Two of the latest developments on which Dieffenbacher has focused specific attention are the development of new impact-free technology using pulsation for size-reduction of wood raw material and a new type of high-capacity pellet press.

If you are planning to visit BASF’s headquarters factory complex, you had better ask for some accurate directions to the gate you require.

In spite of all the storms battering the world economy in the past few years, the Siempelkamp ship has apparently managed to sail safely on through these uncharted waters to achieve record success in all its markets.

Carl Benscheidt, owner and founder of the Fagus company, set up his shoe last manufacturing business in Alfeld, not far from Hannover, in 1911.

For the first time ever, the Imal-Pal group will exceed sales of €110m in 2011, a figure which, in proportion to the number of employees, is probably one of the highest in the wood based panel sector, says the company.

Kings Mountain International
Kings Mountain International says it is a leading global manufacturer of textured stainless steel press plates for the laminating industry.

By the mid-Seventies, reports the Ligna website (www.ligna.de ), “wood and forest industry manufacturers at the large Hannover Messe industrial exhibition were developing space requirements which justified their own independent show. Thus it was that in 1975 ‘Ligna’ was born as a standalone trade exhibition at the Hannover exhibition centre, to be staged biennially”.

Afire in a single plant area can cause long downtimes for the whole production process, so fire protection measures for panel factories demand complete system solutions to provide best protection for each process area, while also functioning as an integrated network.

With effect from November 2010, GreCon entered into a co-operative agreement with TimberTest of New Plymouth, New Zealand, to provide exclusive worldwide sales and service for the TimberTest GA5000 gas analysis machine.
GreCon says that the GA5000 is an innovative system which has already proved itself in the marketplace and will now be backed by its comprehensive technical support.
The gas analysis method according to EN717-2 is a rapid formaldehyde emission testing procedure. In this test, samples are placed in a 60°C heated chamber and air is pumped through the chamber at a rate of 60 litres per hour.
After passing through the test chamber, the air bubbles through water ‘impingers’ and formaldehyde released from the sample is dissolved in the water. The water samples are taken over four one-hour periods and are then tested using a spectrophotometer to determine the amount of formaldehyde emitted from the sample each hour.

Sennebogen’s focus on various product segments is consistently applied in development, product management, sales organisation and the company’s production plants in Germany, says Markus Bauer of the company’s international marketing department.
“In product development, we focus on availability and reliability of our products. Sennebogen has the competence to use technology in an intelligent way, thus handling complexity and high performance without over-engineering. Our Green Line timber handling machines fulfil the requirements of modern process machines,” he says.
“They are specially designed to be extremely strong driving and transport machines with exceptionally high lifting capacities, enabling materials and loads to be quickly and safely transported and stacked in the tightest traffic,” adds Mr Bauer.
Models 723 M-HD, 730 M-HD and 735 M-HD offer working weights of 22 to 38.5 tonnes and their engines also have strong drive systems which put the power directly onto the road without shifting, ensuring top-class driving characteristics and acceleration, claims the company. It says that higher lifting capacities have been achieved with newly-designed kinematics while a specially-strong turning drive enables a powerful, fast and, above all, controlled slewing at the highest load range.
The company also claims that a very low turning and trailing radius makes working and manoeuvring in small spaces easy, while an extra-large support base, wide-gauge axles and a long wheelbase, guarantee stability.
“Automatic steering mode switching is also standard for safe, comfortable steering,” says Mr Bauer. “Another important aspect is the service-friendliness of the machines, with the engine mounted longitudinally so it is extremely accessible and service can be performed from the ground, quickly and comfortably. “We offer high performance in operation and reduced maintenance costs, in combination with excellent working and safety conditions,” he adds.
The new Sennebogen 718 is said to be a unique specialist machine for fuel wood harvest and landscape conservation, taking loads up to 1.6 tonnes at a long, 13m, reach, designed to make problematic tree removal possible at reduced safety distances. It also offers attachments such as the harvester and collector aggregate and wood grab.
“The 718 also offers optimal overview and safety, even over bank tops, with the Multicab comfort cab, which can be elevated to a viewing height of 4.8m,” says Mr Bauer.
Finally, he says it offers easy transportation due to its weight of just 19.5t, transport width of 2.6m and transport height of 3.35m.
The 830 M-Trailer is offered to expand the versatility of the 830 product range. With four large single pneumatic tyres (650/65 R25), the machine is said to offer extraordinary ground clearance and stability and to help increase driving comfort, even on uneven ground, making it suitable for rough terrain and challenging applications, says Sennebogen. “The strong undercarriage makes it suitable for heavy-duty work over large working areas, aided by the Modern maXcab comfort cab, offering relaxed working conditions over long periods,” concludes Mr Bauer.

In common with the vast majority of machinery makers, Pallmann of Zweibrücken has been through a period of dramatically reduced order intake for its wood size-reduction machinery and MDF refiners in the last two years.
However, 2010 saw a substantial upturn in business for this long-established family company, which first opened its doors in 1903 as flour millers and mill designers.
Today’s products have a fairly natural connection to that original business as the seventh generation of the Pallmann family runs a business which designs and manufactures machinery to cut and grind wood for the production of composite panels.

On the banks of the Wupper river outside the small rural town of Ennepetal in North Rhine-Westphalia stands the factory of the company known today as Sandvik Surface Solutions.
For background and context, Hindrichs-Auffermann was formed in 1908, by the merger of two companies which dated back much earlier, to the early 19th century in fact. The merged company specialised in nonferrous semi-finished products and parts.
In the early 1960s Hindrichs-Auffermann started the production of smooth press plates and added texturing in the following decade.

The original foundation for the Pallmann company, in 1903, was the flour milling industry, in which the company was involved in both milling and the design of wind- and water-powered mills. That essential basic element of size reduction is still the focus of this seventh- generation family-owned firm.
The company now employs around 700 people worldwide and is involved in a variety of industries from food to chemicals, plastics and wood, as well as the agricultural residues used to make panels. However, the panel industry accounts for the majority of the company’s turnover.
Pallmann says it has largely based its success in these very diverse fields on a heavy concentration on research and development (R&D).
The company is headquartered in Zweibrücken in south west Germany, where it has a large R&D facility which includes the largest size reduction test station in the world. The space devoted to R&D alone is 20m x 80m in a separate building. There are three floors, with a training centre on the top floor, smaller demonstration/testing machines on the second floor and three sections for larger machines on the ground floor. These last three areas are for plastic recycling and food processing; the wood processing department; and the main R&D labs.
The size reduction test station employs the company’s smallest machines, but these are not small-scale versions; they are small production machines, emphasizes Harald Fried, area sales manager for North America.
“We have very precise scale-up factors for these machines, enabling us to produce very precise results,” he says. “This means there is very little ‘surprise factor’ when we deliver a machine to the customer’s mill – the specification with regard to throughput and so on will be met.”
The test set-up is a PZU 16-525 OSB production system with a theoretical production capacity of 20 bone dry tonnes per hour (bdtph) of standard OSB flakes.
“People from all over the world send their logs here and we make flakes on a production machine with real production runs,” says Hartmut Pallmann, chief executive of his family’s business. “The flakes then go to an existing board mill for test boards to be produced – it is almost like pre-certification of the panel product.”
The R&D carried out over the years has resulted in a product range which comprises around 800 different machines and models.
“We carry out lots of special designs for customers,” says Mr Pallmann. “Continuous improvement of the machines is one of our main aims and another reason for our large R&D facility – and our test department. After our tests, the machine is run in trials at our customer’s factory before we ‘go public’ with any new development.”
Pallmann began its involvement in the wood panel business principally in particleboard and OSB, then moved into MDF and now claims to be the second largest supplier of refiners in the world for MDF.
The machines produced by the company are identified by a two, three or four letter name, all of which begin with the letter ‘P’ for Pallmann. The other letters describe the function of the machine, in German.
Thus there is the Drum Chipper, PHT and the disc chipper PHS. The former processes sawmill waste, roundwood, peeler cores, veneer waste and wood from forest thinnings and annual plants for particleboard, fibreboard, wood combustion and the paper industry. The latter is a chipper for the paper industry.
The re-chipper PSN is for re-chipping material such as butt ends; gang saw, veneer and particleboard waste; screen rejects; shavings; and splinters.
The Series PZKR covers the family of knifering flakers which have the patented system of counter-rotational flaking and a knife ring exchange system. Pallmann produced its first knifering flaker in the 1950s.
These flakers are designed to produce flat flakes of exact thickness from chips, veneer waste, purchased flakes or any kind of coarse raw material. A fast rotating impeller leads the chips to the knives of the counter-rotating knife ring. It is this counter-rotating feature which Pallmann claims gives trouble- and obstruction-free operation and flake discharge, even with very wet incoming material. The company also says that it promotes good knife utilisation and uniform wear.
The feeding device for the PZKR, named the Cleanomat, offers continuous feeding with simultaneous separation of undesirable material. Metal is removed by drum magnets in the Cleanomat, which is a heavy particle separator, removing grit and stones in a similar way to an air classifier. A vibro-feeder with integrated screen deck at the infeed to the flaker allows the bypassing of fines, thus saving knife wear.
The so-called quick knifering change system developed by Pallmann has reduced the time required for this essential operation to between five and 20 minutes, according to machine size. The door of the flaker is opened, an exchange jig is moved into position and the knifering clamps released. Pushing a button then initiates the hydraulic removal of the ring to be transferred to a transport carriage to go for sharpening. A reconditioned ring is then inserted and clamped.
The removed ring can now be sharpened on the fully automatic PZSE sharpening and setting robot which reduces the man hours needed for the sharpening process from about 21⁄2 hours manually to around 10 minutes and gives far higher sharpening accuracy. The man-hours in a manual system are absorbed in disassembling the knife packages, cleaning and grinding the knives and then setting the packages before final assembly into the ring again. The 10 minutes used in the automatic system are for getting the ring into and out of the robot. Wear shoes can also be re-ground as required in the same machine to ensure constant knife protrusion. The setting and grinding process takes about 40 to 50 minutes, depending on the size of the ring, the degree of wear and the knife length.
The PHMS is the Pallmann high-speed hammer mill series, while the PHPH is the impact hammer mill, particularly suited to processing waste and recyclable wood.
For refining chips for the fine surface layers of particleboard, the double stream screen basket mill PSKM is offered with a grinding path diameter of 600-1500mm and working width of 220-1180mm.
Pressurised refiners for the preparation of fibre for MDF production are identified by the letters PR and the largest of these built to date is a 62in diameter unit, of which there are several in operation. One of the most recent was installed at Yildiz MDF in Turkey and this has a 24in plug screw feeder. Although this is the largest refiner installation to date, Pallmann is prepared to produce refiners up to 72in.
The Yildiz mill also has the largest drum chipper in the world, at 2.4m diameter, and a Pallmann chip-washing system.
The vast majority of these machines are made in-house at Zweibrücken, with only the very largest components being outsourced. To this end the factory is equipped with an array of heavy engineering machinery, including flame cutters which can cut steel up to 300mm thick.
In the past, mills wanted the size reduction equipment supplied as a package, ready to go, but things have changed.
“Customers more and more want to get involved and to build up the equipment on site,” says Mr Pallmann. “It is cheaper in terms of transport costs, taxes and so on. We do all the engineering and quality control and certified welders do the on-site assembly.
“For instance in a chip washing plant, much of the installation can be carried out by the customer, including the steel work for the building. We supply the controls, electronics and key components such as pumps, chip washer, de-watering screw etc, but the rest is built by the customer.”
He continues: “Globalisation is not just a word, it is real. We do the complete engineering here, and some key components, but the rest is done on site under our supervision.”
Brazil offers an example of this approach: Pallmann supplied the Fibraplac project from green end to pressurised refiner as a complete line, using its subsidiary in Brazil to assist in the realization of the project.
China is a major market for Pallmann. Gaofeng, among the largest MDF lines in China, is currently under construction and involves the supply of the complete fibre preparation system, including rotary debarker, chippers, cleaning and refining, all as a turnkey contract. The company already has two Pallmann refiners.
“More and more people worldwide want complete packages,” says Mr Pallmann. “However, there is a trend for customers not only to want a turnkey green end, but to specify the machinery using their own experience.”
Hence the concept of ‘Pallmann Wood Yard Systems – complete systems from one supplier’. The first of these to be built in-line to an MDF line was at Kronopol in Zary, Poland, but several such lines have been supplied for OSB.
“In the last two years, business was good for us in OSB flakers and we got all the orders for the new mills in Europe. That meant 10 flaking lines, including nine debarkers,” Says Mr Fried.
The growing interest in agricultural fibre based boards has also provided opportunities. The company has supplied bamboo chippers to India and Bangladesh, depithers and hammermills for sugar cane bagasse mills, a special version of the PSKM double stream mill to Isobord wheat straw plant in Manitoba, Canada and a specially designed pressurized refiner for cotton stalks to China. Gypsum and cement bonded board mills are supplied as well.
“We have also done a lot of work on oil palm empty fruit bunch preparation and sold a line to Kalimantan,” says Mr Fried.
Recycled wood gets ever more popular as a raw material for panels and Pallmann has machines for processing this sometimes challenging resource.
Refurbishment of wear parts such as plug screws and refiner plates has become increasingly important to the business. “Today, more and more we have to offer a full service,” affirms Mr Fried.
That includes the new service centre in Zweibrücken, which has six distinct groups of engineers specialising in different machine types. Pallmann service centres around the world are computer-linked to the service centre to give a 24-hour service. Engineers are also available to travel anywhere in the world at short notice.
For the future in this currently slow market, Pallmann still expects some growth in China for MDF, the rest of Asia for particleboard and some MDF, with North America providing opportunities in OSB. Some modifications and upgrades to MDF lines in Europe are also anticipated, as well as a few new lines.
“We are a horizontally integrated business, from the original idea to its realisation,” says Mr Pallmann. “Anything from the 10hp lab machine to the 10,000hp refiner we can do; as long as it is a size reduction machine, we can do it. The overall concept must be good but it is the little details that count.
“When you need to produce a board, come and see Pallmann about the raw material preparation to make it.”

Technocell Dekor, a name well known to anyone in the panel industry involved in adding value to panel surfaces, claims to be the world leader in the production of decorative laminating papers.
The company is part of the Felix Schoeller group and possesses eight of that group’s 10 paper machines. Three of these are located at Technocell Dekor’s main factory in Günzach, near Munich in the south of Germany. Other paper mills are located in Osnabrück, Penig and Neustadt in Germany and Drummondville in Canada.
Dr Mathias Rump, vice president of Technology for Technocell Dekor, outlined the structure of the whole decor market and where his company fits in.
“It is a long value-adding chain and very complex, from base paper to finished laminate,” he said. “Our product covers all areas of design – we produce print base papers whose composition can be adjusted to anything you may require. That base paper is then printed, treated, pressed onto panels and those panels are then cut to size and perhaps shaped.
“Therefore it is necessary for us to take responsibility throughout the whole processing chain in order to arrive at good quality products and a stable market. It would be dreadful to foul up the market with poor quality products that don’t perform! Holding the leading position in the market means we must have a sense of responsibility to our business partners.”
To that end, Technocell has relationships with printers, woodworkers, panel producers and furniture makers, he explained.
“We try to ‘de-mystify’ the process and make all the steps that define quality understandable and to make that quality measurable,” said Dr Rump, who went on to explain that the company is also trying to address the problems of terminology in the industry.
“For instance, the word ‘overlay’ means different things to different people. In the US it means any kind of surface – paper, vinyl or whatever; in Europe it mainly means the clear surface layers such as those applied to laminate flooring. Therefore we are trying to establish a uniform terminology in the material we publish and we’re trying to get a two-way exchange in communication,” he said.
To disseminate its considerable knowledge, Technocell holds periodical seminars, or forums, and publishes the papers. It has also published a book called The analysis of decor paper: A compendium of quality parameters and test methods, as part of its contribution to that de-mistifying process.
The latter book, to give just one example, explains the Taber test with a definition, explanation including its relevance, and the method for carrying out the test.
“We see a trend towards integration of the value-adding steps – for example backward integration of panel producers into impregnation,” said Dr Rump. “We also see a trend for printers to forward integrate into lacquering their foils on the printing line – the technology is there and varnishes have developed to become more usable in the printing process.”
Hans-Christoph Gallenkamp, senior vice-president of Technocell Dekor and a member of the Schoeller family, added: “Our task is to make the whole process more transparent and to supply our knowledge on to the value adding chain. It is not only knowing paper making but understanding that whole chain – a partnership approach with the customer and his value chain.”
Capacities of the eight Technocell decor machines range from 11,000 to 40,000 tonnes a year and they produce papers for making high pressure laminate (HPL), low pressure laminate (LPL) and continuous pressure laminate (CPL), paper foils, print base, saturating base and machine glazed papers. The three Günzach machines all have a 2.25m working width.
Drummondville is currently an exception to the other locations in that it produces pre-impregnated papers, but that is because it is a joint venture with the German Kunz Group which owns the panel maker Uniboard, the exclusive customer of Drummondville.
The company has three different kinds of paper machines, including a ‘top wire’ machine to produce symmetrical white papers.
“This is the only machine of its type in the world and it offers the advantage that the paper does not have a ‘top’ and a ‘bottom’ face but can be used either way up, avoiding the need for laminators to have to turn a pallet of paper over during their production cycle,” explained Mr Gallenkamp.
The five hectare Günzach site, situated in a beautiful region of Bavaria at the base of the Alps, employs 232 people on its three paper making lines. One line makes white to brown pastel colour base papers, while the second makes backing papers and edgebanding and the third makes a full range of base colours, from white throughout to intense black.
The site gained ISO 9001 certification in 1994 and EMAS/ISO14001 in 1996. It was one of the first paper mills in the industry to gain the environmental 14001 certificate, driven partly by the fact that it is a very compact site which had nowhere to store waste and therefore every reason to avoid creating it in the first place.
In 1999, the company started producing paper from regenerated paper by recycling waste from its own production into backing paper.
A tour of the factory begins in the colour management laboratory, where the recipes are formulated in a process which simulates real paper production from pulp and the other basic ingredients.
The sample disc of paper so produced can be laminated to a piece of particleboard and colour-checked against a master sample. All data is stored in a computer for repeatability.
At the start of the production line, pulp is stored in bales of sheets, using short fibre from eucalyptus and longer pine fibre. The two types are mixed according to the required final paper properties.
The pulp sheets, together with Titanium oxide, fillers and dyes are mixed with water in the pulper in a swirling action which ensures good mixing. From the pulper, the mix passes to the refiner to equilibrate fibre length and on to a reservoir where other additives such as wet strength agents are added.
The mixture then passes to the machine vat where final online colour checking is carried out just before the paper machine.
A form of hydrocyclone then separates out any dirt or lumps from the mixture and several screens remove any small contaminants before the mixture passes to the machine head box.
The mixture, which is now 99% water, is sprayed onto an endless ‘wire’ and most of the water is removed by a combination of draining and a vacuum under the paper web. This leaves a higher concentration of fillers and fines in the top layer of the web and so this is equilibrated by the Dandy Roll.
A felt now picks up the web and passes it through a nip roller press. The web then enters the dryer at 50-60% moisture content where it passes over a series of heated cylinders, followed by cooling cylinders, the application of steam to adjust the moisture content, and passage through a three-nip Küsters calender press.
The calendering leads to compression of the outer layers for smoothing of the surface, while retaining the springiness of the core of the paper so that it remains permeable to resins.
The final paper product goes to a jumbo reel and is then edge-trimmed and cut to the customer’s required length on a rewinder system.
Another quality management lab checks the final product for all parameters such as ash content, weight, pH as well as colour, and all data is stored on a server to give traceability and repeatability.
Technocell’s quality standards are undoubtedly high in order to satisfy the very demanding decor paper market but Günzach has another, literally high, claim to fame: it is the highest decor paper mill in Europe, standing at 800m above sea level in beautiful Alpine scenery. This at first surprising location is a legacy from its original function of making papers to wrap locally produced butter and cheese. Technocell has come a long way from that speciality to its current specialist décor paper production.

Wood, water and a tradition of iron working all come together in the village of Oberkochen, 100km east of Stuttgart. This is the home of the company known throughout the world as Leitz GmbH & Co KG.
When he founded his company in a small workshop here in 1876, Albert Leitz could surely have had no idea of what was to develop from his hand craft, and water powered machinery, with which he produced tools for the extensive woodworking industry growing up in this richly forested area of Germany.
Early products for Mr Leitz were hand tools such as drills, knives and axes. Tools for water-powered machines soon followed and then, with the advent of electrically powered machines, new demands were placed on tools in terms of wear and stress.
Now the family-owned Leitz business claims to be the world’s largest supplier of tools for the wood and wood-related market, offering a vast range of tungsten carbide and diamond tipped tools, some of which even carry memory chips.
“Our core business was always in wood and wood products,” says Christoph Bollinger, managing director with responsibility for sales and marketing. “We have production facilities in Germany, Austria, Italy, Finland, France, Belgium, the UK, Turkey, Brazil, the US and China and 180 service stations [sharpening and repair centres] worldwide. That is why we say we are ‘globally localised’.” The Brazilian office, opened in 1979, was the group’s first venture outside Europe.
“The company’s turnover amounts to a total of more than €500m, 50% of which is in the woodworking and 50% in the metal working sectors and we employ over 6,000 people,” says Mr Bollinger.
The Leitz Group specialises in machine tools for processing wood and panels, as well as plastics, and has many subsidiaries. It employs around 3,500 people.
The holding company is the Leitz Association and the Leitz Group forms one of two divisions of the Association. The other is Leitz Metalworking Technology (LMT) GmbH & Co KG, also based in Oberkochen. Under LMT there is Böhlerit GesmbH & Co KG, the Austrian tungsten carbide development pioneer, Fette GmbH near Hamburg, Kieninger GmbH in the Black Forest, Bilz GmbH & Co near Stuttgart, Onsrud Cutter LP in Libertyville, US and Belin Yvon SA in France. This group of companies is mainly active in the metal processing tool side of the business
and employs more than 3,000 people.
However, the two sides of the Leitz Association do not act entirely independently, but exploit the synergies of their different operations at regular meetings.
Mr Bollinger describes the CNC market as a fast-developing branch of the industry and Leitz has one factory in Germany dedicated to this sector. It has also diversified into the machining of plastic materials and insulation products such as Rockwool, in response to demand, and as a result of its expertise in wood and metals.
“Laminate flooring gave a turbo-boost to the flooring division and a lot of the tools used today for machining it were developed by us. We are quite possibly number one in that industry today,” said Mr Bollinger. “The processing of every type of panel is becoming more and more important.”
The changing demands of raw materials, mechanisation and ever-increasing cutting speeds mean that research and development has always been a vital area for Leitz and it has three R&D centres – two in Germany and one in Austria, with the largest being at Oberkochen.
Investment in R&D accounts for more than 5% of total sales revenues and the Leitz Association has over 300 patents and registered designs to its name.
One could be forgiven for thinking that it would be difficult to display Leitz’s products in an exciting way – after all they are ‘only’ cutting tools. However, a visit to the company’s technical centre at Oberkochen would soon change your mind.
A four-screen multi-media presentation takes you through the historical and the present day position of Leitz. Meanwhile, tools such as saw blades, router cutters, tongue and grooving cutters, drill bits and myriad other devices are exhibited in static displays with the raw material they are intended to machine. Clever lighting of these displays shows off the tools to best effect. Each display is dominated by a flat screen video of the tools in action, which also shows close-ups of the tool profiles.
The display of tools for machining laminate flooring begins with diamond-tipped circular saw blades to rip-saw the panels into planks. These are followed by up to 10 machining heads – five on each side – depending on the intricacy of the profile. For instance, ‘click-fit’ T&G profiles require more heads to machine their complicated shapes than do simple T&G sections.
“We use poly-crystalline diamond on most of these cutters, with mono-crystalline diamond on the final heads, to get a smooth edge on the hard laminate surface, where finish is very important,” explains Jürgen Graef, head of Leitz R&D.
“We do a lot of basic research on cutting materials – coating knives and blades with different types of tungsten carbide for example and testing on various materials,” he says. “We also do research in other areas such as designing tools for noise reduction and studying chip movements by using perspex hoods over test cutters.” They have also developed a polished foil for covering the faces of circular saw blades to reduce noise and give a smoother finish.
The dust from products such as laminate flooring can be very abrasive and if it is not removed effectively it will shorten the life of the machining heads. Thus Leitz supplies the tools and hoods as a system. For the same reason it is also important to move the dust away from the cutting edge effectively and this is where the Leitz ‘i-System’ comes into play. It is a dust flow control system in which the tools have a special gullet and, literally, cutting edge technology, to guide the chips away from the cutting area to the exhaust system. This exhaust system is not responsible for drawing the chips away from the cutting edge – its role is purely in transporting them from the cutting area of the machine as they are expelled by the gullet.
Computer aided design systems (CAD) are used to produce the tools and Leitz works with universities, institutions, machine makers and its customers in developing new products.
Many of its tools today are held in place in the cutting head by a hydraulic clamping system which the company claims gives high machining accuracy combined with the facility for rapid tool change.
The ‘Tool Information Management Software System’ is another development employing what it calls “intelligent tools” in multi-head CNC routing operations.
The benefits claimed for the system are the rapid relocation of tools, automated procurement of them, on-time scheduling of the required tools, control of tool costs and reduction of tool stocks, tool life checks and increased machine availability.
Each tool carries a memory chip with data concerning its length, diameter, maximum revolution speed and optimum rpm. Obviously some of these factors change after sharpening so it is possible to change the data on the chip at this time.
The CNC machine is equipped to read this chip and know what kind of tool it is and what its precise parameters are. There are several components to this system, including measuring and set-up devices, the intelligent tools with their data chips, tool information management and Leitz’s integrated service concept.
“We sold a Tool Information Management System to a furniture manufacturer in Germany and cut their tooling costs by one third,” recalls Mr Bollinger. “In diamond tooling that meant they quickly recouped the cost of the system!”
Many tools begin life as a cylinder of solid steel. Various diameters of special steels are sourced from all over the world and a blank is cross-cut from the cylinder. It is then milled, ground, shaped and drilled in machines which are CNC controlled from the CAD offices above the factory floor to produce the final machine tool body. Tungsten carbide or diamond tips are soldered to the tools in a special process.
For sharpening diamond tipped tools, spark erosion under a liquid electrolyte is used and wire spark erosion in electrolyte for simultaneous cutting and sharpening of some diamond tipped tools. Finished tools are checked on the profile checker.
Instant communication and remote service are essential in today’s fast-moving business environment and Leitz employs new media in the form of its SOLNET system. This is a package providing online customer access to its consulting services and can be used by Leitz engineers to communicate with customers and find solutions to their problems rapidly. Replacement tools can also be ordered for quick delivery on the system.
Albert Leitz would certainly be confused by such high-tech developments as intelligent tools and online service. He would however, still recognise the wood machining business on which the Leitz Association of today is heavily based. And he would almost certainly approve of his company’s tag line and see his place in its origin: ‘Shaping the future for over 125 years’.

