Minelli Magazine - Wood Manufacturing

Why is custom wood manufacturing complicated?

Written by Luca Minelli | May 11 2023

Creating products that respond precisely to customers’ requests and needs is often quite difficult. Custom wood manufacturing, in fact, requires specific skills, technologies, and competency that not all manufacturing companies have.

Let’s discuss the topic in the following article.

Custom wood manufacturing: what you must consider

In most cases, creating custom wood products means meeting very complicated and demanding requests by clients as well as guaranteeing the highest quality and functionality while respecting deadlines and ensuring cost-effectiveness.

This requires a lengthy process of study and experiments with new technologies and often the need to create machines tailored to a specific purpose.

Clients usually look for innovative designs, new styles, and unique finishing options or want to solve a specific problem, that other possible suppliers may not have been able to address.

A competent manufacturer should therefore be able to think outside the box and create something that no one has thought of before with the unique objective of achieving a precise result.

Here are some aspects to consider.

Codesign

Codesign refers to the ability of the wood maker to cooperate with its clients and give advice in order to improve the characteristics of products during the initial phase of design.

This is crucial to combine what the client looks for with the feasibility of the project that depends on the characteristics of the type of wood and the available machine and technologies.

Codesign involves the following steps.

1. Selecting the best type of wood to produce a specific product

Not all types of wood are suitable for creating a certain object, as each essence has precise characteristics. A reliable manufacturer should be able to recommend the ideal wood to use to get the best result in terms of cost, functionality, and aesthetics.

2. Defining the design of the objects

Custom wood manufacturing means creating a product that responds to all clients’ standards and requirements. During the codesign phase, the manufacturer should give advice about the best design and finishes to get a product that is functional, beautiful, and cost-effective too.

3. Creating realistic prototypes

Having a precise idea of the final result before moving to production is essential to avoid future problems and extra costs. Using the latest CAD-CAM software, the manufacturer should be able to create realistic prototypes that correspond 100% to the final product. In this way, clients can ask for any modifications before moving to full production with a great advantage in terms of time and resources optimization.

Quality control

Wood is different from any other material, and you need the right competency and tools to create perfect products.

Being natural, it moves as its moisture content changes. When humidity is high, wood absorbs moisture and swells. When humidity drops, wood shrinks. 

Considering tolerances in custom wood manufacturing is therefore necessary. A primary concern of a competent wood maker is to understand the extent of the tolerances without negatively affecting precision of the final object.

Each wooden product must be checked for:

  • dimensional and functional aspect (size and shape)
  • milling accuracy (missing parts, dents, splinters, and breakage)
  • morphological defects (open knots and heavy discoloration)

All wooden objects should be individually checked with automatic systems of infrared video cameras and tailor-made artificial intelligence algorithms. This can guarantee continuous monitoring of the process with data collection and analysis while providing real-time visualization and dedicated reporting compliant with Industry 4.0 regulations.

An expert manufacturer should also implement sophisticated metrological systems for more accurate and precise quality control resulting in perfect, top-quality wooden objects.

A 3D laser technology and the metrology software make the entire process automated, faster, and more reliable.

It is a system based on blue light 3D scanning technology that lets technicians generate 3D blueprints of physical objects with a high level of accuracy.

Here’s the process:

  • a blue light laser gun scans the product’s surface
  • cutting-edge metrology software converts the scan into a three-dimensional drawing
  • the 3D representation is compared with the original technical project to guarantee that nominal dimensions and tolerances are right

Wooden objects with complex shapes can be especially complicated and time consuming to measure manually. The laser gun makes the entire process faster and more accurate.

Technologies

Industry 4.0 and digital transformation are essential for custom wood manufacturing, as digitalization brings great advantages both in the stages of production (faster and more efficient) and product quality.

Adopting anthropomorphic robots, artificial intelligence, IoT, and data analysis incredibly improves wood manufacturing processes and makes them smarter and more precise, guaranteeing:

  • production accuracy
  • competitive prices
  • high production capacity
  • short lead time

Only a technologically advanced wood manufacturing company that invests time and money to acquire the most modern machinery and systems and is based on automation, interconnectivity, machine learning, and real-time data can provide top-quality and cost-effective wooden components.

Sustainability

One of the biggest challenges today is creating custom wood products while respecting the standards of environmental sustainability imposed by the market.

It is crucial to pay attention to the wooden components you buy to ensure they are made respecting the environment. Not all custom-made wood products are really sustainable, as sustainability doesn’t concern just the raw materials but also the entire production process from collection to manufacturing and distribution.

The following is the definition of sustainable business by Wikipedia:

A sustainable business, or a green business, is an enterprise that has minimal negative impact or potentially a positive effect on the global or local environment, community, society, or economy […] In general, business is described as green if it matches the following four criteria:

  • it incorporates principles of sustainability into each of its business decisions
  • it supplies environmentally friendly products or services that replaces demand for nongreen products and/or services
  • it is greener than traditional competition
  • it has made an enduring commitment to environmental principles in its business operations

If you want to learn more, you can read our article about the characteristics of a sustainable wood manufacturing company.

The combination of cutting-edge software, innovative machines, manual and automatic quality control systems, and decades of experience in custom wood manufacturing allows the Minelli company to guarantee maximum precision.

We use only the latest generation of customized and made-for-purpose CNC machines that provide consistent dimensional and finishing results even at a very high production volume.

Many of our machines are unique and custom made.

Moreover, under specific circumstances, we can develop a tailor-made production line that guarantees maximum efficiency to meet our clients’ needs.

We have production plants in both Europe and the U.S., and we can provide customizable private stocking solutions to guarantee just in time delivery.

If you’d like to have more information or have a project in mind, please contact us: our experts will be glad to help you give shape to your idea!