2009, in Las Vegas, NV.

Leah Kenttamaa-Squires created this award-winning piece in a class Furniture Design for CNC Manufacturing in Fall of 2008, under the leadership of professors R. Gazo, E. Haviarova, R. Paul and Wood Research Laboratory technician D. Warner. The course is a joint effort between the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources and the School of Visual and Performing Arts.

The 50 finalists were chosen from 169 entries from 49 different schools in North America. Hongtao Zhou a former Purdue student who graduated in 2008 from the same program and now teaches design at University of Wisconsin in Madison received an Honorable Mention at the same competition.

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. 

A couple of photos of our booth on the first day of the AWFS show in Las Vegas.  We are Booth #5200 - Great turn out so far!

**Update**

More Pics!

Demonstrating our CNC Routers, I-Cut, Links from eCabinets to ShopBot & from 20-20 to a Thermwood

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Nice sample of graphic produced with i-cut software on a Thermwood Model 45 CNC Router at AWFS Show in Las Vegas  

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Our "Wall of Applications" possible on a Thermwood CNC Router

20-20 Technologies and Thermwood Corporation have joined together to offer a smoothly integrated, highly productive manufacturing system for cabinet manufacturers.

"We are very excited about this new partnership," said Ken Susnjara, CEO of Thermwood.  "This represents a truly comprehensive approach from design and retail all the way through manufacturing, all working together smoothly and seamlessly.  It combines the best technology of both Companies to create an industry-leading offering."

The data process starts with the design.  Over 50,000 dealers use 20-20 Design or ShopWare CAD to layout and sell projects.  To machine a job, an output file from 20-20 software is sent directly to a Thermwood CNC router and the advanced CNC control on the Thermwood system automatically performs all required CAD functions, nests the parts, prints nest diagrams and labels and runs the job directly from full sheets of material.  For even higher production volume, rectangular panels without additional machining are sent to an optimized panel saw, and only parts that require CNC machining are sent to the router.  This not only increases overall production capacity, but represents an increase in productivity as well.

"The advantages to using nested based techniques for machining instead of cutting all panels on a saw and then processing machined parts one at a time on a machining center are significant," said Craig Yamauchi, Executive Vice-President of Manufacturing & Residential Solutions of 20-20 Technologies.  "Labor requirements are less and productivity is higher, sometimes substantially higher."

20-20 welcomes the opportunity to demonstrate the ease of use and high functionality delivered by this partnership for shops seeking best practices and robust integration at this year's AWFS show in July.  20-20 representatives will be on site to show how you can go from the showroom to the shipping dock with greater sales tools, lower costs, fewer errors and increased ROI.

Ken Susnjara, Thermwood's founder and CEO has taken forty years of experience as head of several companies in a number of highly competitive markets and distilled it into a 400 plus page book, "Entrepreneurial Skills". 

This work tackles all the difficult aspects of running a company in a competitive environment from a fresh, unique and decidedly non-theoretical basis. The author pulls no punches in telling you what works, what doesn't and why. During the last forty years, Ken took his company and others through several industries, with several totally unrelated products. He dealt with thousands of both small and large customers, with the government, with foreign customers and foreign investors and with virtually every kind of financing option available. He lost and made millions using almost every financing vehicle available, including public stock and bond issues. During this time he went through several major crises where the survival of a company rested on the turn of a card, so to speak. And all this time he learned.

Now he has taken that knowledge and that experience and put it a book to try to help other entrepreneurs. He offers a fresh view of corporate structures, product positioning and pricing, competing and selling, how markets work, advertising, trade shows, internet marketing and relations with your employees. He clearly and boldly tells you exactly what he thinks works and what doesn't in today's business world.

The over 400 page book has been initially published on Scribed at

http://www.scribd.com/doc/17062116/Entrepreneurial-Skills

Samples of the work are available at that site for free viewing so potential buyers can determine if these ideas and insights might just work for them.

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.

A CNC panel saw coupled with a machining center is the most common production arrangement for higher volume cabinet production. Nested based machining is more productive in lower volume shops but hasn't offered enough throughput for larger shops. Now there is a way to combine the best of both approaches to achieve even higher throughput and higher productivity.

The idea is simple but the technology to achieve it has been elusive until now. The basic approach is to use the panel saw to cut rectangular parts that do not require additional machining and use a CNC router to cut parts that require machining using a nested based approach. As simple as the idea sounds, it offers some significant benefits.

1. You only need to cut parts on the panel saw that don't require additional machining. Less panel saw labor.
2. You don't need to sort parts at the panel saw that need additional machining since they are not cut there. Even less labor.
3. You don't need to transfer parts from the panel saw to the machining center.
4. At the CNC router, you load full sheets of material instead of identifying, selecting programs, handling and setting up each part, one at a time. Much faster.
5. During the machining cycle the operator has time to do other operations such as edge banding which is not possible if you are handling one part at a time.

The technology to do this now exists and in a very refined form. For example the system can easily do the following:

1. Automatically separate rectangular parts and send them to the optimizer and send all machined parts to the CNC router.
2. Automatically nest the job at the machine control accommodating whatever material is available.
3. Print nest diagrams and part labels at the machine control.
4. Trim and bar code scrap for later use.
5. Easily re-cut a damaged part or add it to the next job right at the machine.

This approach offers more throughput, smoother operation with less labor and less chance for operator error and implementing it is rather easy. You will keep your panel saw, since our software will work with virtually any panel saw optimizer. Replace your machining center with a CNC router. We will program your product line into our manufacturing software which will work directly with your existing cabinet sales software. That's it, you are ready to run.

This approach is especially attractive if you need to replace your existing machining center. Our large table, nested based CNC systems are about the same price as traditional machining centers but, are a lot more productive and offer better throughput.