Germany’s oldest industrial company and one of the oldest companies in the world: that is the claim of S c h w ä b i s c h e Hüttenwerke GmbH, or SHW for short, which was established in 1365. The company used to be just a producer of iron, until the end of the 19th century when it diversified. Then in 1921, it gained two powerful equal shareholders in the form of Baden-Württemberg GmbH, on behalf of the state government of Baden-Württemberg, and MAN AG, perhaps best known for its trucks.

Because of its “sound positioning, solid commercial business and excellent German engineering”, Siempelkamp says it is panic-proof. “Even under the most unfavourable conditions, we will make it well through the next years and will keep the 2,745 jobs worldwide secure, of which approximately 1,600 are based at the head office in Krefeld,” said Dr-Ing Hans W Fechner, spokesman for the management.
Siempelkamp says the ability of the 125-year-old company to stay crisis-proof is the result of a stable and diverse makeup on three strong business pillars. These are: machinery and plants; the foundry; and the nuclear technology business units.
Siempelkamp says it offers products that are world market leaders – and that a high proportion of inhouse production, together with the 100% ownership of international branches and production facilities, strengthen its position.
Another formula for success claimed by the company is that it knows how to make use of opportunities that arise and strengthens its portfolio with well-directed acquisitions, such as SES.
Siempelkamp Energy Systems GmbH (SES), the specialist for energy plants, emerged from the takeover of Metso Panelboard GmbH in Hanover, Germany and has belonged to the Group since 2007. Over 20 years of market experience and more than 50 operating energy system concepts ranging from 10 to 85MW combustion capacity comprise the references for SES.
It is a company which specialises in complete engineering know-how and technologies for the supply of stable process heat, concentrated particularly in the wood based products industry. Together with process heat supply, this Siempelkamp subsidiary also offers the possibility of electrical power generation up to 10MW, either as a combined system with a steam turbine, or an ORC module in the thermal oil circuit, or as a standalone combined heat and power generation system.
Since its integration into the Siempelkamp Group, the Hanover-based company has been able to lay the foundation for further projects. For instance at the Pfleiderer AG thin MDF plant in Grajewo, Poland, a power station with a total combustion capacity of 66MW passed its acceptance test in 2008.
The facility was built within the scope of a turnkey contract and is designed for 7MW of thermal oil capacity, 27 tons of steam/hour at 276psi and a flue gas capacity of 28.5MW for the dryer.
At the Laminex MDF plant in Australia an existing energy system was replaced by a new SES power station with a total combustion capacity of 24MW. Two additional orders in eastern Europe are further success stories, says the company.
Art Progress ordered a power station for the first MDF plant in the Ukraine with a total combustion capacity of 68MW. Another new MDF plant has been built in Apsheronsk, South Russia. Next to the panel production equipment made by Siempelkamp, SES will supply the energy plant with a total combustion capacity of 76MW.
Egger in St Johann (Austria) ordered an energy supply concept from SES for the new Büttner dryer used on a particleboard press line. Thermal oil capacity of 16MW, plus 20MW of flue gas capacity for the dryer, produce a total combustion capacity of 36MW. The thermal oil system will heat the press and is also designed to feed the district heat supply of the city of St Johann.
Büttner’s specialist industrial dryer technology and SES complement one another within the Siempelkamp Group.
“The engineers of our companies cooperate intensively when working on comprehensive projects – from the development of the plant concepts to the acceptance by the customer. This is a clear benefit for the plant operator: Roadblocks can be avoided and quick start-ups guaranteed,” says Ines Veckenstedt, managing director of SES.

This year marks 25 years since Hans-Joachim (Hajo) Binder sold his first complete secondhand particleboard line to a company called National Particleboard in Pakistan.That line, like Mr Binder’s company Modul Systeme, is still very much in operation.
Modul also owns two-thirds of a company called Springer M-R-S. Located in Springe, alongside Modul’s warehouse full of second-hand and refurbished machinery, SMRS designs and manufactures brand new gluing systems and board transfer stations for calender lines as well as custom-designed forming stations. It also carries out refurbishment and reconditioning of a wide range of machines for itself and for Modul Systeme.
In November 2008, SMRS resumed the activities of a company once commonly seen in panel mills – DeMets NV – which manufactured presses, pre-presses and cement bonded particleboard cold presses. SMRS acquired the rights to the DeMets name and alldrawings and specifications. New DeMets presses are now available from SMRS and it also offers service and spare parts for all existing DeMets equipment.
“Our clients are often used to, and more comfortable with, proven technologies,” said Mr Binder, ceo of Modul Systeme. “They don’t like ‘black boxes’ where they are not in control of the process and can’t see what is going on. So, we developed a high-tech gluing system with freely programmable controls. It is a modular system with the modules built into frames which can simply be lifted into place, connected together and they are working within two days.”
Sales manager Margret Michl described the concept in contemporary terms as “plug and play”.
“If you are buying a Siempelkamp or Dieffenbacher complete big continuous production line and their engineers come and install everything for you and get it working, that’s OK,” continued Mr Binder. “But with a more-basic line upgrade or modification, our approach is preferred and we can offer upgrades to all particleboard and MDF lines, as well as offering complete lines.” Modul also has a history in plywood lines.
The majority of Modul’s business is in developing countries where less technological
‘sophistication’ is often preferred and where the skill-set in the factory may be lower than in western European countries, for example.
“We allow our clients to choose what they want, based on their own experience, rather than presenting them with just one option,” said the chief executive.
The glue preparation/mixing systems offered by Modul are basically common to both MDF and particleboard mills although the application of the glues is obviously different.
For the particleboard industry, the company has developed flake dosing bins with  integrated belt scales and it also supplies the blenders, with exchangeable liners (‘wear troughs’) if required.
Some glue system projects are supplied via OEM’s such as Dieffenbacher. As an example, the Unopan MDF line supplied by Dieffenbacher was equipped with glue dosing for its 1,400m3/day capacity from Modul Systeme, as a sub-contractor.
The latest direct supply of a glue dosing system for MDF went to Uniboard USA LLC for another 1400m3/day line.
“In our business we have to follow the client’s wishes – whatever he wants we will find.  We offer advice but if the customer is set on one particular thing, that is fine,” said Ms Michl.
Recent projects for Modul Systeme include the first-ever particleboard plant for Ethiopia.  This was a second-hand Bison/Dieffenbacher line from Molar Wood in Thailand, plus a  short-cycle press from Shanghai Wood Based Panel Machinery Co Ltd (SWPM).
The Dieffenbacher press was a singleopening unit of 2440x14640mm with a capacity of 260m3/day; Maichew Particleboard Project produced its first board in March 2009.
In 2001, Modul supplied a Siempelkamp ContiRoll press, relocated from the US, to Kwangwon Lumber in South Korea to make MDF. In 2008, it supplied a second line, also from the US (Georgia Pacific) and this was another ContiRoll, with a capacity of 290m3 /day. First board was produced in August 2009.
Urupanel SA of Uruguay built that country’s first MDF line when Modul supplied another ContiRoll line, this time relocated from Daesung’s MDF factory in South Korea and with a capacity of 230m3/day. It produced its first board in April 2009.
A single-opening particleboard line was also supplied to Tableros Peruanos SA, relocated from Utisa in Spain. This 220m3/day Dieffenbacher press line produced its first board in October 2009. The line has ClassiFormer forming (originally from Metso).
In contrast to many companies in the panel industry, Modul has had quite a reasonable 2009 in terms of orders.
Repinho of Brazil purchased a shortcycle line, which is already in operation. It also ordered a particleboard line and dismantling started in August in the former factory of Merbok in Kedah, Malaysia. It is scheduled to restart in its new location during 2010.
A secondhand 4ft-wide Mende-type calender line from Venezuela, which started life producing particleboard, is being combined with a refiner from Pfleiderer’s plant in Nidda, Germany and will take shape, combined with other machinery, to make up a complete line for a Modul customer in the Far East, where it will then produce MDF.
The latest project for Modul at the time of my visit to its Laufen offices in early October was to dismantle Glunz’s first MDF line, Topan 1, in Germany, and transport it to Iran where it will be re-assembled. This includes a 350m3 a day ContiRoll press and everything else from chip washer to finished board.
“We started to feel the downturn in 2008 and business has been quite quiet this year,” said Mr Binder. “Our project times are shorter than the major suppliers so we felt the effects earlier than some others in 2008. Now we feel, again earlier than some others that the market is beginning to come back. I hope we are ‘through the valley’ and beginning to come up again, whereas the big OEMs are still stuck in that valley.
“It is not always between us and [Siempelkamp or Dieffenbacher] but there is now a trend towards one of them getting the order for the continuous press for example and our getting the order for the front end and/or the finishing line.”

Balancing between spiralling costs, availability of high quality raw material and global efforts to preserve natural resources requires the panel industry to change its viewpoints, says Markku Levanen, head of sales at Dieffenbacher in Finland. “In fact, we are talking about changing the ideologies.
“There can be few mill and production managers who have not considered making use of the raw material that is increasingly available and comes with a tolerable price tag – and that is recycled wood material.”
The French particleboard producer Compagnie Francaise du Panneau (CFP), part of the Parisot Group, decided to take advantage of the ClassiCleaner wood raw material cleaning system from Dieffenbacher in its plant, which produces 500,000m3 of panels a year, mainly for the furniture industry.
Prior to investing in this screening and cleaning system, the plant was able to use only a small proportion of low quality chips in its process. The ClassiCleaner is CFP’s response to raw material prices and availability.
“The ClassiCleaner has allowed CFP to significantly increase the proportion of low quality chips that it uses because heavy contaminants such as stones and glass, and light impurities, are now efficiently separated from the raw material, the end-product quality is better and the lifetime of the flaking equipment is longer,” said Mr Levanen. “Light impurities such as plastic foils and thin papers do not affect the panel quality any more either.”
Philippe Valdenaire, technical director of Parisot Group, said: “We chose the ClassiCleaner because of its compact size, screening accuracy, ability to separate light and heavy impurities and its low operating costs. An additional benefit has been the tidy surroundings.
“Since the installation in June [2009], we have been able to increase the use of low quality raw material. The efficient chip cleaning enables us to further increase the use of recycled raw material without compromising the board quality. In addition, we are impressed by the very low wood loss in the cleaning process”.
The ClassiCleaner provides for a screening result according to the overall process needs and the cleaning is carried out only to the enriched sub-flows. This innovative operating principle makes the patent-protected ClassiCleaner both efficient and economical, claims
Dieffenbacher.
The particleboard industry is not the only one struggling with the availability and quality of wood raw material; the pellet industry is seeking the same material sources as the panel producers. Quite logically, what suits the raw material preparation needs of the particleboard manufacturing process also suits the needs of pellet manufacture. Due to this evident synergy, the Dieffenbacher Group now serves the pellet industry as well as the panel industry.
“Chip cleaning is becoming increasingly important also in the wood pellet industry,” said Mr Levanen. “Wear of dies and other process equipment correlates closely to the sand and silica content of chips and flakes, no matter if we are talking about panel or pellet manufacture. The norms of silica content in wood pellets require producers either to closely monitor the mineral quantity of raw material – or to take measures to remove it,” he explained.
In pellet manufacture, screening the chips and flakes into different fractions can bring similar savings in energy consumption to those experienced in panel manufacture and Dieffenbacher says its ClassiCleaner fits well in both processes.

The Ligna 2009 exhibition in Hannover in May 2009 marked a watershed for the company known to everybody simply as ‘Vits’.
It was on May 20, during the show, that Vits Systems GmbH became Vits Technology GmbH, marking a change of ownership of this long-established company – and at the same time, a return to former ownership.
Werner Deuring, an Austrian entrepreneur with a history in the panel machinery industry, first bought the company in 2002. He sold his shares to an investment company in 2006 but remained as managing director.
On March 26, 2009, Vits Systems GmbH went into controlled receivership after battling with liquidity issues in recession-hit markets and a lack of willingness on the part of the banks and investors to inject further funds into the company.
Clearly Mr Deuring still had strong faith in Vits and on May 20, 2009 he reacquired 100% of the shares in the business and renamed it Vits Technology GmbH.
Nothing else has changed substantially. The company still designs and manufactures impregnation lines for decorative papers in the panel industry and supplies converting lines in many other industries, such as automotive filter paper, masking tape and glass-fibre non-wovens.
Resin mixing and blending systems supplier IFA, Vits America and Vits Imaco (the Chinese arm of Vits technology GmbH) were unaffected by the insolvency of Vits Systems.
“The management team is essentially the same as before,” confirmed sales and marketing director Daniel James. “We have had to reduce overall staff numbers across the business due to a large decrease in orders for paper impregnation lines between Summer 2008 and Ligna 2009 and because our other business units, metal treatment and offset printing, have heavily under-performed.”
In fact, in August 2009, Vits divested its metal treatment division, which provided coating for steel and aluminium strip to be used in white goods manufacture (such as washing machines) and in making car bodies, among other things.
“We are now concentrating on our core businesses of paper impregnation – and converting lines (as well as dryers and format sheeters) for the printing industry,” said Mr James. “However, in spite of the staff cuts, all key technical personnel in design, R&D and service have been kept on.”
Working with Mr James are sales managers Jörg Mellin, Mariusz Maciejewski and Peter Hauer.
“Customer contact with sales and after-sales service thus remains the same and the engineers that go out to customers are the same ones that have visited them for 15 years or more – the faces have not changed,” said Mr James. “And this is very important as many of our sales represent repeat business.”
The new company took two orders at the 2009 Ligna exhibition. One was being commissioned in Iran in late September, while the second was still in progress. A sizeable order was received from China in September and another, larger, order came in from Turkey. However, Mr James said, when interviewed in early October at the Langenfeld headquarters, that these orders could only be seen as “spikes”, there being no clear trend in the global market this year, even though more enquiries were being received at the time than at the same time last year.
Vits latest development, the super-fast HighLine, initially previewed at Ligna 2007, has recently been installed and commissioned at an MDF factory in Turkey and received official customer acceptance in early October 2009. The line is capable of running at over 100m/minute, sheeting melamine films for flooring.
The problem in the past has been to achieve such speeds without rewinding at the end of the impregnation line – highspeed handling of sheets of impregnated paper was the difficult part of the operation.
“Due to a new suction cup linear-driven stacking system, developed with the customer, the line has now broken the 100m/min barrier and during the acceptance test actually ran at 105m/minute for a complete eight-hour shift. Nobody has achieved that kind of performance before,” said Mr James proudly.
“Using this new system, and other modifications, we can double the speed of many installed melamine lines, if required. Thus a mill could replace six existing lines with three by simply upgrading them, or it could invest in a new HighLine.”
Phenolic lines are of course capable of running at much higher speeds than melamine ones and Vits had just finished commissioning such a line at a panel mill in Austria. This can run at over 200m/minute, sheeting and stacking directly on to pallets.
Phenolic lines from Vits which rewind onto rolls, instead of sheeting on pallets, already run at speeds of up to 300m/minute, according to Mr James.
Of course research and development (R&D) wait for no man, even in quiet markets, and Vits is working on new systems for intermediate coating between somewhat in the last couple of months and things were now looking quite good. “China seems to be the driving force as far as investment goes at present,” he said.
Meanwhile, resin mixing systems manufacturer IFA in Rain am Lech in Bavaria has experienced slow business in the impregnation field where it is heavily dependent on Vits. However, in other areas, such as building products, diversification over the last couple of years seems to have paid off. The company was recently awarded two large contracts to deliver mixing systems to the gypsum board market.
Vits has had a turbulent time this year but emerged from Ligna with orders and a new owner convinced of its long-term viability – and with the nerve to weather the current storm and to build on a solid reputation in the company’s specialist fields of operation.

Much of the expertise and experience gained by Bison still exists within Binos and the company is still owned by the same branch of the Greten family – Tom Greten is the managing director.
The Binos company specialises in building and upgrading plants for the production of MDF/HDF, particleboard, OSB/OPB (oriented particleboard) and cement and gypsum bonded particleboard. Technology, engineering, automation and manufacturing, as well as installation, commissioning and training of personnel are all part of the service, says Binos.
However, there is more to the company than that, explained Tom Greten when we met at his headquarters in late September.
“We are promoting ourselves as a solution provider – ‘come to us with your production problems and we will create solutions for them’,” he said.
“The first point, though, is often to get the panel manufacturer to admit that he has a problem – then we can help. Maybe they have ignored the problem for some time and don’t want to admit it, or, while they were selling all the panels they could produce they didn’t have time to fix the problems. It is a matter of communication from both sides.”
Mr Greten feels that the current market is actually playing in his company’s favour. With sales volumes severely down for the panel makers, there is more incentive to address costs and efficiencies in areas such as energy conservation, raw material consumption and maintenance costs.
“Once the customer’s problem is identified, we can produce tailor-made solutions and these can involve our machines or a mix of ours and other manufacturers’ machinery,” continued Mr Greten. “This does not necessarily involve a high level of investment as we point out ways to gain improvements economically.
“We also offer a service element and advice. For instance, a blower fan in an air forming head may be blowing much harder than is necessary. Summer and winter [ambient] air have different humidities and we can adjust the dryer air flow accordingly, thus saving energy.
“This could be part of a complete service package, offering a general analysis of the whole factory process.”
A major part of Binos’ business is in the MDF sector and forming is an area of particular attention for the company, having as it does such an influence on final panel quality – and cost.
One instance of Binos combining its own technology with that of other suppliers is in its use of the Dieffensor machine made by GreCon of Alfeld, which is also owned by another branch of the Greten family (Gerd and Ernst Greten).
Originally launched as a detector for foreign bodies in MDF mats to protect the stainless steel belts of a continuous press, Dieffensor now has a much more wide-ranging roll in controlling the forming line, when combined with Binos’ lifting elements. The result is what Binos calls Active Density Control.
The Dieffensor provides an accurate measure of the mat weight and density distribution and feeds this information electronically to the Binos lifting elements under the forming belt. These elements lift and lower the mat and, in conjunction with the scalper, control the complete mass flow of the mat, with two effects: First the control and optimisation of the cross-profile; and second, a more precise and constant production of the length profile. “This system is much more accurate than belt scales,” said Mr Greten.
The objective is more even forming, a better end-product, and a saving in valuable wood fibre.
There are three main business areas for Binos in manufactured machinery: MDF/HDF; mineral bonded boards; and particleboard (including OPB). A fourth business area is in refurbishment and spare parts (related to the Bison history of the company).
For MDF, the company is focused on thin boards, employing the Mende-type (calender) roller press in which the company has considerable experience. It modifies older presses with new rollers of different size, or new frames, and produces output capacities of 50,000 to 120,000m3 of MDF per year.
For fibreboard forming, Binos offers its spike roll sifters and formers. “The sifter and former are key pieces of machinery for producing MDF of less than one millimetre thickness,” said Mr Greten. “The homogeneity of fine fibres in this former is far greater than in conventional mechanical forming heads as the spike roll disintegrates the fibre balls into single fibres before forming the mat. It also incorporates a vacuum steam injection system which gives increased production. The sifter has adjustable air and spike roll speed and also sifts out latex lumps, for example.”
Binos is currently supplying a modified version of its spike roll former to a company called Borisov Drev in Belarus, together with a calender press with a 3.2m drum, and a guarantee that the line will produce 2mm thick board, with the inbuilt potential to produce 1mm thickness.
This is a turnkey project for Binos, which is supplying all the equipment for the line, including spike roll sifter and forming, pre-press, press and blowline blending.
“This project demonstrates that we are a serious supplier to the wood based panels market and this is our biggest project to date,” said the managing director. “We are a strong supplier in MDF lines where product quality is more important than pure capacity. This kind of plant will be well-suited to the world, post-economic crisis.”
Binos claims to be the only supplier of complete plants for mineral bonded boards (gypsum and cement) with capacities of up to 50,000m3/year. It also modifies older lines, particularly in Russia/eastern Europe.
“Our projects range from €850,000 to €4million for modifications and we are currently commissioning a Bison gypsum line in Russia that was originally supplied in 1992 but not installed until now for financial reasons,” said Mr Greten.
In particleboard, Binos offers a way to improve profitability for those companies with older production lines which are no longer competitive in that market.
It does this by offering upgrades to the lines to produce an OSB product called oriented particleboard (OPB) – a product with smaller and thinner flakes than traditional OSB. The mills can then compete with OSB in certain markets for an investment of €2 to 4 million, claims Binos.
“The owners can choose to dismantle and try to sell their old particleboard plant or give it a new life and a better-priced product using the same press and just a new front-end to the line,” said Mr Greten.
Glue kitchens and resin blending equipment are part of the scope of supply for both MDF and particleboard lines. It is the engineering workshop at Springe that enables Binos to carry out repairs, refurbishment and upgrades to a range of older machinery, being equipped with large lathes capable of machining large rollers, for example.
“We have a history of prototyping and this stands us in good stead to analyse situations and provide solutions for our customers,” said the managing director.
This also means Binos has an extensive research and development (R&D) facility with a lot of paid-for R&D activities under way, for companies both within and without the panel making industry. This includes areas such as visualisation, programming and plant control systems.
There are three departments within Binos GmbH: Binos Technology, Binos Machinery and Binos Automation, whose titles speak for themselves.
Tom Greten freely admits that his company is not trying to compete with the big oem suppliers such as Siempelkamp and Dieffenbacher; it does not supply high-capacity lines as they do. Rather, Binos is in the market of smaller capacity lines producing niche products where quality is more important to the mill than quantity, he says.
With this fact in mind, Mr Greten and his team see the current economic difficulties facing the global panel industry as an opportunity for Binos rather than a threat.

Carl Benscheidt founded his business in Alfeld near Hannover in northern Germany making shoe lasts (the wooden ‘moulds’ used to make shoes) and in 1911, commissioned a young unknown architect called Walter Gropius to build him a factory.
Walter Gropius, who went on to become world famous for his ‘Bauhaus’ school of architecture and design, produced factory and office buildings at Alfeld which still look modern today and which are the subject of an application to UNESCO to be listed as a world heritage site.
The shoe last company was known as Fagus (the Latin name for the beech wood out of which the lasts were made). It continues to design shoes and to make shoe lasts today, although plastic has replaced wood and the scale of production is much smaller due to world market trends.
Part of the buildings now house a museum on both their architecture and shoes, which is open to the public.
In 1974, Ernst Greten, great-grandson of Carl Benscheidt, decided on an additional, completely different, business path and founded GreCon as a manufacturer of measurement and safety equipment, mainly for the woodworking industries.
GreCon’s fame in the wood based panel industry today is as a global supplier of inline measurement devices, spark detection and extinguishing equipment, steel belt protection sensors, cyclone blockage detectors, panel surface inspection devices and laboratory testing equipment.
It is also in a joint venture with woodworking machinery maker Weinig in GreCon-Weinig which makes finger jointing lines in a newer building on the Alfeld factory site.
This year saw the complete updating of the whole line of measuring equipment supplied by GreCon and this range, designated 5000 and replacing the 3000 series, was first presented at Ligna in Hannover in May 2009.
This updating/upgrading process involved the complete redesign of some equipment, such as the DAX 5000 laboratory density profile analyser – which received software and hardware upgrades and a new cabinet design – while for others there was just a software upgrade or improvements in calibration.
“We introduced the 5000 series because we had developed a lot of new systems of benefit to our customers. We have had eight orders since Ligna for the DAX 5000 alone,” explained Kai Greten, joint managing director of GreCon.
Obviously, as with any electronic/ computer systems, upgrading of software is a continuous process and has been ongoing since the 3000 series was announced in the 1990s, said Mr Greten. “However, we decided that we had got to the point where we could make big enough changes to justify the launch of a new generation – the 5000.”
Products in the 5000 range include the UPU 5000, which detects and maps blisters and delamination in panels on the line after the press, using non-contact ultrasonic systems.
The UPU 4000 is also offered as a less sophisticated, and therefore lower-priced, alternative.
The DML 5000 is a thickness gauge with laser heads or transducers for use with softer materials, while the DMR 5000 inline thickness gauge is intended for use on panel production lines. It is available with the CT frame to enable it to be withdrawn sideways from the line for calibration or maintenance without interrupting production.
For moisture content measurement inline, GreCon offers the IR 5000 non-contact infra-red sensor for mats before the press and the MWF 5000 for the pressed panel product.   This latter device employs microwave technology and records surface and core moisture content of the panel. Both systems can be used in all process steps of panel production, says GreCon.
Supplementing the inline technology is the MWF 5000 LM laboratory microwave moisture measurement system.
For board weight measurement inline, there is the brand new HPS 5000 with high resolution, measuring each square millimetre of board. “This calculation of weight is based on detecting 100% of the processed wood,” said Mr Greten.
The CS 5000 is aimed at high-speed lines and can have up to10 non-contact heads across the width of the running line. The GS 5000, meanwhile, is a more conventional board scale to measure individual panels or stacks of panels, employing load cells placed under the conveyor.
For surface inspection of panels inline, there is Superscan for laminated panels and this is installed directly after the laminating press.
Just as important as measuring finished board quality is controlling mat quality before it even enters the press.
The Dieffensor was launched at Ligna 2003 as a system to detect foreign bodies or glue lumps in the mat before a continuous press in order to protect the valuable stainless steel belts from damage.
However, developments on this device since its launch have extended its applications considerably, as Mr Greten explained.
“The add-on function of the Dieffensor is weight measurement of 100% of the raw material going towards the press. This is a key feature because it gives measurement in both length and width directions and allows optimization of forming and saving of resinated wood raw material.”
Development of this machine has been carried out jointly with machinery maker Dieffenbacher, which started with the idea of press belt protection.
“Over 30 Dieffensors have now been delivered and development is continuously ongoing,” said Uwe Kahmann, joint managing director with Kai Greten. “We have six people dedicated to the development of this product in our research and development department and have achieved an accuracy of 5g/m2 recently. We are also diversifying into other markets with the Dieffensor, thus further justifying expenditure on its development.”
Research and development (R&D) is an important department for GreCon and employs a total of 20 staff for measurement applications.
In the currently quieter market, the R&D department has used the opportunity to carry out ‘internal research’ on new products, while the company as a whole has taken the opportunity to improve some of its internal systems and procedures.
Another important area of business for the company is in spark detection and GreCon has developed its software version 1.7 this year.
“Large mills have may be 150 detection zones around their factory and they wanted a system to better coordinate those zones – and to cater for add-ons after start-up,” explained Mr Kahmann. The latest generation came to the market in July 2009.
The Alfeld works assembles 8,000 spark sensors a year and these can record incidents to one thousandth of a second for later analysis by control units which come in three ‘sizes’, from four-zone to 16-zone to 150-zone units.
Press fire protection is an increasingly important area too and GreCon has carried out 12 installations since it launched its programme 30 months ago. “Our sensors are more accurate than those of our competitors and can, for instance, distinguish between a spark and a camera flash,” said Mr Greten.
That is good news for a journalist/ photographer who lives in fear of setting off an extinguishing system while gathering a story for these pages!
Recognising that panel mills, like everybody, are having to economise as much as possible, GreCon also offers a consulting service to assist its customers, as well as making its products available on lease or rental programmes to reduce customers’ capital outlay.
“Perhaps the customer likes our equipment but he wants to know the saving potential in his particular factory,” said Mr Greten. “So we will go to the plant, analyse his process, and present a report showing the savings potential we have identified; a fresh look from someone outside the business can often be helpful. We can also provide specialist knowledge to evaluate the databases of our installed equipment and sometimes we can help the production people to make a case to the financial management to get buying decisions made. We call this whole process ‘potential analysis’.”
While the company is headquartered in Germany and all R&D and production is carried out there, it is represented around the world by its own offices.
The latest to open was in Moscow earlier this year (2009). The long estestablished office is Grecon Inc in Tigard, Oregon in the US, which has been going for 20 years.
There is also GreCon Ltd in Newcastle, UK; GreCon China in Shanghai; and sales offices in France, Thailand and southern Germany. Independent representing companies are also to be found in 35 other countries.
Although shoe last manufacture only accounts for around 15% of the group’s business today, GreCon certainly has not lost its roots. Indeed it has proudly maintained and preserved its historic architectural heritage while pushing at technological boundaries with its products for the panel industry.

Bischweier in southern Germany has been home to a panel manufacturing business for just over 40 years, having started particleboard production in 1968 as Gruber + Weber.
In 2001 the factory became fully a part of Kronospan Holdings GmbH and since then the group has poured a lot of money into the site to bring it in line with the group philosophy of efficiency in making the right product for the
right market.
It all began with a multi-opening press line producing particleboard which
could be laminated in a melamine-facing press line.
Family-owned business Gruber + Weber invested in its factory over the years, adding more short-cycle pressing capacity in 1983 and 1993 and additional warehousing in 1998 – a building also intended to house a new cut-to-size plant which was never realised.
The factory closed down in 2001 and was then bought by Kronospan, which restarted particleboard production in January 2002 on the original 10-opening hot press. Production capacity was then 360,000m3 a year.
In the following year, after a lengthy process to obtain the necessary planning permission, the new owners erected a new factory building on the site and installed a Dieffenbacher CPS continuous press line with a new chipping line, screening line and sifters.
The new press was 42.8m long and 2.4m wide and had an initial annual production of 400,000m3.
As the new line started production in August 2003, the old multi-daylight line – also by Dieffenbacher – was closed down; the two lines did not run simultaneously.
Investment continued in 2006 with the installation of a new Schelling panel sawing plant. This produces cut-to-size panels in both raw and melamine faced board and has a capacity of 120,000m3/year.
A short-cycle press line was also brought from Worms in Germany and refurbished and installed at Bischweier, fitted with new electronic controls and wear parts.
The refurbished line in fact comprised two short-cycle presses alongside each other and was originally by Dieffenbacher. The presses were modified and upgraded by Wemhöner.
In a separate building, there is also a Wemhöner short-cycle line from 1994/5.
These three presses together gave the Bischweier operation a surfacing capacity of 24 million m2/year in 2007.
Attention turned again to the Dieffenbacher CPS particleboard line in 2007 when preparations began to increase the line’s annual capacity to 850,000m3.
The equipment installed in 2003 had been designed to anticipate this increase in capacity but a new log yard was required, together with a new chipping line, extended screening facilities and new chip silos.
“Wet chip preparation was completely modified, including the moving floors,” said Oliver Lauer of Bischweier’s technical department.
A new dryer was also added and this was equipped with the latest emissions-cleaning technology in a ‘UTWS’ System; this employs a heat exchanger, dry electric filter and other technology developed by Kronospan to eliminate dust, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and odours.
To increase thermal oil heating capacity for the longer press, a new gas-powered heat exchanger was installed. The company has modified the combustion chamber from the old dryer in order to use that to heat the thermal oil.
In general, Bischweier aims to generate 90% of its energy by burning waste wood.
In order to meet the 850,000m3 capacity target, the continuous press was extended to 52.8m. This was accomplished during the month of July 2008, with removal of the old equipment, installation of the new and extending the press all being completed in one month.
The new warehouse built around the same time incorporates two railway sidings for shipping the company’s production out and for bringing resins in from Kronospan’s Lampertswalde plant and from the BASF factory in Ludwigshafen.
A large part of the site was still undeveloped when Kronospan bought it and there was thus ample room for the company to execute its expansion plans.
Bischweier is in the Black Forest area and there is thus a good wood supply, explained Mr Lauer. Sawmill slabs and small roundwood come from a 100km radius and all Bischweier’s wood supply is certified to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) standards.
However, there is some problem caused by the rush to biomass energy production, Mr Lauer admitted.
“Pellet producers are competing for the wood supply and some even utilise logs because the biomass energy business is subsidised,” he said.
Chipping employs one Bruks Klöckner 1500kW chipper with a two metre diameter rotor and Bischweier’s chips are sorted into one of three compartments in the chip store, which has a moving floor, according to categories of softwood, hardwood or mixed. The chips are allocated to a compartment from the chipper area control room. This enables some
tailoring of boards to particular
customer requirements.
The sawdust silos are enormous, at 25m in diameter, and with a capacity of 9,000m3 each.
As part of the stringent planning conditions imposed by the local authority, the chipper hall is lined with special sound-absorbing building blocks.
Covered belt conveyors carry the wet chips to the knife ring flakers and to the dosing silos, thus avoiding release of dust into the atmosphere.
The drum dryer has a drying capacity of approximately 70 tonnes of water evaporation per hour actual and was designed within the Kronospan group.
There are seven Pal of Italy oscillating dry screens and two wind sifters by Schenkmann & Piel of Germany (part of the Dieffenbacher group).
The gluing system is by Imal of Italy and this company also supplied the on-the-line quality control measurement
systems.
Forming employs four heads – two for surface and two for core layers.
Minimax supplied the Minifog system which guards the continuous press against fire.
There is a Steinemann Satos 10-head sander to finish the board surfaces.
An underground tunnel is used to take the packs of finished boards under the yard to the new warehouse without risking the outdoor elements.
In the warehouse there is an ingenious stock tracking system in which sensors/transmitters set in the concrete floor ‘talk’ to the fork lift trucks which are connected to the main stock control computer system; the driver scans the label on the pack and the computer tells him where to place it in the warehouse. The same system also enables the driver to locate the correct pack and remove it from stock for a given customer order.
Part of the same sensor system is also used to control the parking of road trucks in the warehouse ready for
loading.
Grades of particleboard produced include E1 (with urea formaldehyde resin) and Kronospan’s own ELE (extra low emission) panels, which fall somewhere between E1 and E-zero for formaldehyde emissions. A special melamine urea formaldehyde resin is used to produce the ELE panels.
A certain amount of moisture resistant board is made, mainly for flooring applications, but this is a niche product, said Mr Lauer.
Particleboard thicknesses of 8 to 40mm are produced and most production goes to the furniture industry with customers in France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany forming the main part of the factory’s customer base, although small quantities have also been shipped to China and other parts of Asia.
Since it started its expansion and upgrading plans in 2003, Kronospan has spent in excess of e160m on its Bischweier operation, raising production volumes of both raw particleboard and surfaced boards, improving the quality of production and ensuring compliance with stringent environmental regulations.
Within a 500km radius the factory can access markets from the Netherlands in the north to Genova in the south and from Orléans in the west to Prague in the east, illustrating the Kronospan philosophy of being close to both its chosen markets and to a reliable wood supply.

It is never easy to build a business from nothing and make a success of it, but Hans-Peter Kleinschmidt has done just that.
Starting from scratch in rented premises designed to assist young companies such as EWS 12 years ago, he worked long hours designing and creating products to build the company which he heads as chairman today.
Boasting a growing range of quality control measurement equipment for use on the production line to give real-time feedback, EWS has itself grown and there is a plot of land waiting to accommodate the company’s planned new factory.
Electronic Wood Systems started life in Hameln near Hanover in northern Germany.
Famous as ‘Hamelin’ in the children’s story of the Pied Piper, who legend says cleared the town of rats, the town will continue to be the home of the company when it builds its new factory on an industrial estate on the outskirts in 2009.
The reserved site is 7,500m2 in area and EWS will build a production/research & development (R&D) facility as well as offices. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2009, with completion in mid-2010.
However, EWS has no intention of becoming a large unwieldy company, says Mr Kleinschmidt.
“There are advantages to being a relatively small and flexible high-tech company. We have leading-edge technology and we enjoy what we do. After all, very experienced technical people have come to EWS from larger companies for a reason – there is more possibility to influence decisions and more involvement in the
company,” he says.
Illustrating this point is the presence of Matthias Fuchs as one joint managing director and Hans-Peter’s son Hauke as the other.
Mr Fuchs arrived in April 2004 with considerable experience in the electronic measuring industry and Hauke Kleinschmidt joined EWS in 2005, also bringing relevant experience to
the company.
Recently, the board was expanded and enhanced with the recruitment of Markus Rückert, who is responsible for R&D (on which the company spends 15% of turnover annually), and Jan Pippert, commercial manager.
Mrs Elke Kleinschmidt is responsible for commercial/human resources and Monika Wilbois for marketing. Other specialist staff cover software development, engineering and technical service.
Among its range of products, the company has produced the Thick-Scan thickness gauges for some time but recently addressed a problem common to all
such instruments: In order to calibrate it, the thickness gauge frame is normally withdrawn from the production line, calibrated and then reinserted.
Now, EWS has installed an additional measuring head outside and alongside the production flow and this calibration track gives automatic continuous calibration to the measuring tracks.
Meanwhile, addressing the need for greater accuracy in measuring weight-per-unit-area on the MDF production line, the company has introduced a calibration method here, too.
For the first time, says EWS, this development takes into account the ‘beam hardening’ effect of x-ray radiation.
“An x-ray is made up of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ beams and the soft beams are absorbed more by the thick MDF mat, thus ‘hardening’ the beam” explains Matthias Fuchs. “For instance, you may have a mat of 20kg/m3 density and an MDF board of 20kg/m3, but the thicknesses will be very different. From this kind of information we can produce a density curve which forms the basis of our calibration and this is patented,” he says. “The common method used to calibrate such gauges is to use various panel samples with known raw density values but this disregards the phenomenon of beam hardening.”
The company’s Mass-Scan X is the solution offered to overcome these problems.
Another innovation is in blow detection. The Ultra-Scan system from EWS uses a patented system of sound resonance which is said to increase the sound penetration through the board a hundred-fold. Thus very thick boards can be measured and the system is rendered insensitive to external noise, heat and steam, says the company.
Mechanical weight scales commonly used at the end of panel production lines need to be the maximum length of panel produced, plus 50% to allow accurate weighing. This makes them cumbersome and gives them a tare weight of up to two tonnes, which means lower accuracy.
Electronic Wood System’s answer is a non-contact board scale called Conti-Scale. This only requires a 300mm space in the production line as it is an isotopic-based system employing several heads across the width of the line. When combined with a thickness gauge, it also gives density distribution information.
Moisture analysers (infra-red, microwave and resistance types), cyclone plug-up detection systems, spark detection systems and the Dense-Lab laboratory density profile systems complete the
EWS range.
In collaboration with Norwegian company Argos Control, the company also offers the Argos Grading System for
surface inspection of raw and decorative-surfaced panels.
Another, recent, example of collaboration is SicoScan. This time, the partner is Siempelkamp, the supplier of complete panel production lines and short-cycle press lines (see p32), which joined forces with EWS in a cooperation announced at the Ligna 2007 exhibition.
SicoScan is a complete system integrating the measurement technology of EWS into the machines, process control and automation technology of Siempelkamp.
Thus mat moisture content on the forming line, weight-per-unit-area behind the mat former, board thickness and any delaminations at the press outfeed, as well as board weight, are recorded by the EWS sensor technology.
The sensors then interface with the Siempelkamp line control software in the central control room and provide the information to the controllers without the need for a separate computer and screens dedicated to quality measuring equipment. The measuring signals are recorded and evaluated by Siempelkamp’s Prod-IQ system, which gathers and coordinates all production information and applies it to the production process, thus optimising control of the line.
The two companies continue to discuss further technical developments in measurement technology, and cooperation in R&D to develop these ideas, while retaining their independence and creativity as separate companies.
“The key is the blue SicoScan box Gauge-Controller made by EWS,” said Markus Rückert. “It is this which evaluates all the data from the sensors and interfaces with the ‘Siempelkamp world’ PLC via data cable. Should that link be severed, the data is still stored safely in the Gauge-Controller.
PiperWare is the software employed by EWS’s systems and is a common structure for all the various gauges. It has the flexibility to be set up for continuous, multi-opening or single-opening press lines, explains Matthias Fuchs. “We spent e300,000 just on developing this software, which makes visualisation as simple as possible for the operators.”
Electronic Wood System’s turnover has increased by almost 30% this year and the future of the company which Mr Kleinschmidt senior founded 12 years ago seems secure, especially with the collaboration with one of the biggest players in the global panel machinery business, Siempelkamp.
So Hans-Peter is planning to take more of a back seat and to hand over control of his company to his young team of experienced people, who will be responsible for the future of the business.

With 2007 sales of e260m and employees numbering 3,700 worldwide, the Leitz Group is a major manufacturer of precision tooling.
Founded in 1876 by Albert Leitz at its present location in the state of Baden-Württemberg, today the company has 34 sales and nine production companies, as well as a global network of around 200 service stations.
Its product range comprises the full assortment of machine-powered precision tools for machining solid wood, wood products and plastics.
The company says it devotes considerable resources to fundamental technological research and that it regards itself as a partner to its customers in developing safe and efficient operations.
Consultancy services as well as sales are thus part of the offering, covering areas such as tool management, software competence and storage. Training courses are also offered to customers’ staff.
After the initial sale, maintenance of the tools in efficient working order, and reprocessing of them at specialist centres worldwide, is another part of the package, with collection and delivery of the tools being handled by Leitz, says the company.
While the company supplies a wide range of tools for the cutting and shaping of wood based panels in general, an area of particular recent relevance is that of lightweight honeycomb-cored panels.
With their thin panel facings and paper-based cores, these panels offer particular challenges when machining the edges, to accept edge-banding for example.
“The industrial production of these lightweight panels requires special production tools,” confirms Dipl-Ing Richard Patsch, manager of research and development at Leitz. “They are very different in their machining characteristics, so in many cases demand specially-adapted tools.”
Of course the main characteristic of honeycomb-cored panels is that they have large cavities in the middle and this means that standard panel sizing saw blades do not tend to give a good cutting result.
Thus Leitz has developed thin-kerf panel sizing saw blades for this application. Leitz also recommends the use of tools with reduced cutting pressure to avoid collapse of the honeycomb.
“The ideal tool for a smooth cut edge is a circular saw blade with aggressive tooth geometry,” says Mr Patsch. This avoids material tear-out and delamination of
the board.
“The steep cutting edge results in a smooth rise in the cutting power – an essential prerequisite for the best cutting results,” he adds.
It is also important that the cutting pressure is always positioned against the outer layer in boards with an open honeycomb structure, says Mr Patsch, adding that it is important to use a scoring saw blade.
“When Leitz developed the new thin-kerf panel sizing saw blades with this cutting geometry, the cutting width was reduced by a third and with it the cutting forces. A range of saw blades with diameters of 250 to 450mm and appropriate scoring saw blades are available,” he says.
When first using thin-kerf saw blades for this application it is important to check the width of the machine riving knife. The standard riving knife may be too wide and may need to be changed, cautions Mr Patsch.
Edgebanding of these honeycomb panels is another specialised area.
In principle, there are two choices when edgebanding honeycomb panels, Leitz has found.
The choice depends on the structure of the surface panels and the honeycomb.
If the former are thicker than 8mm, the edgeband can be applied directly to the honeycomb panel, being glued to the edge of the surface panel. This requires sufficient gluing surface on the narrow edges of the surface panels and high edge rigidity. This process is preferred with work pieces with profiled edges or when high loads are to be accommodated, such as for table tops. Processing in this case is with conventional hoggers, jointing cutters or shank tools with cutting geometry optimised to reduce the cutting forces, according to Leitz.
The majority of the available light construction furniture boards, however, have thin facings such as 4mm HDF. Edgebanding requires the forming of rebates in the edges of the surface panels and applying an edging strip. Strips of MDF, particleboard or hard fibreboards are suitable for the edging strip.
Profiling tools, specially designed to suit the different materials, machine grooves in the face of the edging strip. These grooves must match exactly the profile in the surface panels. The cutting forces that arise from the milling tool must not cause delamination of the honeycomb core or the surface panel. The cut quality to the honeycomb is not critical, but the honeycomb chips must not constrain the application of the edging strip, says the company, adding that either tooling sets of stacked saw blades, or of tools with a staggered cut, are suitable for this operation.
Before gluing the edging strip, the faces of the surface panels are trimmed, either by hoggers or jointing cutters. If the excess to be trimmed is large, then jointing is preferable because of the high cutting forces on the thin panels. Using hoggers can cause the board to vibrate.
“In principle the two machining procedures are different in the power requirement,” says Mr Patsch. “The cutting power requirement for jointing rises linearly with rising board thickness, whereas it declines with hogging. That means that hogging needs less power than jointing to machine board thicknesses. The Leitz ‘DT-hogging program’ offers a suitable range of hoggers for this application.”
Finishing the edge banded edges on lightweight honeycomb panels is carried out with conventional tools and standard machine set-ups. However, to ensure a smooth-radius hogging without vibration, it is important to reduce the pressure from the surface rollers.

Eppingen is not in a part of the world where one would expect to find heavy industry, let alone a world player such as the company Dieffenbacher.
Approached from the Autobahn by minor country roads meandering through agricultural scenery, one is struck by the contrast to the more conventional
industrial cities of north Germany.
The explanation is simple. Jakob Dieffenbacher started with a locksmith business in the town in 1873 and in 1910 moved into the production of hydraulic presses for the fruit, wine and edible oil industries, so that explains the rural
location.
Today the fourth generation of the Dieffenbacher family is running the business, while the fifth is working its way through university to ensure the succession.
Dieffenbacher GmbH & Co KG today is divided into three main business units: wood, forming and operations.
Business unit wood obviously concerns the panel industry.
‘Forming’ concerns the press forming of 3-D items such as car body parts and stainless steel sinks, among many other things, in metal or plastic.
‘Operations’ covers all manufacturing service and logistics for the other two business units.
The company has grown over the years from being simply a press manufacturer into a supplier of complete lines for the panel making industry and it has done this both by internal innovation and by the acquisition of other machinery specialists.
One of the earliest such acquisitions was Schenck Panel Production Systems, which joined Dieffenbacher 10 years ago, bringing with it its expertise in process technology and, importantly, forming for particleboard and MDF lines.
In 2003, Schenkmann & Piel Engineering (SPE) joined the fold, with its expertise in drying proving a valuable addition to Dieffenbacher’s range of competences.
More recently, in 2007, the company bought a minority shareholding in Italian company Instalmec. This filled some more gaps in the ‘inhouse’ product portfolio by adding Instalmec’s mechanical and pneumatic conveying systems, suction, filter and cyclone equipment, rotary valves, dosing and screening systems, separators and gluing systems and blenders.
The latest and perhaps the most significant full acquisition made by Dieffenbacher came this year (2008) with the purchase of a significant part of the former Metso Panelboard company.
This involved two former Metso
locations, at Sundsvall in Sweden and Nastola in Finland.
“This means we now have 75-80% of the panel production line supplied from our own resources,” said Günter Natus, technical director, panel division, and a former Schenck employee.
Dieffenbacher’s purchase of the Sundsvall operation led to the return of an old and highly-respected name in the panel industry – Sunds. With the creation of Sunds MDF Technologies AB, this became the new competence centre for the engineering and the supply of complete front-end systems for MDF/HDF plants within the Dieffenbacher Group.
Its portfolio features fibre dryers and ‘Z-Sifters’, a pneumatic transport system and the new ‘EVOjet’ dry resin blending system. Sunds MDF Technologies’ scope of supply also includes complete doorskin lines.
Meanwhile, Dieffenbacher Panelboard Oy of Nastola brought the engineering and supply of machinery for panel handling, raw material preparation and forming for particleboard manufacture from Metso to Dieffenbacher. The complete portfolio features the ‘Lukki’ intermediate storage system and the complete range of ‘ClassiCleaner’ (WBPI issue 5, 2008, p60), ‘ClassiScreen’ and ‘ClassiFormer’ products. The scope of supply also includes small-capacity
single-opening press lines for
particleboard manufacture.
This left energy plants as the only part of the panel factory which Dieffenbacher did not offer from its own resources.
“So we developed the know-how inhouse by employing the right people and formed a couple of strategic alliances and now we have already sold four systems designed by us,” said Mr Natus.
The biggest such project so far has been for Pfleiderer at its Russian MDF plant in Novgorod, where it has an 85MW system.
“We supply everything on these projects, from the blowline to the finished, packaged panel and also carry out full erection on site.”
In a further move to strengthen its position in energy plants, this year Dieffenbacher entered into a cooperation agreement with Teaford in the US in which it will use Teaford’s heat energy system in some North American projects. Teaford will also become the manufacturer and installer of SPE’s particleboard/OSB drum dyers in the North American market.
Another cooperation agreement is with Swiss-Combi in its EcoDry system to reduce emissions from dryers. Swiss-Combi holds the patents and Dieffenbacher the licence. The key element of this equipment is the heat exchanger, which Swiss-Combi will supply.
The system employs an air-cooled grate and can utilise a mix of fuels as required. Remote online service is also available if required, as it is for all Dieffenbacher’s panel production lines.
“The pressure on environmental
emissions in the US is intensifying and this means we expect there still to be good business even in the current difficult
market,” said Mr Natus.
Ongoing investment at the Eppingen headquarters of Dieffenbacher involves enlarging the manufacturing facilities and refurbishing part of the offices, specifically for the ‘wood’ business unit. This follows an extensive enhancement of the factory in Windsor Ontario, Canada in 2007.
It may seem that the timing of that investment was questionable, but that
factory provided welcome support when certain parts of the CPS continuous presses destined for China were manufactured there when Eppingen was at full capacity and the North American market was quiet.
Also under construction on the Eppingen site is a new warehouse building for the logistics side of the business. With increasing transport costs, this is an important part of the business and involves the efficient movement of parts between the various manufacturing locations and sub-suppliers, as well as to the final customer.
“We have a lot of our annual turnover tied up in logistics and felt that there was room to improve,” said Mr Natus.
Another company near Eppingen shares the Dieffenbacher name and that is Dieffenbacher Zaisenhausen. It is a separate company, run by the brother of Wolf-Gerd Dieffenbacher, ceo of Dieffenbacher GmbH, but the two firms cooperate on many projects as well.
Zaisenhausen specialises in short-cycle presses and finishing lines.
At the beginning of November 2008, Dieffenbacher GmbH had an order book stretching ahead for six to 12 months, but neither Mr Natus nor technical director and customer relations manager Bernd Bielfeldt was confident in predictions of the future order situation, given the global economic uncertainties.
“Our educated guess for new orders next year is that there will be no more than 15 complete new lines and probably no less than 10, worldwide, next year. That’s half of the last two years’ annual totals,” said Mr Bielfeldt.
While admitting that there had been nothing from North America or western Europe in the way of new lines in the last two years, he pointed out that Russia, China, South America and India had shown some strength and suggested there is still a huge demand to come from Russia.
Looking at per capita consumption in the different regions, North America and western Europe, unsurprisingly, come out on top though the product mix is different, with North America being stronger in structural panels.
“India’s per capita consumption is so small it is hard to calculate,” said Mr Natus. “China’s consumption is at 10-20% of western countries but is growing rapidly, mainly in MDF, while Russia is similar but mainly in particleboard.
“So, long-term, there must be huge opportunities for everybody involved, including Dieffenbacher,” he forecast.
Dieffenbacher is supplying the first continuous line ever to Siberia, for a company set up by Malaysian-headquartered group Rimbunan Hijau. The customer will produce MDF near Chabarowsk. It used to be involved solely in logging and shipping the logs to China but now Rimbunan Hijau has decided to go into MDF production. Start-up of the CPS press, which is 2.65m wide x 24m long is anticipated in late 2009, with a capacity of 150,000m3/year.
Another Dieffenbacher customer in Siberia is Partner Tomsk, which is also setting up an MDF line, due to be shipped from Eppingen in mid-2009. This one will be 2.95m wide and 38m long, with an annual capacity of 260,000m3.
“They have the resources and the money in Russia. Five to seven years ago, investment was just by western companies and it still is to some extent, but there is a lot of investment by Russians themselves now – some old-established in the wood business and some new to it,” said Mr Natus.
Dieffenbacher founded an office in Moscow on October 1, 2004 and now feels that ‘OOO Dieffenbacher’ as it is called turned out to be a good investment,
supporting that promising market.
Eighteen months ago, Dieffenbacher also founded an office in India to be present in that market. “We believe the market will grow and we want to be present with our own people,” said Mr Natus, pointing out that all Dieffenbacher’s worldwide offices are staffed by direct employees of the company – they are not agencies – and he feels that this is important.
“Our first continuous press will be shipped to India in the second quarter of 2009 and will be the first in India. It is going to Greenply Industries and will be an 8ft x 28m press with a capacity of 190,000m3/year,” he said.
Of course Dieffenbacher already has a factory and sales/service office in China to serve that large market for the company (WBPI issue 4, 2007, p55).
One opportunity for orders in an uncertain future market could be retro-fits/modernisations of existing plants.
Another is almost certainly niche products such as the insulation board line which Dieffenbacher has supplied to German panel maker Homanit, for example. The line is for Homanit’s Homatherm factory in northern Germany. This was under installation in November. Homanit has also purchased a thin HDF line for its Karlino factory in Poland. This will have a capacity of 220,000m3/year.
Some other recent projects for Dieffenbacher include the Gagarin particleboard plant near Moscow, which produced its first board in October. An LVL line, also in Russia, produced its first billet in October for MLT of St Petersburg.
Meanwhile, Kronospan Jihlava, Czech Republic, produced its first particleboard in August and, said Mr Natus, was running at nominal capacity after one week – the fastest start-up Dieffenbacher has ever had.
In Japan, the Okura particleboard line also achieved acceptance in October, while in the US, Louisiana-Pacific’s oriented strand lumber (OSL) line at Houlton, Maine, which employs a special steam-injection press, received acceptance in September.
To ensure a continuing ability to carry out its manufacturing business, Dieffenbacher employs 50 apprentices at any one time and has a dedicated training area in the Eppingen factory where apprentices learn their skills on a range of sophisticated machines. This not only ensures a continuing supply of skilled people but is also important in an area of relatively low population to encourage young people into their local industry.
The company carries out its own research and development and testing in Eppingen and can also carry out tests for customers, for instance on a new raw material for panel production, in its laboratory within the production area.
Dieffenbacher is still a 100% family-owned company and achieved a turnover of e290m in 2007 (the figure in 1980 was e36m), with 70% exported. It employs around 1,000 people worldwide.
The headquarters may be in a rural location in southern Germany, but it is clear that Dieffenbacher is an industrial concern which operates truly globally.

There are very few manufacturers worldwide of paper impregnation lines to prepare decor and Kraft papers and foils for lamination onto
panels.
Vits Systems GmbH, headquartered in Langenfeld, was founded 80 years ago, in 1928, and is a specialist in such “web processing plants”. In terms of impregnation plants supplied, Vits claims an estimated 70% market share. Its impregnators are also used in the filter paper and other sectors of the paper industry.
Vits also makes process plants for the thermal treatment of strips and foils for the metal industry and is a key supplier of rotary sheeters, dryers and finishing machines such as pre-folders or UV-coating units for the web offset printing industry.
In total, Vits has supplied around 900 impregnating lines over the years and has seen a significant increase in demand
during the boom in the laminate flooring industry in more recent years.
Development of those lines continues and the company was carrying out final testing of its latest technology at the time of WBPI’s visit in late October.
This latest impregnation line is capable of running at 100m/min. Running the impregnation process at that kind of speed is not the major problem – stacking the treated sheets fast enough, and carefully enough, at the end of the line is.
If the treated paper were to be rolled at the end of the line, then the problem is less severe, but most panel industry treaters are required to deliver cut-to-size sheets to
a stacker.
The newly-developed system employs an ‘active guidance system’ in a carefully coordinated choreography to lift the sheets as they exit the treatment line and gently but quickly lay them on the stack.
“In this way, we have increased the speed of the line from 50-70 metres per minute, depending on the paper weight, to at least 100 metres per minute,” said Thomas Niedermaier, managing director for sales at Vits Systems. “Our target is 120 metres per minute and we are confident of achieving that soon.
“Our latest line, called HIGHLINE, was launched at the Ligna exhibition in Hannover in 2007 as a high-speed line and we are now adding to this by de-bottlenecking the paper stacking system.”
The first such stacking system to be delivered was scheduled to go to panel manufacturer Kastamonu of Turkey and to be running by the year’s end (2008).
“We have seen a lot of interest from other customers as well because of the 30-40% increase in line speed,” added Mr Niedermaier.
The current economic crisis must mean that demand for new impregnation lines is going to decrease in the coming months, or maybe even years, and thus Vits is not relying solely on new sales.
“We are now concentrating on upgrading existing lines for our customers – there are at least 600 of our lines out there with potential [for improvement]. It is also important to reduce energy consumption these days, as well as more efficient handling to reduce waste,” said the managing director.
“Heat recovery systems, better insulation and optimised exhaust systems will save 30-40% in energy, plus giving a faster running speed for the line. This leads to the possibility for the customer to replace two lines with one high-speed, more efficient line, thus reducing production costs even further.”
With investment in laminate flooring now decreasing for reasons of global capacity, Vits’ management realised there was a need to diversify, using its long experience in overlaying as a starting point. Powder coating lines were the
chosen route.
“Powder coating is not new – it comes from the metal industry but metal is a conductive substrate so giving it an electric charge is easy,” pointed out Mr Niedermaier. Imparting opposite-polarity electric charges to substrate and powder so they attract each other is the basis for powder coating.
“Another point is that metal can be heated to high temperatures to make the powder coating melt and flow – wood can’t,” said the managing director.
Vits found that no company was offering a complete turnkey line and that they were all utilising components from metal coating lines which did not meet the quality requirements of the panel industry.
“This has led to a decrease in enthusiasm for, though not interest in, the technology,” explained Mr Niedermaier.
“We have thus developed equipment for two essential areas of the line: an oven with a very even heat distribution to the whole work piece, which is patent pending; and specially designed spray guns which are also patent pending.”
Vits has long experience in ovens for drying paper and says that its experience in tight control has been transferred to the powder coating line ovens.
“Also, until now, it has only been possible to coat MDF that has been produced with salt crystals in the wood to give it conductivity. This is more expensive than normal MDF and only produced by a few companies. So, working closely with a partner company producing furniture components in Austria, we have a line running successfully with normal MDF. The conductivity comes from the moisture content of the panel,” said Mr Niedermaier.
“We build the machinery and install the lines, while our partner company is responsible for the development and implementation of the coating technology.”
Mr Niedermaier suggested that there are two great advantages to powder coating.
Firstly, it is emission-free with no solvents, unlike wet lacquering which either has solvents or is water-based, leading to drying problems. He also said that powder is no more expensive than wet lacquer.
Secondly, the powder is a polyester epoxy resin and Vits claims that this gives a high-quality surface.
“It is very scratch resistant, impact resistant, warm to the touch [unlike melamine] and it offers new design possibilities such as metallic glitter finishes and coating of heavily-moulded surfaces, while surfaces and edges receive exactly the same coating,” said Mr Niedermaier. “You can also use the same coating for the MDF panels as for the metal frames – in office furniture for example.”
The powder coating lines are marketed under the name POWTEC. Components to be coated are suspended in the line, which is either 160cm or 80cm high.
Meanwhile, powder suppliers have also seen the potential and have increased their research and development to reduce curing temperatures.
Vits has not deserted its traditional impregnation line markets, as evidenced by the new high-speed line being launched now. Mr Niedermaier also believes that melamine (short-cycle) lamination has a strong future as the only way to achieve structured decorative panels such as realistic wood grain or stone effects.
However, the company is realistic in its assessment of the short-term market and has realised the need to diversify. It also believes it has identified a promising new niche in the market for its powder coating lines.

As at the end of October 2008, Siempelkamp Maschinen-und Anlagenbau GmbH & Co KG had sold 16 panel manufacturing plants during the year, giving it what Ralf Griesche, marketing and communications manager with the company, called “A brilliant year so far”.
This seems a fitting way to mark 125 years of Siempelkamp, which was and remains essentially a family-owned business.
A major new development for the company preceded 2008, when it acquired part of the Metso Panelboard company. This transaction took place on October 1, 2007, so its full effects were not really apparent until this year.
With this purchase, Siempelkamp assumed responsibility for the Metso Contipress (formerly the Küsters press) continuous press and all maintenance for existing Contipresses. The company will also take on the maintenance of the Bison and Mende-type presses supplied in the past by Metso and its predecessors.
Importantly, it also acquired the energy system of Metso Panelboard, which has become Siempelkamp Energy Systems, or SES.
“We have already tripled the business Metso had before in energy systems,” said Heinz Classen, managing director of Siempelkamp Maschinen-und Anlagenbau, confirming the generally buoyant sales of the company in recent years. “There has been a boom for the last four years and we have an order book well into 2009, including 10 orders for our thin board lines since they were introduced in 2006, so we have had good success [in the market].”
However, with the current uncertainty in the global economy, Mr Classen admitted he was not sure how the future will shape up. Nobody is of course.
On the positive side, Mr Classen pointed out that world steel prices seem to have peaked. “This added 20% to our costs in the last three years although we have cut manufacturing costs during that time as well,” he said.
Siempelkamp attributes part of its recent success to the latest evolution of its famous ContiRoll continuous press, as well as its special thin board lines employing that press as part of the whole
technology package.
“Generation 8 of the ContiRoll is not just an upgraded press but a revision of our whole production line for panels; we have made improvements from the complete area of the mat former to the press to the stacking area for finished boards at the end of the line,” said Michael Vogel, manager of ContiRoll press design for the wood processing section of the company.
This rethinking of the whole line is also key to Siempelkamp’s recent concentration on, and successful sales of, thin board lines for MDF, mentioned by Mr Classen.
“Thin MDF with a thickness of 1.5 to four millimetres is increasingly replacing wet fibreboards and thin plywood and the market is demanding that machinery suppliers come up with concepts which ensure safe and economic production of these panels,” said Mr Griesche.
Obviously, the only way to produce such thin panels economically is at very high speed and so this has been a major area of concentration for Siempelkamp in developing Generation 8.
The company now guarantees line speeds of 105m/min although it says its plants are capable of speeds up to 120m/min.
“We have optimised the fibre flow and the falling height of the fibre in the
forming bunker to achieve an even cross-wise distribution and to eliminate clumps of fibre and consequent damage to the steel belt of the continuous press,” explained Mr Vogel.
“The StarFormer spreading head also has very fine gap settings to prevent any lumps getting through into the mat and to ensure an even lengthwise distribution of the fibre. We have achieved a forming accuracy of +/-2% for 3mm boards. There is then a downstream levelling unit to level the mat surface.”
Obviously the crucial phase is now the pressing of this carefully prepared mat and Siempelkamp has modified and enhanced its pre-press to cope with the higher line speeds.
For thin boards only, the company then offers its new compactor, which is installed after the pre-press and before the ContiRoll hot press.
“This has two wire mesh belts which evacuate most of the air from the mat. As the mat is compacted to nominal thickness, any lumps which might still be in the mat are squeezed out,” said Mr Vogel.
“A precise head-cut following a mat dump, if any, enables the ContiRoll to continue at full speed of 2,000mm/sec. An accurate head cut is ensured by a special diagonal saw installed between the pre-press and the compactor for thin board production.”
If the panel maker wishes to make thicker MDF, he can simply open the compactor and allow the mat to pass through straight from the pre-press to the ContiRoll.
Now we come to the Generation 8 ContiRoll itself. For thin board production and shorter presses only, an option offered is to have directly-heated infeed drums, the shells of which are heated with thermal oil. Heat transfer from the stainless steel belts into the mat thus starts as soon as the mat enters the ContiRoll.
Not a new feature, having been available for nine years now, but an important one for thin board production as well, is the flexible press infeed. While the lower hot platen has a fixed geometry, the upper one is flexible and can be adjusted up or down by the hydraulic cylinders to any radius to enhance further de-aeration of the mat and start an optimal pressing process as early as possible. It also enables the achievement of high surface densities, thus eliminating sanding of the finished board, says Siempelkamp.
The press cylinders themselves are the same as those used in the previous generation. However, their number is increased and their position optimised for thin board production, it says.
Another special feature for thin boards in Generation 8 is the presence of pressure distribution plates in the lower half of the press to give greater stiffness and more equal pressure distribution, explained Mr Vogel.
Returning to those pressure cylinders, each cylinder row in the calibration zone is fitted with a position encoder, interacting with the automatic feedback from the board thickness sensors at the press discharge end.
Pressure and distance can also be precisely adjusted, row by row, for the right, inside right, inside left and left cylinders to give even thickness distribution.
“Because of the speed of these thin board lines, we offer a triple diagonal saw after the press, or the customer can opt for a clipper adapted from the carton industry for panels up to 3mm thick,” said Mr Vogel.
The ContiRoll press essentially comes in three sizes. Size 1 has a frame height of 3.7m, while size 2 has a frame height of 5.1m to cope with the higher pressing forces involved when pressing wider boards up to 12ft. Size 2 is also used for very long presses.
Siempelkamp holds several world records according to Mr Vogel. For example, the first press of size 2 at Duratex, botucatu has a 50m ContiRoll for MDF, installed about seven years ago, and this was followed by even longer presses: Huber of Oklahoma has a 60m OSB press and Tolko Slave Lake a 70m unit, again for OSB production.
Now there is a new record, with Duratex again. This press was undergoing installation in November and is 77m long and nine feet wide. It is scheduled to begin producing 2,400m3 a day of MDF in the middle of 2009. However, 77m is just the effective pressing length. Total length is 90m and the overall line length is 174m. Total weight of the press is 2,200 tonnes and, if you really like statistics, the total pressing force is 53,000 tonnes.
A stronger roller rod chain has been developed to cope with these long presses and has more than twice the breaking load of a size 1 press.
At the other end of the scale, Siempelkamp has supplied the first of its new ‘size 0’ four-feet wide ContiRolls to Lishui of China. This press is 33.8m long and is due to start up in January or February of 2009, to produce something over 100,000m3 of MDF annually.
The markets for continuous press lines have moved quite dramatically in a geographical sense in the last 15 years or so.
Western Europe and North America have been less active in installing new capacity, while China of course has made spectacular advances in the last eight to 10 years.
A recent strong market for Siempelkamp has been Turkey, with five complete lines sold in a short period of time. The company has been in the Turkish panel market for nearly 50 years, initially with single- and multi-daylight presses, and supplied the first ContiRoll for MDF in 1994, to Çamsan. Since then, it has sold a total of 19 such plants to Turkey.
Three of the recent contracts are up and running, while a fourth is under construction on site. Number five is in manufacture at Krefeld.
Turanlar, whose factory is about one hour’s drive from Samsun on the Black Sea coast, bought a thin MDF plant to make board of 1.5 to 4mm at 2,000mm/sec. Capacity is 650m3/day at 3mm thickness and the first panel was produced in August 2008.
Meanwhile, Yildiz Entegre is currently installing a multi-opening-press doorskin line supplied by Siempelkamp complete with dies, which is due to start production early in 2009.
Kastamonu’s factory in Kastamonu City has a 7ftx55.3m ContiRoll to produce standard thicknesses of MDF and HDF. It started production in March 2008 and has a capacity of 900m3/day, 18mm thickness basis.
Yildiz Sunta, another major panel maker in Turkey, has ordered a particleboard line which is currently under manufacture in Krefeld. First board from this 7ftx42.1m press is expected in April 2009 and capacity is nominally 2,000m3/day, 18mm basis.
Starwood, also of Turkey, produced its first thin MDF on June 27, 2008 on its 7ftx28.8m ContiRoll press.
Apart from Turkey, Siempelkamp has also seen increasing sales to Russia in the last couple of years as Russian-owned
companies – as opposed to western European panel makers building lines in Russia – have set up production there.
Customers for ContiRoll lines include Ugraplit particleboard, Ivatsevichdrev particleboard in White Russia and Apscheronsk MDF.
The Siempelkamp group is not solely involved in the wood based panels market, but has products in the foundry and nuclear industry and other energy markets. It has recently invested heavily in these production facilities too and this balance of markets should hopefully reduce the exposure of the company to market fluctuations in the panel industry as the group enters its 126th year.

Usually, panel manufacturers rely on the optimisation systems which come with a sawing system.
“However, saw manufacturers address a wide clientele, from saws for joinery companies to cutting systems for the plastics and gypsum industry and that is why the accompanying optimisation systems are often not aligned with the specific needs of wood based panel manufacturers,” claims Roland Schramme, managing partner of Altanis, whose business is in optimization systems.
“What causes problems is the maximization of throughput and capacity for 24/7 operations; the online integration of cutting systems of other manufacturers; the online integration with ERP/PPS systems and a simple implementation of the extensive packaging instructions of customers.”
Furthermore, Mr Schramme asserts that the trend towards a declining size of orders reduces throughput and increases cutting: “Very often, order-specific production costs cannot be calculated and the optimization system delivers complex cutting plans which are not cost-optimised and take a very long time to cut,” he says.
This is the focus of Altanis’ solution ‘pCUT’ for wood based panel manufacturers – streamlining the production process while at the same time reducing cost.
“The success of pCUT has already been proved by a number of well-known panel manufacturers. For instance Pfleiderer Engineered Wood of Neumarkt, Germany has deployed pCUT successfully in three plants,” says Mr Schramme in a claim backed up by his customer: “The implementation of Altanis pCUT was amortised after six months,” says Martin Rong, executive director of Pfleiderer Engineered Wood. “And further on, the quality of the value  chain has been improved significantly.”
In order to achieve profitable prices, it is of course necessary to know the cost of the product. The key component of that is the production cost, which is itself composed of machine cost, raw material (input and clipping) cost and packaging cost. Very often, claims Mr Schramme, these costs are not known in detail but are calculated using empirically acquired average values, which are neither customer- , nor order-specific. The knowledge of single aspects like average clipping, mean stacking height or number of cut cycles is not sufficient for an accurate and order-specific cost calculation in the panel manufacturing process, he says, and, therefore, the customer- and order-specific costs of panel manufacturing cannot be calculated before production starts.
“Because of the inadequate knowledge of the production cost, customer prices cannot be calculated according to the true costs of production. Therefore, unprofitable orders could be accepted while profitable orders might be rejected,” says Mr Schramme.
With the detailed calculation of the order-specific production costs, Altanis claims the following targets can be reached:

The Fagus shoe last factory is an architectural treasure and the founding building of the famous Bauhaus architectural concept.
Built in 1911 in Alfeld, not far from Hanover in orthern Germany, to house the then-booming wooden last business of Carl Benscheidt, it still looks modern.
But how did the GreCon of today come from a shoe last business? (For those who don’t know a shoe last is the re-usable ‘mould’ around which a shoe is made).
Fagus did not only make lasts, but also made the machinery used in their production and this led to the manufacture of woodworking machines and ultimately to Grecon Dimter, a joint venture with machinery maker Weinig, which has a factory in the south of Germany.
There was another connection to the panel industry: in 1958, Ernst Greten senior, father of fourth generation Berndt, Ernst and Gerd, developed a wind-sifting system for particleboard, which in turn led to the establishment of the company Bison, which supplied machinery for complete particleboard and MDF lines until the mid-1990s.
In 1974, the brothers Ernst and Gerd founded the electronics side of the business, GreCon, so well-known in the panel industryworldwide today.
The fifth generation of Gretens is represented by Kai, son of Berndt, and he is technical director of the electronic department in Alfeld, responsible for R&D and manufacturing.
The GreCon range includes on-the-line and laboratory quality control systems, safetysystems and measurement systems.
Among the most recent innovations –both in the last 12 months – are the Superscan and the Dieffensor.
Superscan is a camera-based inspection system for panel surfaces which operates at the full line production speed. It is designed to detect defects in raw board surfaces or laminated, lacquered or printed finishes and GreCon has just supplied its first two-sided system for top and bottom decorative faces.
Dieffensor, developed jointly with Dieffenbacher, detects foreign bodies or resin lumps in the fibre or particle mat, and also double-checks the forming accuracy.
Calibrating any online measuring system is obviously vital and, until recently, this could only be done during plant shutdowns.
However, now GreCon offers its bond detection and thickness sensors mounted on a ‘C’ rather than an ‘O’ frame so that one half can be pulled sideways out of the line for calibration and cleaning without interruption to production, or losing all the information which the sensors provide. This is known as the ‘ct-Concept’.
For moisture measurement on the line, the company offers an infra-red system, IR 3000 and a microwave system, MWF 3000.
The MWF 3000 can also be expanded to a density analyser to obtain moisture content and density data simultaneously.
The IR 3000 has a non-contact measuring head and operates on the principle that higher moisture content material absorbs more of the infra-red light.
The online measurement of weight-perunit- area is carried out by the BWQ 3000 traversing gauge, which is again non-contact, employing x-ray technology.
The Stenograph is an online density distribution analyser, also employing x-rays.
Online blow detection is an important quality control tool with the potential to save material wastage and line stoppages and GreCon’s UPU 2000 employs up to 16 inspection channels mounted on a frame across the width of the production line.
For online bond quality measurement,the company offers the UPU 3000 with up to 22 inspection channels.
There are two online thickness gauges: the DMR 2000 with measuring rollers and the DMR 3000 with rhomboidal technology.
“Most panel manufacturers produce above their own quality standard to be on the safe side,” said Kai Greten. “We can help to reduce raw material consumption but maintain standards by the best use of measurement systems and this can give a big competitive advantage.”
An infra-red cyclone plug-up detection, and spark detection and extinguishing, systems make up GreCon’s safety-related products.
A new development here is the OPC interface to Siemens, Allen Bradley or other standard control systems and from there to visualisation on a central control room display, rather than on a separate console on the individual equipment cabinet.
“This will help to identify exactly where a problem occurred to prevent it happening again,” explained Mr Greten. For the laboratory, Labrob and Bondcheck are offered, together with the DA-X density analyser.
All GreCon measuring systems come with on-line help if required, giving the operator access 24/7 to its technical staff. “All systems we supply are available here on site in full-function, full-scale so if the customer wants to test a new product, we can do it here. We can also investigate any problems and give troubleshooting advice,” said the technical director.
The company also makes all its products inhouse, only buying in printed circuit boards and equipment cabinets. It employs 21 people just in R&D, out of a total of 350, and has 40 service engineers travelling to customers, 22 of whom are Alfeld-based.
GreCon also has a subsidiary in Tigard, Oregon in the US where spark detection and measurement systems are assembled from Alfeld-produced components, and subsidiaries in the UK and Strasbourg. It also opened an office in Shanghai last year, as well as having agents in Australia, Asia and Europe. “Our main objectives for our customers are to minimise raw material and energy consumption and improve quality, while at the same time providing maximum protection to prevent fires and explosions in filters, pneumatic and mechanical conveying systems,” concluded Mr Greten.

Founded by Hans-Peter Kleinschmidt in 1996, Electronic Wood Systems, or EWS, has developed a range of electronic systems to monitor quality and safety on panel production lines.
From small beginnings in Springe in northern Germany, the company moved to its current premises in Hameln, 50km from Hanover, and the home of the legendary Pied Piper of the children’s story, in 1995.
Originally the Hefehof yeast and schnapps factory, the old restored buildings were adapted under a government/local authority scheme to accommodate small ‘high-tech’ businesses in their start-up phase.
The original intention was that companies would stay for a maximum of five years and then move on.
However, EWS was given special dispensation to stay at Hefehof and has been there for nine years, but now Mr Kleinschmidt has plans to relocate his business.
“We have a reservation on a 4,500m2 property, still in Hameln, and plan to build our new offices and production centre there in 2006,” he told WBPI. “We need more space and it will be a better location for our staff.”
The business has developed since those early start-up days, expanding its product range and its global market penetration and 2005 showed an 80% increase in turnover on the previous year.
Such increases obviously require more hands to run the business and there have been two significant appointments to the board of directors of EWS in the last two years.
First came Matthias Fuchs. Having run the research and development (R&D) division at competitor GreCon (where Mr Kleinschmidt also started in the business), he joined EWS as technical director and executive vice-president in May 2004, also becoming a shareholder in the business.
Then, in April 2005, Hans-Peter Kleinschmidt’s son Hauke joined EWS as sales director. Hauke, a precision engineering graduate was, prior to his appointment, responsible for R&D of mechanical components, including optics and electronics, for Mahr of Germany.
Export has always been the lifeblood of this business, averaging around 90% of sales, but Mr Kleinschmidt has seen what he describes as “a breakthrough” in the German market recently.
One such domestic customer was Kunz (now part of Pfleiderer), which purchased a blow detection system after a three month trial installation in its Gschwend factory. EWS had to prove the system could measure 55mm particleboard immediately after the press exit.
As a result, further export orders arrived – Kunz subsidiary Uniboard in Canada bought a blow detection system for its La Baie MDF line.
Back in Germany, EWS closed an order through Siempelkamp in September 2005 to supply a laser thickness gauge for the Gutex thick insulation board line which Siempelkamp is supplying in southern Germany.
The Conti-Scale, launched at Ligna 2005, is a completely new area for EWS. It measures panel weights on the line and, when combined with thickness gauges, can also deliver density data to the line operators, employing a low-radiation isotopic source.
“It measures with very, very low radiation sources – equivalent to the levels in an aeroplane at 30,000ft, or a smoke detector,” said Mr Kleinschmidt.
“If you want to increase production speed on a continuous line you extend the press length, but then you don’t have room for a traditional board scale and need to move the star cooler along, but that is not necessary with the Conti-Scale as it only takes up 300mm of space. Also, very thin board moves too fast for a conventional scale but ours has unlimited line speed. Conti-Scale also shows weight variations across the board, not just the total board weight.”
Under the motto ‘Scanning for quality’, EWS produces a range of equipment for on-the-line as well as laboratory applications.
Thick-Scan has measuring heads mounted in pairs on one to eight tracks on the production line behind the press and/or sander to monitor the thickness of finished panels of OSB, particleboard, MDF, plywood, or LVL.
Ultra-Scan delamination detectors can also be installed behind the press or sander and employ ultra-sonic transmitters and receivers across the width of the line to produce a sonic picture in up to 256 colours. This is a patented resonance system.
“This resonance leads to a one hundred-fold increase in sound penetration energy to avoid interference or ‘noise’ from surrounding equipment,” explained Mr Kleinschmidt. In addition to delamination detection, the sound picture produced can also indicate areas of elevated moisture in the panel, or thickness variations, according to the sensitivity level set by the operator.
The company says that very thick panels can be penetrated by this system, which is why Pacific Wood Technology of Washington, US, chose it for both its LVL lines.
Temlam LVL in Canada has also ordered Ultra-Scan blow detection, and thickness gauges, for its new Raute line.
Mass-Scan continuously measures mat or panel weight-per-unit-area cross-wise or linearly on the production line. Low dose x-ray sensors are positioned between the forming line and the press, or over the finished panel, and a 3-D image is produced on a computer screen.
Measuring the moisture content of particles after the dryer is a difficult area, but EWS offers the MC-Scan, which employs an electrical resistance method to continuously monitor the material in the chutes. It takes a sample using a screw system, returning it to the chute after measuring.
The MT-Scan employs near infra-red (NIR) technology to measure moisture in fibres, chips or mat during production.
Fires have caused catastrophic damage and lost production to many panel plants around the world and in order to prevent this, EWS offers Spark-Scan, using spark detectors in combination with water spraying nozzles to extinguish sparks before they become fires.
Completing the product line-up is the laboratory system Dense-Lab X. This measures the density profile of panel samples throughout their thickness. Rauch and Glunz (Germany), Nelson Pine (New Zealand), PTP (China), and Sumitomo and Tostem (Japan) have all bought this system.
Electronic Wood Systems also cooperates with Argos Control AS of Kongsberg, Norway, a manufacturer of automatic grading systems for panel surfaces.
“We represent Argos in Austria, Germany and Switzerland and they have established an office in the same building here in Hameln,” explained Hans-Peter Kleinschmidt. “We cooperate in the market, sharing contacts and representing each other.”
Argos, founded in 1992, has over 10 years’ experience in raw board surface grading systems and Glunz of Eiweiler, Germany, has recently ordered an Argos grader after good experience with an installation which has been in operation in its Kaisersesch plant for three years. More than 60 systems are in operation so far.
The market for EWS is truly global and Mr Kleinschmidt said that eastern Europe is developing well for the company.
“In early September we sold blow detection and thickness gauges to Kronopol in Zary, Poland and two thickness gauges and a blow detection system to Egger’s project in Shuya, Russia.”
Daiken already has EWS measuring systems installed in its MDF factory in Bintulu, Sarawak and has now purchased a weight per unit area gauge ‘Mass-Scan’ for its Miri MDF plant.
In Nigeria, the company has supplied the full range of its equipment to Omo Wood’s particleboard lines.
In the North American market, EWS is represented by EWS Int in Beaverton, Oregon, run by Steven L Mays.
It is also represented in China, Korea and Japan and EWS’ own sales staff travel the globe in sales and service roles.
In upgrading secondhand production lines, EWS has supplied Merbok MDF Lanka (Sri Lanka), Omo Wood (Nigeria) and Mortka MDF (Russia).
The company recently gained ISO 9002 certification.
In what for many companies have been difficult market conditions in recent years, EWS has expanded its business and its staffing levels and seems confident about its future.

Diversification is a much-used word, with many experts advising companies to encompass a range of different business activities in order to spread their exposure to market fluctuations. Pfleiderer, a well-known name in panel making for over 40 years had, until quite recently, followed that mantra very thoroughly.
Headquartered in Neumarkt in Bavaria since 1962, Pfleiderer has had a wide range of manufacturing businesses since it started in sawmilling as a family concern in Heilbronn in 1894. These have included specialist spun concrete and steel poles and masts (such as mobile telephone masts), insulation materials, rail track systems and wind energy, as well as wood based panels.
However, today the company is entirely focused on one sector – what it calls its  engineered wood products (EWP) business – and this thoroughgoing ‘re-invention’ of Pfleiderer has been brought about under the leadership of Hans H Overdiek, 53, a man with extensive experience in senior management positions in various industries, who joined the Pfleiderer board in January 2001.
“In 2002, when business was very poor, we had to make a decision,” says Mr Overdiek. “Our panels business was only in particleboard at the time and was heavily dependent on the German market, which was poor and unlikely to improve soon.
“It was clear that we were in too many businesses with no synergies, all of which needed cash and management attention if we were to be among the top players in each sector. In engineered wood products, though far from being one of the really big players, in the markets of mid-Europe, Poland and Russia, we were still among the top companies in particleboard-based products.”
Poland has been a particular success story for the company since Pfleiderer entered that country with the purchase of two particleboard plants, in Grajewo and Wieruszow, in 1999. A turnover of €120m and an EBT (earnings before tax) of €10-12m in 2001 has now been turned into €240m turnover, while profitability has more than doubled. The company also completed its buyout of Thermopal in that year.
“In analysing where the business was going we could see that, although Germany was still our most important wood panel market, it would not generate growth, especially for particleboard, and was in fact more likely to decline. Therefore we had to seek new products and regions for growth,” says Mr Overdiek.
This was when he decided to sell off all the other businesses and focus on particleboard and new wood panel-based products. That disinvestment process has just ended with the sale of the rail track systems.
“Having made that decision, we then set three top priorities,” explains the ceo.
“Firstly, the German market may be bad but it is still the most important in western Europe, so we had to get our business here into the best shape and regain profitability.
“We did this by taking out particleboard capacity and starting a new business model in Germany. That means we would no longer try to be ‘everybody’s darling’ but would concentrate on the people who would maintain the business and who we could do business with five years on.”
In 2002, Pfleiderer had more than 1,500 customers involved in the furniture sector and today it has around 300, explains Mr Overdiek.
“Clearly we look for volume business, but also specialities. We define the customer by the added value we can bring to him and he can bring to us. We did the same for the  urniture-related part of our business, which makes up 70% of our revenue, with 30% being in the specialist trade and distributors.
“We introduced a new business model here too: instead of going to each and every distributor, we concentrated on 200 leading ones as our regional distributors, who could then supply the smaller furniture makers.”
Mr Overdiek then sets out the second of his priorities.
“We had a strategic gap,” he explains. “We were nobody in MDF – we lacked the technology and production know-how, and the plant. Thus we took over the Nidda plant from the receivers of Hornitex in 2004, which solved those two problems. The receivers closed down the particleboard line at Nidda before we bought the site and then it was dismantled. We also closed our own particleboard line at Rheda in 2004. Between them, this removed almost a million m3 of capacity from the [Germanmade] market in 12 months, in a €17m write-off.”
Pfleiderer took on the 130,000m3 a year Siempelkamp ContiRoll continuous MDF line at Nidda in third-quarter 2004.
“In 2001, Pfleiderer had a turnover of €1.4bn and we have since sold €650m of turnover,” says Mr Overdiek. This included pulling out of all non-EWP product areas. “The funds generated were used to pay down debt and to fund new investments, which brings me to my third priority – to grow by new investment and by region.”
This growth started with the new factory at Novgorod in Russia, where the foundation stone was laid in May 2004, full permits were obtained by the end of that year and construction was due to be completed at the end of 2005. The short-cycle press lines will commence production at the end of February 2006, with the particleboard press – the continuous one removed from Rheda and refurbished – starting production in April. Capacity is expected to be 500,000m3 a year “depending on how we tune it,” grins Mr Overdiek. A decor paper impregnation line is also planned there.
Pfleiderer was already experienced in the way of doing business in Russia, having had insulation material plants there since 1996.
“We have had a successful history in doing business in Russia and were able to prepare the market in the furniture sector with production from our Grajewo plant in surfaced board and melamine films,” continues Mr Overdiek.
“Then came the big move for Pfleiderer. The company was back in the black in 2004 after heavy losses in the previous two years – and this was achieved through the  perating business, not just by the disposal of assets.We were then able to convince the institutional investors to buy shares in Pfleiderer and it has been a good business for them. When I took over, the shares were priced at less than three euros and within two years they had risen to over fifteen.
“Our next move was to go from being a mediocre particleboard player in Germany to being one of the top five in panel making by acquiring Kunz and merging the two companies. Now we will become one of the top global players in the furniture production and interior design sectors.We now have not just a small MDF plant in Nidda but one of the best in Europe at Baruth [formerly Kunz] and we have access to two MDF plants in North America [Uniboard, part of the Kunz business] and, for the first time, access to the laminate flooring market with one of the few integrated laminate flooring manufacturers in North America, Uniboard, with a market share there of around 14%.”
The takeover of the Kunz group was delayed by the need to first remove some 360,000m3 of uneconomic particleboard production at Uniboard – line one at Sayabec and the whole site at New Liskeard – and was concluded on October 13, 2005.
The Kunz name will disappear as the German operations are re-branded Pfleiderer, while the Uniboard name will continue, says Mr Overdiek.
“We see very significant potential to increase the profitability of Uniboard by applying more European know-how, bringing in more technical competence and by concentrating the business on higher-margin value-added products.
“The combined business will be good for €1.4bn turnover and an EBITDA of €200m or better for 2006 and that doesn’t take into account any new investments.”
One such new investment that is not included, and which is valued at €83m, was confirmed in its final form on November 2, 2005. That is a new, greenfield, thin MDF line to be built at Grajewo, Poland, with an annual capacity of 250,000m3. Start-up is scheduled for quarter two, 2007. Also not included is the Novgorod line.
“We have a fine and solid financial base and will be able to grow the company  substantially from where we are now, in new products and new regions with a combination of local organic growth and new investments,” says Mr Overdiek, backing up his reasons for reversing the diversification of Pfleiderer under his stewardship:
“We are far less vulnerable than we were two or three years ago, by concentrating our management focus and our funds in one business area – wood based panels. But, we have significantly taken out risk and volatility by taking our business away from just Germany and expanding regionally in areas which show organic growth, such as eastern Europe – and which show better profitability, even for a more ‘mature’ product like particleboard. We have also shifted our risk portfolio from purely particleboard-related products to MDF and laminate flooring.
“The North American laminate flooring market grew by 25% last year and eastern Europe will show double digit growth and we have three large plants with most of the infrastructure already in place.”
Pfleiderer was number five in composite panel production volume in Europe even before it bought Kunz. After that acquisition, Mr Overdiek expects a market share in Germany of around 30% for particleboard and 14% for MDF. And he believes that the ‘big five’ players will get bigger, with more takeovers and mergers and so the market will become less fragmented.
In 2002, Pfleiderer was in fact very close to buying all the Hornitex mills but he says there were too many staff employed there.
“We would have wanted a maximum of 400 in Horn, but there are nearly 1,000 and we would have shut the loss-making businesses. We wanted to buy Beeskow [MDF plant] as well as Nidda but the receiver would not sell it separately. I would still be interested in that mill on its own, at the right price.”
But the Overdiek philosophy is not just about size: “I am not looking just at turnover, but at profitability because that will help me to grow the company and give returns to my shareholders and that is what we are going to do,” he says.
Pfleiderer also had a joint venture, started in January 2000 with Binder Holz: MDF Hallein in Austria, which started production that year. However, Pfleiderer pulled out of that business in September 2001, to the surprise of many observers.
“Hallein was not able to produce the product we needed for our German furniture manufacturing market – it was designed for different products,” explains Mr Overdiek. “There were also business cultural differences and we thought it best to part and I believe it was the right decision; we are in 100% charge of all our businesses now.”
Pfleiderer sells its products under three brand names: Pfleiderer, Wodego and Thermopal.
Wodego was launched in August 2003 with a programme for panels including Duropal for HPL and worktops. “Wodego is still for volume business, but to specialized distributors,” explains Mr Overdiek.
Pfleiderer Holzwerkstoffe Vertriebs GmbH handles sales to key accounts in the furniture sector, while Thermopal is similar to Wodego but doesn’t include any raw board products and has a specialized product range.
So what of the future for Pfleiderer?
“When I say we will continue to grow, I am not talking just ‘natural growth’. We are prepared to continue with acquisitions to grow both product-wise and regionally. We plan upgrading of existing facilities and new acquisitions and we are also willing to make greenfield investments,” concludes Mr Overdiek.
So this company certainly seems to be one to watch in this evolving industry.

Readers of WBPI will be very familiar with press lines, refiners, chippers, sanders and saws and the whole panoply of machinery needed to make their panels.
However, the wood does not arrive at the front end of those lines by magic. It requires transporting from ship, to rail or road truck, to woodyard, and from woodyard to the beginning of the production process, which is where Sennebogen comes in.
Founded in 1952 by the present owner Erich Sennebogen, now in his 70s, who still lives in an apartment atop the office building at Straubing, the company began by producing manure loaders, reflecting Mr Sennebogen’s farming background.
Those first machines, while they may be a far cry from a panel mill, were specifically designed for purpose and it seems that has always been the philosophy behind the  company’s products.
Mr Sennebogen’s two sons, Erich junior and Walter, run the sales and marketing, and accounts for the business, respectively.
The product range is divided into three principal ‘colour-coded’ lines: cranes, both heavy-duty and telescopic (yellow line); materials handling machines (green line); and mobile harbour/port cranes (blue line).
Sennebogen also produces special base carriers as modular components. These can carry and power a variety of attachments and the customer can specify the engine, connecting points, multiple hydraulic systems, wheeled or tracked undercarriages, cabs and other customised solutions.
In the early days you would find Sennebogen machines on construction sites, but not today – at least not a recent machine – as the company now prefers to specialise in its niche markets where there is somewhat less global competition.
The company has two factories in Germany – the main one in Straubing and another in Wackersdorf, 80km away. It also has a factory in Hungary where the steel components for machine undercarriages are produced for the German factories.
Until now, the Wackersdorf factory has produced the smaller Caterpillar machines but this arrangement has come to an end and Sennebogen will now produce its own machines there; in fact it badly needed the production space for its own products.
In line with its modular production philosophy, the company principally offers two engines, from Caterpillar and Deutz, with John Deere power units for the US market.
For the panel industry, it is the ‘green line’ machines which are of particular interest and general materials handling equipment is the biggest-selling line for Sennebogen.
Each vehicle in the factory is custommade to order, starting with the undercarriage – the components for which are prefabricated in Hungary and modified to customer specification at Straubing.
First the hand made tracks, or the rubber- tyred wheels, are fitted to make a rolling base and then the required upper parts are fitted: the body, the appropriate engine, which ranges from a 70kW to a 700kW unit, and the hydraulics. Tracked bases can be made with adjustable width for transportation or storage or can be operated at the narrower width in confined spaces.
Then the cab and the jib are fitted to the body and finally the specific lifting gear, such as a log grab, is added.
The factory took delivery of a new stateof-the-art CNC drilling centre this year to add to the existing one and these two machines accurately drill the heavy undercarriages for attaching the components. Hydraulic cylinder pistons are also machined on site, on a computer-controlled lathe.
“Nearly all our staff, including at director level, are trained in our own training centre here and we try to retain our trained staff within the company,” said Mr Kirst,  international marketing manager.
“This is a family-owned business and all the employees are part of the family – there are a thousand people in the whole group, with 350 here in Straubing.”
All machines are thoroughly tested in the yard before delivery to the customer.
When repairs are required, customers are guaranteed a 24-hour delivery worldwide, unless the logistics are impossible of course; some of those parts are big and heavy.
One of Sennebogen’s innovative ideas was to mount its cabs in such a way that they can be hydraulically raised to enable the driver to see over the side of a truck he is loading or unloading, for example. Another was to put a heavy chain in the jaws of the log grab, to lie on a partial load of logs and stop them from sliding out.
Another instance of such lateral thinking was exhibited for the first time at Ligna 2005, and this was the idea of moving the boom mounting to the back of the vehicle on the 7-Series, thus improving all-round vision for the driver.
Alfred Endl, president of sales and operations, emphasised the importance of the wood products industry to Sennebogen.
“Sawmills and the wood based industry in general are a major part of our business because of our range of ‘pick and carry’ machines.We go for special solutions, niches and smaller quantity production, while our competitors are more in mass production. We have had a strong five years because of this. The logging, port, recycling/ scrap industries are all strong for us.”
Mr Endl outlined how the company got to where it is today: after that first manure loader in 1953, Sennebogen produced a mechanised grabber the following year and in 1957 turned to the construction industry with a mechanical rope excavator.
“By 1960, we had produced our 1,000^th crawler/mobile crane, while in 1964, we  produced the first hydraulically operated excavator – an example of the innovation on which this company is founded,” said Mr Endl.
In 1969, Sennebogen moved into truck cranes with lattice booms and in the same year, produced the world’s first fully hydraulic rope excavator.
Three years later came plastic and GRP bodywork – another first – followed by the industrial carry deck crane in 1977 which led to diversification into other industries.
For many years, Sennebogen made machines for other companies and hence its name did not appear on some of its most significant advances; examples are Zeppelin, Hanomag and Caterpillar-labelled vehicles.
“The real development of our identity took place in the 1990s,” said Mr Endl.
The Green Line of materials handling machines was developed by Erich Sennebogen junior in 1996.
Sennebogen has 50 distributors in Europe, Asia and Australia and 21 in North America, including 120 depots.
The 7-Series log picker/grabber has been a strong sales line and there are units working 23 hours a day all year round at some customers, according to Mr Endl. “Its 360o working radius and all-wheel steering mean it takes up very little manoeuvring space and therefore frees up storage area,” he said.
Sennebogen avoids complicated electronics in its vehicles, preferring less sensitive systems. “We can avoid electronics and rely on electrical and hydraulic systems because we are dedicated to materials handling, unlike our competitors. Customers can be quickly trained in any necessary service and maintenance routines,” said Mr Endl.

When Hindrichs-Auffermann was formed by the merger, in 1908, of Gebrüder Hindrichs of Barmen and Auffermann of Beyenberg, a lot of history was brought together. Hindrichs Brothers, as it would be in English, was established in 1824, while Auffermann started business in 1811.
The newly formed company specialized in the production of non-ferrous semi-finished products and parts.
In 1948, the company was licensed to produce coin blanks and its last involvement in that area was the stamping of coin blanks for the introduction of the euro nearly four years ago when Hindrichs- Auffermann was taken over by Sandvik of Sweden.
In the early ’60s, Hindrichs-Auffermann started production of press plates with smooth surfaces for the production of laminates. In 1966, the company was taken over by Vereinigte Deutsche Nickel Werke. The production of textured press plate surfaces started in the 1970s, while the production of endless press belts with smooth or textured surfaces came in the early ’90s. These are the businesses on which the company is almost exclusively focused today.
A major change for the company came in 2000 when it was again taken over, this time by Sandvik of Sweden, to become Hindrichs-Auffermann GmbH. Subtle legal changes then occurred in 2002 by which the company became a division of Sandvik GmbH in Düsseldorf.
Hindrichs-Auffermann is now the trading name covering the production and marketing of all endless press belts and press plates for decorative surfacing of panels.
As readers of WBPI’s sister magazine, Surfacing World, will be well aware, that market sector has  been making rapid progress in recent years, meeting demands for ever more realistic textured surfaces, as well as the more traditional, smooth (mirror, satin and matt) finishes. And it is the press plates and endless press belts which impart that texture to the decors.
Hindrichs-Auffermann puts its range of textures into seven categories: ‘Smooth’, ‘Alu’, ‘Perl’, ‘Stipple’, ‘Wood’, ‘Stone’ and ‘Grafic’.
“In Wood, for a more natural effect, we can reproduce the saw marks as well as all the different details and characteristics of the grain,” said Stephan Gierke, manager of process control.
“It is difficult to reproduce the true depth of structures like stone but the demand is for increasing depth – 70 to 100 microns is the average but we are working towards 200 to 300 microns and this we have recently achieved in press plates. There is not so much demand for deep embossing in press belts, but we expect it to increase and this is also under development.”
The required properties of laminates are attractive texture, natural and appropriate gloss level, realistic feel, resistance to dirt build-up and ease of cleaning, and the ability to impart grip to the surface in some circumstances, explained Mr Gierke.
“These are all the responsibility of Hindrichs-Auffermann, working together with its customers.”
Meanwhile, the required properties of the press plates and endless press belts begin with the correct steel grade. Hindrichs-Auffermann uses one grade for press plates and two grades for the manufacture of endless press belts.
The company also has a new grade of steel coming to the market soon for endless press belts, specifically related to the heat transfer properties, to enable higher press speeds.
Steel purity, hardness, flatness and thickness/ thickness tolerances are also important considerations for these press tools.
Production of press plates and endless press belts involves four main stages. The first is the printing of the desired pattern on the metal surface. This is followed by chemical etching in Hindrichs-Auffermann’s case (some use mechanical etching), polishing and hard chrome plating. The required system for mounting in the customer’s press is the final stage of production.
Quality control in this business is absolutely vital as the slightest imperfection in the plate or belt will soon become obvious in the finished, pressed decor.
At Hindrichs-Auffermann, a careful visual check is followed by mechanical tests, gloss measurement, roughness tests, depth control and an assessment of the overall feel of the surface. The more subjective visual and ‘feel’ tests rely heavily on experienced personnel, of course.
As can be imagined, there are special requirements for endless press belts as the welding seams have to be totally invisible and must resist cracking in the severe bending and heating/cooling cycles to which they are subjected, while the chrome plating must also remain totally intact.
Special skill
Textured endless press belts provide an even more severe test of the company’s skills. “The material properties in the seam are different to the rest of the belt and this invisibility after etching is not easy to achieve,” said Mr Gierke.
However, it should perhaps be borne in mind that Hindrichs-Auffermann has been producing press plates for around 40 years and endless press belts for 10 to 15 years now, so they certainly should know how to do it.
The company also offers a refurbishment service for both press plates and endless press belts and re-texturing for plates.
The gloss level decreases with use and ‘window framing’ can also develop. This arises especially in the production of flooring panels and is caused by the grinding and polishing effect between the surface of the melamine faced board and the press plate. As the press opens, the centre of the board moves away a fraction of a second earlier than the edges. At the moment the press plate comes  completely away from the panel, there is a slight movement during which the aluminium oxides attack the press plate surface, giving a grinding effect. This part of the plate thus shows a higher gloss level than the remaining  plate surface.
In order to restore a uniform gloss to the entire press plate, it must then be dechromed, re-polished and the chrome plating re-applied.
Obviously, if a foreign body becomes trapped in the press, more major repairs may be required.
The continuous belt presses often used in the production of laminate flooring, with its abrasive overlay, tend to need more frequent refurbishment of the stainless steel belts.
Of course China is seen by everybody in the panel industry as a growing market and Hindrichs-Auffermann is already there, with a refurbishment plant which it started up earlier this year.
Chinese personnel have been trained at the company’s factory in Germany and some German technicians have also gone out to China. The required specialist machines have been shipped to China from Germany and Sandviken in Sweden, headquarters of parent company and steel producer, Sandvik.
The talk of the decorative surfaces sector today is not just of embossed plates – that is well-established now – but of ‘embossedin- register’ (EIR) textures. This is where the texture is specifically aligned with the printed pattern of the decor to give a realistic see-and-feel dimension to the panel surface.
“We are in touch with several customers and are making some very individual textures with them,” affirmed Mr Gierke. “We are also running some research and development projects in-house to further develop the production of EIR plates.”
In fact, Hindrichs-Auffermann refers to these as synchronous-porous plates and belts and has a range of them due on the market next year, in woodgrain, stone and ceramic finishes.
Global product manager Hans Peter Mischok joined our discussions to comment on the global nature of this business.
“We are supplying all the major panel manufacturing groups with both plates and belts,” he said. “ The top trend in Europe and North America at the moment is for deep textured woodgrains – the rustic-type effects – which we deliver in both plates and belts.
“The Asian market is also increasing for us – particularly in China – while the last two years have been very slow in Europe. But we are beginning to see signs of improvement here too.
“For the last two years, it has mainly been refurbishment and re-texturing of plates and belts, but in recent months we have seen signs of more orders for new plates. Also, the press makers Siempelkamp, Dieffenbacher,Wemhöner, Bürkle and Hymmen are all  reporting increased sales, which is a good sign for us as well.”

Behind the company which supplies just about everything for the panel production line – Siempelkamp Maschinenund Anlagenbau (machinery and plant) – are five other divisions of the Siempelkamp GmbH & Co KG Group in diverse fields of activity.
What could justifiably be called the bedrock company of the Group is the foundry division.
“Our Krefeld foundry is the largest in Europe, and possibly the world, for large castings of up to 300 tonnes,” says Dr Hans W Fechner, ceo of the Group, who joined Siempelkamp in 2001 and took over from Dieter Siempelkamp on his retirement in November 2003.
“And it is profitable because of ‘shared engineering’ in which we have developed the ideal product through the calculation of stresses and so on, with the customer, to develop parts which are both stable and as light as possible,” he says.
Another important branch of the Siempelkamp Group’s business is in nuclear technology. This is linked back to that foundry through the manufacture of containers (castors) for the transport of fuel rods between energy plants and reprocessing facilities. Other highly specific parts for nuclear energy plants are also manufactured, as well as parts for wind farms.
“This is a worldwide business and we are the number one in specialist parts for nuclear power plants, supplying every new plant,” says Dr Fechner, whose own background and qualifications are in that sector.
The Group also includes specialist companies such as Strothmann, which supplies automation and robots for the automotive industry, and another specialist Ferrocontrol, which supplies electronic automation devices for specific customers.
There cannot be anyone in the panel industry who does not know that Siempelkamp makes presses for this industry, but they may not know that the company also makes forging and other presses for the metal industry as well.
“There are only two companies worldwide which can produce these massive presses and we are currently supplying one with a 40,000 tonne pressing force for a supplier to the European Airbus A380,” says Dr Fechner.
All these group activities made up a total turnover of €570m in 2003, employing 2,600 people. Of that total, €350m came from the panel business. Dr Fechner stresses that business has been profitable. And the company is still privately owned, and controlled from the Krefeld headquarters, where currently the vast majority of fabrication is carried out.
“Up to now, our philosophy has been to manufacture everything in Germany, but we have to face the fact that other countries have lower costs,” says Dr Fechner. “The ContiRoll continuous press, for example, is very labour-intensive to make and the  intention is to use other countries for some smaller parts, while investing in the machine shop in Krefeld for heavy milling. We could find ways to do more man-power-intensive parts at lower cost in China or eastern Europe, for example.”
Siempelkamp does have a subsidiary in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada which supplied the electrical controls and other equipment for the Huber and Slocan/Louisiana-Pacific plants there. American-designed handling equipment from Siempelkamp’s works in Charlotte, North Carolina, US, was also supplied, together with the automation.
“Our intention is to be profitable and have a good market share and for a relatively small family business that is only possible with good technology, good ideas and the right people,” says the ceo.
Dr Fechner also values the synergies of the different sides of the business: “There is a lot of interdisciplinary exchange. For example, we can build a press using a combination of foundry technology and press design.” A good example of this is the monster OSB press for the Slocan/Louisiana Pacific project mentioned earlier and under manufacture at the time of my visit in late September.
This is a 12ft x 34ft (3.65m x 10.515m) 12-opening press – the biggest ever built – in which the standard welded design of the press frame structure has been replaced by a mixture of modular cast iron yokes and frame plates linked to the press tables.
Each table weighs about 200 tonnes, but the press is designed as a simple, quick- to-assemble set of modules that can be easily transported. Total weight of the press is 3,250 tonnes and it is the height of an eight-storey building.
The press platens themselves – 34ft length, 70 tonnes weight – presented a new challenge for drilling for the thermal oil passages (a technique pioneered by Dieter Siempelkamp’s grandfather many years ago).
The press cylinders are over one metre in diameter and machined to exacting tolerances on the company’s Krefeld lathes.
Siempelkamp has also been carrying out development work in the forming of OSB mats involving a complete revision of the system. Fine and coarse strands are now separately resinated, which is said to save glue and improve the strand orientation, while optimising the use of raw material.
Heinz Classen is vice president responsible for the wood panel industry side of Siempelkamp’s business, which has suffered a downturn in recent years.
“Like everybody else, we have had three years in a difficult market, but we have made use of this time,” he says. “We have perfected our processes, for example, with the Unilin ll turnkey MDF project in Belgium, which started up perfectly. Also in China with a newcomer to the industry, Dare Group, and in Turkey we have demonstrated that we can do this and repeat it all over the world.
“Another recent example is the Huber OSB project with its 60.3m ContiRoll continuous press line. Our customers are investing a lot of money and need a quick, efficient start-up.”
Another important side of the press business, short-cycle lines, has also undergone a major organisational and engineering reconstruction in the last three years. The presses have been modernised, with new designs and the introduction of multi-piston presses to the market. These are claimed to give major advantages, especially where frequent format changes are required.
“We have also greatly improved the handling systems for paper and panels so that we are now approaching 200 cycles per hour,” says Mr Classen. The company has sold seven of these multi-piston lines in six months, with five going to Spain, one to Germany and one to Turkey.
The trend towards embossed-in-register (EIR) decor surfaces for furniture and flooring has also brought new demands for the short-cycle press makers and Siempelkamp has recently developed a new loading device with camera positioning system to accommodate the demands of EIR.
The company has an extensive research & development (R&D) centre where it can  generate these new ideas, often in cooperation with a customer, and carry out feasibility tests. A semi-industrial plant is then built at Krefeld and tested before scaling up to a full size plant.
The technology of MDF production is one area in which Siempelkamp has concentrated a lot of this kind of research.
One of the latest developments is a new resination system for the fibre in which dried fibre is resinated in a tower, rather than in the conventional blowline before drying.
The fibre/resin mix falls down inside a conical-shaped tower and is mixed in the process, falling onto a belt at the base of the tower and proceeding to forming. A fullscale plant is currently under test at a cus-tomer’s mill in Spain, employing two such towers.
Siempelkamp has also developed a preheating system, first marketed for OSB and called the ContiTherm, for MDF mats before the press, and the first installation was made in Turkey a year ago. Three further orders have been received so far for this system, for Yildiz Entegre in Turkey, Kronospan, Chirk in the UK and Kronospan Sanem in Luxembourg.
Ultra-thin MDF is a current ‘hot topic’ as a base for the new furniture design gaining momentum in Europe. It involves making lightweight panels with honeycomb cores. By ‘ultra-thin’, Mr Classen means 0.4mm to 2mm thickness which, he says, was previously too dangerous to produce. “Speed is the key – anyone can produce thin board 1.8mm and thicker and we have already supplied 24 plants running at 1200mm to 1500mm a second, but our development aim is to go beyond this.
"We are at the semi-industrial testing stage now and our goal is to build an industrial standard line in the next year in Europe or Asia.”
Considering the general impression of the market, Siempelkamp appears to be doing very well. “We are very busy and our engineering department is full,” confirms Mr Classen. “We are working seven days a week, four shifts, and have orders for eight new panel plants to date and have started up nine this year. Also, there is one new short-cycle line leaving the plant every month.”
The eight plants ordered are from Canada (Slocan/L-P), Iran (Arian Chemie), Spain (Tableros Talsa), Turkey (Kastamonu), Poland (OSB, Slubice), Brazil (Fibraplac), China (Fenglin) and another from Turkey (Yildiz Entegre). Start-ups included three in Thailand, three in Turkey – where Siempelkamp has supplied 10 lines to date – and one each in the US, China and Russia.
Also due to start up this year are Rayong (Thailand) and Dare lll (China). Ten years ago, when the South East Asian market was in full swing, turnkey contracts for companies such as Siempelkamp were common. There was then a move towards experienced panel mills putting together their own specification from different suppliers. That is changing again, according to Mr Classen.
“There is a tendency back towards complete packages, driven by factors such as efficient and quick start-up,” he claims. “The financial backers want to know that the plant will  start up in a guaranteed time frame and start making a return on investment and this supports the complete plant approach. Assembling a line from different parts generally costs more and takes longer.”
Siempelkamp has a number of companies which it either owns as subsidiaries, or in whom it has shares, whose expertise it can call on when putting together a complete panel production line.
These include Dr E Schnitzler engineering, Sicoplan engineering, Büttner dryers, CMC Texpan forming lines, Imal gluing and quality control systems, PAL wood processing and cleaning systems, ATR controls and SHS (Siempelkamp Handling Systems). The company also cooperates frequently with other independent specialist suppliers.
An important part of integrating a line and ensuring it runs smoothly is the electronic control, a specialism of ATR Industrie-Elektronic, with whom Siempelkamp has had a long collaboration.
On October 1, it took over all activities of ATR in the woodworking sector, including all  that company’s software solutions for process control technology and trending and moved it to Krefeld from Viersen. This brings in-house not only ATR’s expertise in controls for new lines, but also its competence in retro-fitting existing lines to increase quality and/or output.
China has been the major talking point of the panel industry for some time now and many new European-made lines have been installed there – several of them from Siempelkamp. Indeed it recently gained a contract from Fenglin Fibreboard Co Ltd of Guangxi for a new MDF plant in Baise.
Fenglin already operates a number of MDF lines and will add a ContiRoll of 8.5ft x 37.1m, top speed 1300mm/second, planned annual capacity 230,000m3 (10mm basis).
But things are changing in China, as Mr Fechner affirms: “At present the Chinese government is pursuing a restrictive policy to decelerate the growth in the national economy. This might last for about 18 months and will certainly be forgotten soon afterwards.”
He is similarly sanguine about worries over the lack of raw material. “There is sufficient waste wood available for particleboard production and we will remain present in China and continue to sell the products of our group of companies. The wood market is seemingly increasing its market share and the demand has been clearly identified and projected.”
Dr Fechner also expects investment in OSB production in North America, as long as prices remain firm, and he sees further investment in South America and Russia.

Founded as a blacksmith’s business in Eppingen, near Stuttgart in 1873, today’s Dieffenbacher GmbH + Co KG has come a long way.
The company’s first hydraulic presses, for fruit and edible oils, were produced before it entered the wood panel industry with particleboard and veneering presses.
Today, the wood panel industry accounts for the vast majority of Dieffenbacher’s turnover, although it also supplies forming and pressing lines for the metal and plastics industries.
The acquisition of Schenck Panel Production Systems from the Schenck group in 1998 brought another vital part of the production system fully in-house for Dieffenbacher and it has incorporated the considerable expertise of that company in forming technology into its product portfolio – and built on it over the years since.
Another more recent acquisition brought the expertise of Schenkmann & Piel into the fold as well. Thus the design, manufacture and installation of dryers, air graders and filters for particleboard, MDF and OSB lines became part of the Dieffenbacher inhouse product range.
However, in terms of primary composite panel production, Dieffenbacher’s own CPS continuous double-belt press, first launched in 1990, marked a major milestone in the company’s long history.
As one of only three manufacturers of such presses worldwide, it gave Dieffenbacher a vital foothold in a market which has changed beyond all recognition, largely due to the continuous press concept.
From the heady days of rapid expansion in the South East Asian panel industry during the 1990s to the expansion of the European particleboard and OSB industries and the North American engineered wood and OSB industries, to the more recent phenomenon of the mushrooming Chinese MDF industry, the continuous press has defined the development of the market.
China has been a particularly successful market for Dieffenbacher, as it has supplied 10 continuous press lines to that country in the last two years alone. Altogether, it has supplied over 20 panel lines, continuous and discontinuous, to China in the last 15 years.
Mr Wolf-Gerd Dieffenbacher, chief executive of the family-owned business, claims that this represents about two thirds of the ‘Chinese pie’ in terms of both number of imported lines and production capacities of those imported lines.
There are, inevitably, those who question whether such success can be achieved without sacrificing profitability, but Mr Dieffenbacher has the answer for those doubters.
“We have been successful in China partly because we have been there for a long time, firstly with Bison and then direct to the market for the last 12 or 13 years.We have an office in Beijing which offers a sales and service point and we plan to stock spare parts there. And there is an online service available,” he said.
“China has been profitable for us, but only because of the way we have worked. We have supplied two basic types of MDF line to that market and the repetition factor has meant that we could make a profit, which we could never have done otherwise. We have also used some locally-made content in the line before and after the press line, just as we have done in some other countries.”
The Chinese market is not an easy one to get into or to stay in and has its own particular specialities.
“The Chinese market is governed by raw material, power supply and availability of finance,” said Mr Dieffenbacher, “and the raw material and electricity supply issues have meant that some of the lines built have been on the small side by world standards.”
“I think China will continue to be a good market, probably not so much for MDF but I think particleboard will start to grow.”
Confirming his company’s commitment to that market, he said that the company plans to start manufacturing in China, under its own roof and name, making handling equipment for panels and chips, and dryer drums. In other words big, low-tech, high transport cost, labour-intensive work.
“It is not economical to make complex parts for presses etc and it is not significantly cheaper than making them in Germany as steel prices do not vary so much. I don’t think that making presses in China makes sense – and we have investigated it very thoroughly.”
The advent of serious business from China’s panel industry in recent years certainly helped a number of machinery makers in Europe as the economies of the west came under pressure and western Europe’s demand for continuous lines seemed to have been sated.
Although showing distinct signs of slowing down, China is still quite an active market for the company, with two orders currently on hand. One is an MDF line for Wei Hua, which already started up one Dieffenbacher line in early 2004 and will start up the second at the end of 2005, producing 450m3 per day.
Dieffenbacher also has a second order from Asia Dekor for a particleboard line to be installed close to its existing one on a site in the Shenzhen area. This will have a 9ft x 20m continuous CPS press with a daily capacity of 700m3.
But outside China there are also two large projects under way.
The first is a continuous OSB line for Kronospan in the Czech Republic at Jihlava. This is a complete line from flaker to finishing line. It will have a 38m press, extendable to 50mplus, and a capacity of 800m3 a day. Start-up is due in mid-2005.
“This will be our third reference on this site, having previously supplied a multiopening line and a continuous line for particleboard,” said Mr Dieffenbacher.
The second major project is for Martco of the US. This again is an OSB line and is more or less a duplicate of that supplied to Tolko’s factory in Meadow Lake, Canada.
However, this is not a continuous press, but a 12ft x 26ft, 14-daylight monster. Unusually for this market, the press length is not a multiple of 8ft because the client believes the market in future will want 9ft and 10ft panels. The line will have a capacity of around 1,850m3 a day.
Meanwhile in Europe, Interbon in Spain is starting assembly now of a continuous particleboard line with a capacity of 1,000m3 a day for which Dieffenbacher supplied the forming, pre-press and press.
Also in Europe, this time for Pfleiderer in Grajevo, Poland, Dieffenbacher extended a continuous press of 30m to 46.5m and this started panel production back in August.
Kronospan in Heiligengrabbe, Germany, also had a press extension, this time for MDF. The press grew from 28m to 39m and started up again in late September.
The former Frati of Italy mill in Sebes, Romania, was bought by Peter Kaindl of Kronospan and contains one MDF and one particleboard line. The first is the subject of an upgrade by Dieffenbacher, while the latter is to have a press extension and a new mat former by the second quarter of 2005.
Russia is an area of increasing activity for the panel making business and Dieffenbacher is carrying out a lot of retrofit contracts there and is expecting some new plant orders as well. “The Russians have the raw material for OSB and a strong plywood market, so I believe there should be a good future there,” said Mr Dieffenbacher.
South East Asia continues to be a strong market for Dieffenbacher, even if it has been quieter since the economic crisis of 1998.
In fact, the company opened a new office in Kuala Lumpur in April 2004 for sales, service and spare parts – and an online service is coming soon. It is an independent company, Dieffenbacher Asia-Pacific, and moved its regional office from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur to be closer to its markets in Malaysia and Thailand.
The company is run by Andy Heng, an Indonesian by birth, with considerable hands-on experience of panel making with the Bumi Raya Group of Indonesia.
When it comes to manufacturing Dieffenbacher’s panel production lines, the major components are made in Eppingen, but the company does have a manufacturing facility in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, which it opened 20 years ago.
“We have the capacity to build complete multi-opening presses there as well as a large part of the CPS press,” said technical director Günter Natus.
There is also a sales office based in Atlanta, Georgia.
In Bruno in the Czech Republic, there is also a manufacturing facility where the company makes press parts for the metal and plastic forming industry, as well as forming stations and lines for the panel industry.
Russia is the market which is exciting the industry in Europe, with considerable inward investment by large panel manufacturing companies, as well as some growth by indigenous companies.
“We have had a sales office in Moscow for four or five years but this has now been formalized as a legal entity, which enables us to sign major contracts in the country,” explained Mr Dieffenbacher.
Another traditional area of operation for the company is in short-cycle presses and Wolf- Gerd Dieffenbacher’s brother, Günter, who runs sister company Dieffenbacher  Zaisenhausen, has taken over the production and marketing of short-cycle presses from Dieffenbacher GmbH + Co KG.
“This is a separate company which supplies sophisticated handling equipment and it was a logical move for it to take on the short-cycle press business with what it is already doing,” said Mr Dieffenbacher.
Meanwhile, back in the research and development department at Eppingen, things have not been standing still either.
In the OSB area, the company has developed a new strand forming system. This employs a longer forming bin which Mr Natus explained gives less variation at the outfeed, while an integrated scale in the bin allows the correction of deviations in density before forming actually occurs.
“Controlled air flow in the former also improves forming accuracy, just as it does for MDF, and we now have a suction system that calms the air flow in the bin and forming heads,” said Mr Natus.
“Strand orientation can be quickly adapted to strand dimensions by longitudinal adjustment of the former and the bin walls are movable by 50mm each side to give adjustable width and ensure good edges to the mat, which can be a problem in traditional formers.”
Longitudinal strand lumber, or LSL, is a speciality of Dieffenbacher and can be produced on its CPS press up to 75mm thickness (three inch), with the use of a strand mat steam pre-heater. There is considerable technology cross-over between LSL and OSB in Dieffenbacher’s R&D projects.
The steam mat pre-heater has also been used in particleboard and MDF lines to shorten pressing time. Other recent developments for the OSB market also include the mat pre-heater.
“We are actively developing new products for MDF as well,” said Mr Natus. “For example our inline fibre blending system after the dryer. Here, we spray resin into a duct where fibres are conveyed by air in a much longer and larger diameter tube than a blowline. The application, and the mixing, of the resin and fibre is the key point in this system.”
Also for MDF, Dieffenbacher has just sold the first closed-loop steam dryer, developed by Schenkmann & Piel, and expects to start up the plant before Ligna in early May 2005. This dryer will mean the end of the panel mill steam plume, said Mr Natus.
For the future, Chinese growth looks as if it is going to slow down in the near term but Mr Dieffenbacher is not at all concerned about his company’s current position.
“We are in a good situation, with production booked out to mid-2005 and we are happy with the state of our balance sheet this year, next year and into 2006.We already have 40% of our turnover for 2006 booked.
“We are looking to employ skilled staff rather than to cut our workforce as we had to not so long ago and we are very happy.We are back to the same level of turnover we had in 2001.”

It would be very difficult to miss the factories and headquarters of BASF, not least because they occupy a site of over seven square kilometres in the town of Ludwigshafen in central Germany. There are 2,000km of above-ground piping, 200km of rail track, 115km of roads and 2,000 buildings.
In 2002, BASF had a turnover of €32.2bn employing around 38,000 people in Ludwigshafen alone, making it the largest single-company integrated chemical production site in the world.
Founded in 1865 as Badische Anilin and Soda Fabrik, BASF made coal tar dyes. It still makes dyes, but from oil rather than coal, among a host of other products. After 1945, and eight years’ reconstruction, BASF was moving into the plastics age. Since 1965, this largely European-oriented company has been globalising, although Ludwigshafen remains the hub. Europe has a 55% share of total turnover, North America 24%, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East 16% and South America 5%.
“BASF sticks to its core competences and to its idea of integrated production networks, which is described by the German word Verbund,” said Dr Ralf Sonnberger, group vice-president of the regional business unit (RBU) Glues and Impregnating Resins Europe. “This makes BASF the leading chemical company in the world today.”
The glues and impregnating RBU comes  under the umbrella of the inorganic chemicals division and has two production units.
The first is for methane-based chemicals from natural gas which include products such as ammonia, methanol, carbon dioxide (from the ammonia process) the production of urea (using ammonia and carbon dioxide); and of melamine. The woodworking industry accounts for 75% of melamine consumption in Europe.
The second production unit is for glues and impregnating resins and formaldehyde.
Thus the whole production process follows two paths: through ammonia to urea and melamine; and through methanol to formaldehyde. Ultimately there are around 250 products made from these two paths, including urea formaldehyde (UF) and melamine urea phenol formaldehyde (MUPF) glues and UF and melamine formaldehyde (MF) impregnating resins.
“As well as ammonia, BASF also created the process for formaldehyde in the late 19^th century and developed the Kaurit line for the production of UF glues in 1931,” said Dr Sonnberger.
The company employs an ‘integrated process chain’ which involves the input of customers’ and market information, product management, sales and technical service, the laboratory and the production and supply chain, into what is basically one process.
The furniture industry accounts for 21% of RBU Glues and Impregnating Resins sales and construction around 13% (mainly panels but some laminated beam manufacture). The balance goes to producing chemicals,  fertilisers and for other group customers.
“This spread of industries distinguishes us from our competitors,” said Dr Sonnberger. “Most of them buy urea, melamine, methanol and ammonia and cook the glues. They don’t produce the raw materials as we do – in other words they are not backward-integrated and that is one of our strengths.”
The glues go to particleboard, MDF, OSB and plywood producers; impregnating resins to the production of short-cycle film, paper foils and laminates.
There are four registered BASF trade mark resins: KAURIT for particleboard, comprising UF and UFm (less than 12% melamine content); KAURAMIN for particleboard, comprising MUF and MUPF glues; KAURITEC for MDF production and KAURATEC used mainly for OSB.
The problems of the furniture industry in Europe, and especially Germany, in recent years are well known and, as Dr Sonnberger pointed out, companies all use particleboard and MDF. “Between 1995 and 2001, production has decreased by 34% in value for the overall furniture industry in Germany and consumption has fallen by 33% in the same period,” he said.
“Looking at the global furniture business, the western European trade balance has gone from over three billion US dollars surplus to plus US$0.4bn in 2001, indicating only a slight export in that year. So the import ratio is 35% even though consumption is down, so western European producers are in a bad way.
“For North America, the NAFTA region imports more than it exports, with an import ratio of minus 25% and just under 40% of imports coming from China.
“Eastern Europe and Asia show positive export ratios of 73% and 24% respectively.”
So what does the future hold, according to BASF?
“Our forecast is that imports from eastern Europe and the Far East will increase for the lower-priced mass furniture market, the higher quality production will stay in Europe and the mid-range market will disappear,” said the vice-president.
The company’s market research suggests stronger growth in the repair and remodeling sector and this could be a further opportunity for laminate flooring, Dr Sonnberger suggests. But, he says, there are challenges for the industry. “These are in the areas of cost, innovation to develop the markets for the product and, for the strongest players, globalisation – seeking out the growth areas in the world.”
It seems that all is not positive even for this product, with production in Europe, at 390 million m2, exceeding demand at 295 million m2 in 2002, said Dr Sonnberger.
In NAFTA and Asia, the picture is more promising, with room for imports but installed capacity is increasing, so export opportunities for Europe will decrease further, while China’s rapidly increasing capacity will mean it will have to export.
For panel products, BASF sees particleboard capacity stagnating or decreasing slightly, while MDF and OSB will increase by 5% to 10%, and 10% to 20%, respectively.
Dr Sonnberger also predicts a continuing concentration of manufacture in both the furniture and panel industries – he pointed out that 66% of European MDF capacity is already held by only five companies. Although there is a continuing move towards multi-panel mega-sites in Europe, he does not see an increase in the trend for these companies to make their own resins on site, except in remote areas.
For the future, he believes the western European market for MDF and OSB will continue to grow. And BASF is readying itself for this by increasing its production capacity for melamine-containing glues by installing a new reactor system. Together with ongoing re-engineering of its existing production processes, the capacity for amino-plast glues and resins will increase by around 250,000 tonnes per annum (tpa) to nearly one million tpa by the end of 2004.
“Our strategy is to support these growth segments and to push melamine-containing downstream products in glues and resins and jointly with our customers to drive the innovation process forward,” said Dr Sonnberger. One such innovation is mass coloured MDF, in which the panel is homogeneously coloured throughout and is thus not damaged by scratching. This is an example of employing different chemical competences within the company, as the dyestuff dispersions were also developed by BASF.
Another example is in laminate flooring. The group can supply resins, glues, printing inks, coloured pigments and dispersions, underlay foams, polyurethane and paper additives – an advantage of a diverse group, said Dr Sonnberger.
He concluded: “We will help our customers to be successful in order to survive by offering them reasonably priced glues and resins and looking at ways to reduce their costs by increasing glue reactivity, for example – even though this will reduce our sales of glue per m3 of panel produced. In this business you have to have a long-term commitment to your customers through good and bad times.”

Although Dieffenbacher has been established in Singapore for over 10 years, overseen by the head office in Germany, the company has recently upgraded its presence there with the appointment of a full-time manager with an indepth knowledge of the panel industry in the Asian region.
Andy Heng graduated from the University of Wisconsin in the US, in 1989 and worked in the IT industry in the US for over three years before relocating to Singapore in 1992.
The next 12 years were spent in the wood based panel and high pressure laminate (HPL)  industries in Asia-Pacific and North America including, perhaps most significantly, eight years with the Bumi Raya Group of Indonesia. Here he was marketing, project manager and director involved with various wood based products and investment projects such as particleboard, HPL, plywood, impregnated paper and MDF, including the first short-cycle HPL press in Asia, at Kiara Kristal Sdn Bhd in Johor, Malaysia.
Dieffenbacher wanted to strengthen its position in sales and service in the Asia region and to this end, in April this year,Mr Heng became vice president, business development, of Dieffenbacher Asia-Pacific, with an office in the German Centre at the International Business Park in Singapore. From this base, Mr Heng cooperates closely with Tilman Helmer, area sales manager for Asia, panel division, who is based at the Dieffenbacher headquarters in Eppingen.
“We cover all markets from India to the Philippines and everything in between except China, where Dieffenbacher also has its Beijing office, and South Korea and Japan which are serviced by agents,” said Mr Heng. Since he joined the Singapore office, the company has adopted a new strategy for S E Asia and this month (December) is moving into a new facility in Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia, where it will have a service and spare parts centre.
“We are strengthening our service to customers and bringing that service closer to them,” said Mr Heng. “We will also have an online service in KL so we will be able to solve most problems from there and, if it is necessary to make a service call in person, we will be closer to the customer.”
The KL facility is following the example set by Dieffenbacher’s operations in Windsor, Canada and Beijing, China. Exchange of information and inventory between Beijing and KL is also envisaged.
“The idea of having service centres worldwide is all part of Dieffenbacher’s strategy to strengthen our position as a turnkey supplier, not just a press supplier,” explained Mr Helmer. “We are now established as a supplier of complete systems and of course this makes the whole concept of service centres viable – we couldn’t do it if we were solely a press supplier.”
Mr Helmer also pointed out that the several companies which have joined Dieffenbacher – either as wholly owned subsidiaries or in partnership – in recent years have strengthened the whole company as a systems supplier. Those companies which spring to mind are the former Schenck company and Schenkmann & Piel, both now wholly-owned by Dieffenbacher.
Sister company Dieffenbacher Maschinenfabrik Zaisenhausen (DMZ) GmbH, run by Günter Dieffenbacher for the last 10 years, has always been responsible for the handling side of the Dieffenbacher short-cycle press lines, but since the beginning of this year has been responsible for the complete short-cycle lines. “Additionally we are responsible for the forming line and all the handling operations after the press on panel production lines,” said Mr Dieffenbacher. “This includes double-diagonal saw, star coolers, stacking, storage, sizing saws, handling on and off the sander, including conveyors and all controls.”
“We can see potential for the short-cycle market in Asia as well and this also will be handled by the KL office,” added Mr Helmer.
Intec Engineering is another associate company, offering all energy generation competence. The two companies have been working together in this field for over four years.
“So we now offer everything from the dryer to the finishing line from our own resources – everything except the green end and the sander,” said Mr Helmer. “Since we became a complete system supplier, it has proved to be the right move at the right time.”

Casco Surfaces claims to be the world’s leading manufacturer of surfacing materials for applications in the woodworking, furniture, flooring and automotive industries.
The company’s largest product group includes melamine film, furniture foil and edgebanding (melamine and polyester) for the furniture and interiors market, while its fastest growing market is in laminate flooring. For this sector, Casco supplies abrasive-resistant overlays, decorative films, under-lays and balancing films.
Phenolic films for various industrial applications such as concrete formwork and commercial vehicle flooring are also manufactured.
The company has expanded its global presence over the last five years and today has two production facilities in North America, one in South America, five in Europe and one in Asia, as well as local service offices in 28 countries.
Until July 2003, Casco Impregnated Papers was part of the Akzo Nobel group of companies. In August 2002, Akzo decided to sell its subsidiary and the announcement generated considerable interest among potential investors, resulting in five ‘finalist bidders’. The ultimate winners were two companies acting as a consortium, paying €114m for the company – the 20th biggest management buyout of 2003 worldwide.
The two investors were Deutsche Beteiligungs AG of Germany and Harvest Partners of the US. The management of Casco also has a minority share in the new company, which, for the time being, is known as Casco Surfaces.
A new name has to be found for the newly independent company but that process takes time and should be completed by the end of January 2004.
Deutsche Beteiligungs is an investment company with 40 years’ experience and is backed by Deutsche Bank, among others. The company’s investment portfolio includes the Lignum Group, comprising the well-known wood machinery manufacturers, Homag and IMA.
Harvest Partners is also an investment company and manages funds for US banks and insurance companies as well as industrial corporations in the US and Europe such as General Electric, ABB and Siemens.
The fact that North America is Casco Surfaces’ largest single market, accounting for 40% of turnover, alone makes Harvest Partners seem a good fit.
John Ahlström has been the chief executive of Casco for some 10 years and has just seen his third ownership change in that time. He feels that the latest owners will take the company forward in a good direction.
“It is very exciting,” he said. “We now have owners interested in and committed to growing the business. We are not a small part of a big business any more. The new owners follow our business closely and understand it thoroughly – they know what we are doing and why we want to do what we want to do.”
Mr Ahlström also feels that the change in ownership came at a good time as he perceives that the industry’s structure is changing, offering new opportunities in the market. “The surfacing materials industry in Europe is composed of lots of small/medium players and, between 2001 and 2003, many companies had a tough time.
We are spread globally and so were less hard hit. There is an opportunity now for us to really do things in Europe,” said the chief executive.
Operationally, the company is split globally into five business units.
Business Unit North America supplies melamine technology, laminate flooring products and technical films. It is headquartered in Cobourg, near Toronto in Canada, with a manufacturing unit also in South Carolina, US.
“The North American growth in surfaces is much stronger than the more mature European market,” said Mr Ahlström. “We started in 1987 with 15 million m2 supplied from Germany and we now have a market of 180 million m2 in Canada and the US. We have been driving the thermally- fused melamine sector in North America.”
Business Unit Europe is located in Essen, Germany. It has the same product range as North America and production units in Kristinehamn, Sweden, Schöppenstedt, Germany, Arches, France and Martorelles, Spain.
Asia-Pacific Business Unit is located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and again has the same range of products.
The fourth Business Unit is outside Curitiba in Paraná state, Brazil, and offers melamine and flooring films.
Burgos in Spain is the major manufacturing centre for the fifth unit, Business Unit Furniture Applications, offering finish foils, edgebands, CPL laminates, polyester laminates and polyester edgebands. This unit is in fact headquartered in Sant Cugat near Barcelona.
Casco Surfaces did not exhibit at the Interzum furniture and interiors exhibition in Cologne in May 2003 as such, but instead took a suite a short walk away at the Hyatt Regency Hotel for the duration of the show.
It used this occasion for the European launch of its new Design Collection. This is a new departure for Casco as, in the past, it either procured designs for the customer from printers, or the customer gave the company printed paper to be impregnated.
“We saw that, with our purchasing leverage, we could bundle designs in purchase orders to gain economy of scale and make a more attractive deal for our customer,” explained Mr Ahlström. “Also the customer can sit down with our staff and discuss designs and trends – we are more independent than the printers in this regard.
“The initiative has been well-received by our customers who like the ‘neutral’ input of our sales people and the ‘one-stop shopping’ concept.”
The Design Collection concept was initially tried in North America in 2001 with success and Casco Surfaces now has 80 designs there and around 70 in Europe. These are mainly wood-grains, but also include solid colours and fantasy designs.
There are three main areas targeted by three Design Collections: North America and Europe, both centred on decorative melamine; and furniture applications, with finish foils, edgebands and laminates.
Casco’s design centre is at Sant Cugat and displays the whole collection plus all the big printers’ collections. A sample of any design, pressed onto a panel, can be supplied on the spot too.
Casco’s designs are selected using the printers’ structures but also using Casco’s own colourways, plus some unique designs for which it has the cylinders engraved specially. “We are actually improving the distribution channel for the printers, so while we may appear to compete with them, we are actually working well together with them,” said Mr Ahlström.
The relative merits of exhibitions are often discussed these days and Casco seems pleased with the results of its ‘Interzum experiment’. “We were pleased with the response to our suite in Cologne and will repeat it in 2005,” said Mr Ahlström.
“The ZOW shows are growing in importance, especially in Bad Salzuflen and Madrid. It is a good concept and it does not require so much time and preparation as the big shows in Europe and North America, which are becoming like stand design competitions. Sometimes the money is better spent on visiting our customers.”
The panel industry is a very important market for Casco Surfaces, accounting for around 85% of the company’s turnover.
Furniture is the second largest and has its own Business Unit because of the complexity of the industry’s structure and the large number of customers in a wide range of sizes, he explained.
So, Casco Surfaces is a new company but with expertise in the same products in which it has specialised for years and with the addition of the Design Collection.
All that remains is for the company to find an appropriate and, just as importantly, a unique, trading name, but we will have to wait to find out what that name will be.

The original Maier company celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2002, having started as a manufacturer of turbines.
The company moved into wood chippers, flakers and hammermills in the 1950s and, while that is still the core of the business, the Maier company has changed a lot since then.
The real turning point came in 1996, when Robert Loth bought the company and took a completely new look at the way it was doing business. For years, it had been selling single machines, which were mainly delivered to the major contractors as part of the supply package for a complete panel production line. And its marketing approach was fixed on the particleboard industry. Today, things are rather different.
“The first thing I did on taking over the business was to switch the sales effort towards the panel mills as direct customers,” says Mr Loth, speaking at his factory in Bielefeld, not far from Hannover. “This put us more in touch with what was happening at the clients’ factories and with what their needs really were.”
Even if Maier does supply through a main contractor, or OEM, today, Mr Loth says the company knows the final client and what he really needs. “This means we can provide a professional after-sales service including information about our developments which, for example, reduce the running costs or increase the quality of flakes and so on,” he says.
“What we would like to emphasise is that the customer should treat the chipper lines, the drum chipper, the flaker, the screen and so on up to the dryer, and the mills after the dryer, as a separate package employing the expertise of the machinery maker. This special know-how of Maier is of benefit to the client and the main contractor. Interfaces today are easy to define and Maier is used to offering a guarantee for this. It is far better for any panel factory to split the whole package into specialist areas.”
Of course Maier still makes a wide range of machines for size reduction and it has made many changes to their designs and method of operation in recent years. The emphasis today, though, is on supplying those machines as part of a ‘frontend package’ to the mills.
As a result of being in touch with its clients’ needs, says Mr Loth, Maier developed technologies such as the 60-knife ring flaker, then high-speed flaking. It moved on to a lot of development of the drum chipper and is now in the area of screening.
All the developments of the chippers, flakers and hammermills have been centred on the quality of chip, flake or strand produced as well as on increasing the efficiency of the process, claims Mr Loth.
The latest major development for Maier is a new trans-Atlantic marketing agreement which it has entered into with Acrowood Corp of the US. This is a ‘two-way street’ arrangement in which Maier offers Acrowood’s products in Europe, while Acrowood offers Maier’s in Canada and Mexico.
The US company brings screening systems, disc chippers and a chip cracker, all of which will give Maier access to the pulp and paper industry.
“Maier is focused on screening fines and oversize material, but the Acrowood screens also select a chip size for the digester in pulp and paper mills,” explains Mr Loth. “Thus the agreement also gives us additional possibilities to enter the MDF industry. With access to the Acrowood technology, we don’t have to start from scratch in this area. Also, Acrowood has a strong presence in the OSB industry.
“We successfully developed two-stage flaking for OSB two years ago but didn’t have the equipment to screen the strands until now. Acrowood’s technology adds this and so we can now offer flaking and screening right through to the wet strand silo.”
In many OSB mills, the strander can become the bottleneck as line capacities increase and it is expensive and really ‘overkill’ to install a second strander, explains Mr Loth.
“Our two-stage flaking lowers the cost and increases the range of sizes of wood raw material which can be used – small wood, recycled, crooked, whatever,” he says. The two stages are a drum chipper then a flaker. “It is an ideal system for all cheap kinds of wood because they can go directly to the drum chipper or to the flaker,” he adds.
A new product from Maier is the Heavy Particle Separator (SGA), showcased at Ligna in Hannover last May. This includes non-ferrous separation because more recycled wood is going through the knife ring flaker and a lot of aluminium and other non-ferrous metals can be contained in it.
“You normally have a big non-ferrous separator in the line after the screens and the efficiency of these big machines is not always the best because they are running large quantities, so we have installed the SGA in front of the knife ring flaker or mill,” says Mr Loth. “If you have a six to eight tonne recycling throughput, you can use the SGA, or if you have a higher volume, you can use it as an additional station.”
The SGA works by having an infeed chute with detectors below, which work by using an electric field and automatically operate one of three or four flaps to reject unwanted material with minimal loss of wood. The system can be retro-fitted to older particle separators or adapted to fit flakers and mills made by other manufacturers where the air does not pass through the rotor as it does in Maier machines.
Mr Loth points out that most of his company’s major developments have come about because of the needs of customers, using two contracts in Germany to illustrate his point.
For Glunz at Meppen, Maier refurbished a 1989 chipper by another supplier and also supplied the infeed lines, including long log and slab conveyors, a vibration feeder and electrical controls. All this was integrated with existing conveyors as well, in an upgrade of the existing line.
For Kronotex’s mill in Wittstock in Germany, Maier supplied a long log flaker and vibration conveyor, as well as a conveyor for bought-in chips. Then came the drum chipper and a silo to coordinate with the existing silos. The job included all electrical equipment and was carried out as a turnkey contract by Maier.
But this company is setting its sights much further afield than just Europe. In September 2003, it received an order from Fuzhou Particleboard, which was adding a new particleboard line to its existing one.
“We offered four knife ring flakers with a knife ring for normal flakes of 0.5-0.7mm and another set of KFRs for 0.25-0.35mm for homogenous board, so the customer can switch from homogenous to standard board,” explains Mr Loth.
The contract also includes a Maier automatic grinding machine in which the operator enters the specific number of the ring and the grinder automatically knows if it is a 0.5mm or 0.25mm ring.
This is Maier’s first major contract in China; several others are under discussion.
Maier has an agent in Beijing, Beijing Europe-China S&T Trade Co Ltd, run by Stephan Dong. It also represents other German companies which together give Mr Dong’s company coverage of the front end, the middle and the finishing end of panel making lines.
He also has good connections with clients and universities in China.
In South East Asia, Maier won the order for Vanachai of Thailand’s new particleboard line to supply flaking and milling, and a dumping chain conveyor followed by a vibration conveyor before the drum chipper, and an additional slabs conveyor.
The MPM mill supplied for this contract for surface layer material has new grinding tracks which can be combined to adjust the fineness of the material.
“Vanachai had high demands on the surface quality of its board and this gave the impetus to the development of these grinding tracks,” explains Mr Loth, using the point to underline one of his central philosophies for Maier.
“We are changing ourselves as quickly as the market is changing, to increase our ability to respond quickly.”

Germany’s oldest industrial company and one of the oldest companies in the world: that is the claim of Schwäbische Hüttenwerke GmbH, or SHW for short, which was established in 1365.
The company used to be just a producer of iron, until the end of the 19th century when it diversified. Then in 1921, it gained two powerful equal shareholders in the form of Baden-Württemberg GmbH, on behalf of the state government of Baden- Württemberg, and MAN AG, perhaps best known for its trucks.
“Thus we have the strength of the state and a huge company behind us, but we are a mid-size company with the flexibility which that brings to enable us to find solutions for our customers,” says Thomas Neuburger, general manager of the Materials Handling and Process Division.
The history of the SHW company is recorded in a museum on its substantial site and shows it still has ties with the heavy engineering and casting industries. It still produces, in a small way, artistic sculptures cast in metal, but its main involvement in heavier castings now has moved from the solid fuel stoves of the past to production of massive engine blocks used in ships or large stationary engines.
Ventilated brake discs for high speed trains, such as the German ICE, as well as for the automotive industry, are also produced by SHW.
Other specialist areas in the metal working field include the production of sinter- formed components such as gear cogs and also oil pumps for automotive engines.
All these products are made at one of the company’s four locations: in Wasseralfingen; Bad-Schussenried Wilhelmshütte; Königsbronn; and Tuttlingen-Ludwigstal.
However, to the panel industry, SHW is best known for its technology in the field of materials handling and processing. The raw materials for the production of particleboard and MDF offer particular challenges due to their tendency to interlock with each other and to stick to each other – especially when wet or glued – forming bridges in silos and transport systems. The systems offered by SHW are designed to overcome these potential problems.
“The wood based panels industry accounts for a minimum of 50%, and has been up to 70%, of our turnover,” explains Günter Staiger, area sales manager for North and South America. “We also work in the pulp and paper and other industries such as cement, power, gypsum, dewatered sludges, chemical, food and pet food and environmental protection,” he says. “But free-flowing material is not our business.” Thus materials such as grain or pelletised products are not likely to require the specialist input of SHW.
The changing nature of the panel business, however, has meant an increasing demand for the company’s expertise, as Mr Staiger explains: “With the rise in continuous press lines in the last 15 years, there has been an increased need for dependable and continuous supply of bulk materials so you need reliable equipment with an even discharge rate and this is our speciality.”
It was in the mid-1960s that SHW was first asked to develop a reliable silo discharge system for wood chips and sawdust and this led to its development as a turnkey supplier of storage and conveying systems for difficult bulk goods.
The main system components offered by SHW are material relief systems, silo discharge systems and the associated handling and processing technology.
At the point of residue arrival in a panel mill, the company offers a live bottom system in the yard at ground level, in a pit, or in a storage silo. This comprises independently sliding plates, hydraulically operated, in a form resembling a ladder. The rate of discharge is controlled by level detectors in the silo. A conveyor belt system is also offered as an alternative.
To sort the raw material into fractions, SHW offers a disc screen. The discs are mounted on parallel horizontal shafts and the spacing between the discs is variable according to the size selection required. Smaller acceptable chips pass down through the screen, while larger rejects and foreign bodies are carried over it to a reject chute. This screen can handle raw material quantities up to 600m3 per hour.
To transport the acceptable chips, chain, belt or closed belt conveyor systems are offered, while bucket elevators and pneumatic conveying systems are also available. Intermediate storage can be in flat-, not conical- bottomed circular or rectangular silos. Rectangular silos up to 25m wide can be fitted with travelling screw augers, whose speed is adjusted to suit the raw material and to avoid either compression of it or a bending strain on the auger. It is possible to have several augers in tandem. Larger rectangular silos would employ a live bottom system with any number of plates required.
Circular silos with a diameter of more than 30m are equipped with a central rotating conical screw auger which revolves as it spins on its own axis and covers the entire cross-section of the silo. A sliding frame system is also offered, while smaller circular silos up to 7m diameter can use the SHW Rotor Discharge System.
For silos with a capacity of up to 300m3, round or rectangular, SHW offers an eccentric oscillating discharge frame which has no hydraulic components. This feeds the material to a discharge screw. A unique feature offered by SHW in circular silos is its drag arm system. The arms are made of layers of spring steel clamped together very much like a cart spring. They are curved and one sweeps above the floor of the silo in the horizontal plane to prevent bridging of the material, while the other sweeps close to the floor, dragging the material to the discharge screw. There is a hook on the outer end of each arm, which passes close the wall of the silo to break up any ‘wall’ of chips that may form.
The silo walls are also equipped with special relief wedges to prevent bridging.
The advantage of the flexibility of the arm, both in the horizontal and the vertical plane, is that it reduces the torque on its drive motor and avoids the risk of the drag arm breaking under the enormous potential strains in the bottom of a large, full silo.
The drive mechanism for all SHW’s silos is located under the floor for ease of maintenance and the drive motor/gearbox is attached by a ‘bayonet-type’ fixing so that it can be removed without emptying the silo.
“Silo rotors are also made of heavy gauge steel (8-12mm thick) because of the high abrasion of wood raw material, and especially bark, and these silos have to work continuously – they may only be emptied once a year for maintenance,” says Mr Staiger. Stainless steel can also be specified for the same reason. The whole silo is normally made of 5-6mm steel plate.
Distribution from the silo can be to several lines independently – you can specify several different augers each operating independently and feeding a separate production line, thus saving costs. You can also operate with one very large silo, since additional metering silos are not required.
For feeding dryer lines, SHW offers a metering bin to feed several drying lines if required and a fire protection bin which can be emptied rapidly in an emergency. A silo full of fibres, such as in an MDF plant, offers special challenges and for this a special vertical conical rotor with drag arms is available, so that the silo can be completely emptied of even glued fibres. Steaming silos are available for MDF lines.
Sander dust for burning is directly metered to the furnace, again obviating the need for a metering bin, says SHW.
All systems are tailored to the specific materials and sliding frame, rotor discharge, rotating floor and pivoting wheel systems for smaller silos are all solutions which are available.
“We don’t just sell discharging systems, we decide what is best suited to the customer’s needs and his raw material – whether it is a rectangular or a circular silo, with live bottom, rotor discharge, or discharge screw,” says Mr Staiger. “The customer tells us what his raw material is and the discharge rate he requires and we do the rest. And it is not necessarily just one piece of equipment that we supply. It is often a whole system from receiving station to production line – often for a variety of raw materials, particularly in the case of biomass or the burning of recycled material.”
The company has designed, supplied and commissioned over 3,000 such systems in more than 50 countries and for a wide range of raw materials, says Jürgen Rapp, who is responsible for key accounts and dealing with the OEM’s such as Siempelkamp, Dieffenbacher and Metso who often include SHW equipment as part of their whole plant concept.
“In a particleboard plant, for example, there are separate systems for the green area and the dry area, with a surface layer, core layer and oversize silo after the dryer – some mills have as many as 12 silos,” says Mr Rapp.
While particleboard and MDF form the bulk of SHW’s involvement in the panel industry, OSB also gets a look in.
The company is currently developing, in its own test set-up at Wasseralfingen, a modified bunker for the forming head on OSB lines which will handle the strands more gently. Strands are often broken by the conventional spike system during forming head bunker discharge and this affects the quality of the finished panel. By the time Ligna comes around next May, SHW hopes to have its improved system on show.
Of course, new-build projects are increasingly rare these days and fortunately SHW is not entirely dependent on these. It also offers upgrades to existing silos, such as converting a conical-base silo into a flat bottomed one if necessary, and changing the discharge system.
“Stable bridge building? Never!” is the slogan of SHW, referring to its silos and discharge systems. However, stability within SHW seem to be a fact – after all, the company has been in business for nearly 640 years.

When the street address of a company is the same as its name, you can guess maybe that company has a long story to tell.
So it is with G Siempelkamp & Co KG of Siempelkampstrasse, Krefeld. This town, close to Düsseldorf in Germany’s industrial heartland, was founded on the textile industry and Gerhard Siempelkamp started his company here in 1883.
He revolutionised the textile press by drilling the hot platens so that they could, for the first time, be heated without being removed from the press. The rest, as they say, is history – and a more recent history that has seen the name ContiRoll® become extremely well known in the world of continuous panel presses.
Today’s Siempelkamp group has two main roots: Siempelkamp Maschinen-und Anlagenbau and Siempelkamp Guss und Anlagentechnik. The former made its name in machinery for panel production, while the latter specialised in the foundry sector and in engineering connected with the dismantling of nuclear facilities.
On January 1, 2002, the two companies were united in G Siempelkamp GmbH & Co KG. The motive behind this structural change was to exploit the synergies existing within the company’s different areas of operation with regard to the knowledge base, design, support, assembly and startup service sectors and also to ‘spread the business risk over a variety of markets with different economic cycles’. Today’s panel industry will appreciate the relevance of that last statement.
There are now five operating divisions within the one holding company. These are machinery and plants, industrial automation, foundry technology, nuclear technology and metal forming.
Siempelkamp Maschinen-und Anlagenbau heads up the machinery and plants division. This includes Dr E Schnitzler and Sicoplan, both specializing in plant and project engineering; Büttner for dryers; CMC-Texpan for forming machines and associated equipment; Imal for on-the-line and laboratory quality control, fire prevention and gluing systems; Pal for raw material processing; and the Siempelkamp service company.
Short cycle lamination lines also come under the machinery and plants division. However, this division is not solely concerned with the wood based panel industry, but also supplies complete lines to the rubber, mineral board and plastics sectors.
Within the Industrial Automation division are two principal groups of companies – electrical and mechanical. Electronic control and automation and software company ATR, and Ferrocontrol with its control systems for window manufacture, occupy the first category, while Siempelkamp Handling Systeme, or SHS, Schermesser, and Strothmann handle the mechanical side of the automation technology, including robot technology.
Heinz Classen, vice-president of the machinery and plants division, is anxious to point out that this organisational restructuring of the Siempelkamp group is just that and does not affect the company’s established relationships with its customers.
“The wood based panel industry is the biggest industry sector for Siempelkamp, accounting for 60 to 70% of the business and for them, nothing has changed with this new organisation,” he says.
It is of course no secret that the panel manufacturing business has been tough for quite a while and Mr Classen acknowledges that fact: “The market has dropped for everybody in recent years but things are not so bad for us,” he says. “We sold eight ContiRoll lines last year and seven so far this year. We have sold 16 in a year in the past but they were very good years. We have had to lay off some people like everybody else. The furniture industry in Germany has been very quiet this year.
“But China has been a major market for us this year and Thailand has picked up a lot, with orders for two particleboard lines, at Vanachai and Metro, and there is more to come in that country.” Siempelkamp supplied one MDF line to China at the end of 2001 and has sold two there this year – to Dare Wood and Dan Yang. The latter will be the largest line in China and is due for start-up in the third quarter of 2003.
“We recently signed an order for an MDF line with Luyuan in Hanzhou,” continues the vice-president. “The company already has 10 multi-daylight lines and is now investing in a 23.8m ContiRoll continuous press for thin board.” This line is also due to start up towards the end of 2003.
“We see a new kind of company coming up in China, investing in high-tech lines from Europe. China now has several thin board lines from different press manufacturers and they will see whose is best,” says Mr Classen, acknowledging that there is stiff competition among the world’s three continuous press line manufacturers.
“Siempelkamp has a lot of experience in thin board production – we have supplied four lines in the last 12 months – to Sunchang in Korea, Fibranor in Spain, Isoroy in France and Plum Creek in the US – and a total of 11 lines in recent years.”
He is also optimistic about the future for the US and points out that Siempelkamp recently sold its longest-ever press line to Huber for OSB production. The press is 60.3m long, incorporating a pre-heater for the strands.
All the major machinery producers are anxious to differentiate themselves and one way is to concentrate on marketing a particular product, while still emphasizing the company’s general capabilities.
Thus thin and ultra-thin MDF and HDF lines are a major area for Siempelkamp at present and it has developed several new technologies specifically for this market.
These include a new mat forming system which removes the need for scalping, a fibre mat pre-heating system, a flexible-infeed ContiRoll to run at speeds up to 295ft per minute and finishing equipment adapted to match this high production speed.
The new scalper-less former for MDF is called the StarFormer. In the past, scalping could remove as much as 50% of the fibre and return it to the former, with three main disadvantages.
Firstly, the recirculated fibre cooled and a high temperature is needed for thin board production. Secondly, the physical process of scalping could lead to density variations in the boards. Thirdly, pre-cure of the resin on the fibre is a risk inherent in the recirculating process. The StarFormer has a levelling head which mechanically organises the fibres to get an even density mat without scalping.
The particleboard sector has also not been forgotten and for this Siempelkamp has developed the CrownFormer. This machine is more compact and is claimed to result in low building costs for halls and steel structures and low maintenance costs for the machinery. It employs mechanical disc rollers to distribute the raw material of the mat.
The CrownFormer has been on the market for just over a year, with the first units being installed in Berneck in Brazil and Finsa in Spain. Its primary purpose is to produce produce improved surfaces for particleboard and Berneck claims it now has one of the best-surface boards in South America.
“The big advantage is that you can decide how thick your surface layer should be and it will be homogenous throughout,” explains Otto R Voss, project development chief for Siempelkamp.
“This means that sanding does not expose coarser particles below the surface.”
That leaves one main area of the composite panel market which we have not mentioned – OSB. Here again, Siempelkamp’s development engineers have not been idle. Because of the bulk of an OSB strand mat, increasing the speed at which a continuous press line can run is more of a challenge than it is for either MDF or particleboard. To address this, Siempelkamp has developed the ContiTherm mat pre-heater.
The purpose of this device is two-fold: to increase the speed of the mat through the press and to add moisture to it in order that the board exits the press at a moisture content closer to that of the ambient air, thus reducing the risk of thickness swell.
The addition of moisture and elevated temperature also leads to increased plastification of the strands which again improves the thickness swell characteristics of the finished board, claims the company. Also, because the strands are more pliable, it is not necessary to have such a high pressure in the press and this leads to a reduction in costs.
For a given press length, the increase in capacity claimed is in the order of 20 to 30% and this may obviate the need to extend an existing press.
When considering a new press, the mill can thus choose between a shorter press than would have been required without the core heater, or a higher output from a longer press.
A further advantage claimed for the ContiTherm is that heat is passed through the entire mat in order to enable a reduction in the mat height, which in turn increases the range of thicknesses the press can produce. However, adding heat and moisture could have a downside if it caused pre-cure in the resin, so the heat/steam mix in relation to the resin used is very important and carefully controlled in the Siempelkamp system.
Every panel manufacturer is looking for ways to cut costs, especially in the current market, and one way to do that is to optimize the production equipment you have.
Electronic control and software company ATR, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Siempelkamp, together with the Krefeld R&D department, has developed a system to achieve such optimisation.
A frequent cause of uneconomic production is when a panel production line changes from one panel specification to another – possibly several times a day.
The new control system changes the settings of the former, pre-press, press, etc in sequence to avoid the necessity of opening the trash gate, re-setting the parameters and then re-starting the flow of the mat. This saves time and reduces the amount of mat recycled during panel thickness or specification change. Also, it avoids having an empty hot press.
Mat width can also be changed gradually and progressively rather than creating a gap in production, says Siempelkamp. Increased uptime and a reduction in capital cost are the main objectives of this optimisation. These costs can be reduced by possibly reducing the length of the press required, or avoiding the need to extend a press where there is perhaps not space in the factory to do so.
A production management system developed by ATR and known as PROMACS can also be retro-fitted to the ContiRoll line. This optimises company-specific information processes by acquiring, displaying, analysing and archiving process data to increase plant uptime, guarantee board quality, save resources and maintain promised delivery dates, claims ATR.
Another system offered by ATR is SPOC – statistical process optimisation and control – a Windows based system for online quality prediction and process optimization for continuous production. This is claimed to save raw material, increase output and achieve online quality prediction of internal bond, density and other physical characteristics of the board.
An alternative way to save capital cost is to improve the equipment you have rather than replacing it. To this end, Siempelkamp offers a modernisation service, notably for the ContiRoll press.
This continuous press has been around since 1984 and has evolved considerably. In fact, the first ContiRoll, which started life as the Siempelkamp R&D press and was then sold to Louisiana-Pacific in Oroville in the US, has just been sold again, dismantled and moved to Korea.
Early versions employed a wedge system to change panel thickness and this can be replaced with a much more efficient modern hydraulic system, controlled remotely. Other modifications available include the installation of a flexible infeed section, a chain cleaning system, improvements to the belt tracking, replacement of the old flexible hydraulic pipes, which could be a hazard in the event of a fire, with rigid pre-fabricated hydraulic pipes, and increasing the heating capacity by increasing the flow of the heating medium.
The most major modification to raise capacity is to increase the press length. This can be done by inserting additional heated sections into the middle of the press, but this is limited by the fact that the length of the pressing zone itself is fixed and with an extension it becomes a smaller percentage of the total press length.
Mixing plastic and wood to produce panels with specific properties is another area of activity for the company.
A new-concept line due to start up any day is a wood-plastic composite siding panel line for Boise Cascade in Sasop, Washington State, in the US. This will utilise waste polyethylene and wood particles to produce a weatherproof siding panel for house construction, suitable for colour application.
Agricultural fibre based boards are not forgotten in the Siempelkamp portfolio and lines to utilise bagasse, straw and other agricultural residues are offered.
Raw board manufacture is, of course, not the only area of expertise. Short-cycle press lines for laminating panels with resin impregnated papers have been supplied for many years.
The basic version is the single board press, offering charging times of eight seconds and cycle times of up to 180 per hour. Standard board sizes are 1220mm x 2440mm to 2440mm x 5600mm. The double board press is similar but laminates two boards simultaneously in lengths up to 5600mm each. Maximum capacity is 360 panels at 180 cycles per hour.
Topping the range is the Multi Power Press, whose development was driven largely by the laminate flooring industry. Short press times of around 12 seconds minimise the absorption of heat by the HDF base board to give a stable product.
Rather than the conventional two rows of pressure cylinders, the Multi Power Press has four pistons across the width and 10 along the length, giving a total of 40 pistons. This is claimed to give more even pressure distribution and the press also offers several pressure circuits with the facility to provide optimum pressure adjustment in both axes for different board sizes. Available with single or double board capacity, the press is capable of up to 180 pressings, or 360 panels, per hour.
Such speeds have to be matched with handling equipment which can feed panels and papers to the press and remove the finished panels in a timely manner.
The recent development of in-register decor papers for designs such as tile effects has increased the demands for accuracy placed on handling systems.
Siempelkamp has always promoted itself as a supplier of complete panel plants, using its own extensive manufacturing facilities and a number of wholly or partially owned subsidiaries with special areas of expertise to complement them.
Many of these plants have been supplied as turnkey projects although there seems to be an increasing trend for panel manufacturers to take more control of specification and supply of various plant components, perhaps mixing and matching machinery from different suppliers.
The other major trend in recent years has been a reluctance by mills to invest in complete new plants if what they already have can be upgraded and optimised.
Siempelkamp has responded to these trends by becoming an increasingly flexible supplier and investing heavily in research and development, which may be two reasons why the company will be able to celebrate its 120th anniversary in 2003.

Leverkusen, on the northern outskirts of Cologne in western Germany, has been home to Schenkmann & Piel (SPV) since October 1, 1977 when two partners founded the business with a one-product portfolio.
That product was an air grader, or air sifter, targeted on the particleboard industry. Today, in addition to those graders, the company offers a variety of dryers for particleboard, OSB and MDF factories, supplying complete systems with all necessary controls and ductwork.
The company is not, and never was, a large manufacturing operation but concentrates on the design and development of products which are largely made by approved sub-contractors with a long experience of working with SPV.
Exceptions to this are the key components of the graders and dryers which are manufactured in SPV’s own workshops; there is no point in transporting ducting half way round the world when it can be fabricated locally at lower cost.
A major change for the company came in 1999 when press and complete line supplier Dieffenbacher of Eppingen, Germany, took a 20% share in SPV. The two companies had worked closely together for some years and so the ‘marriage’ was in a sense a natural one.
One of the founding partners of the Schenkmann & Piel business, Fred Schenkmann, retired in October 2001 and was succeeded by Peter Wolff as general manager. Mr Wolff has considerable experience of the panel industry, having formerly been in charge of sales for press maker Küsters, now part of the Metso Panelboard group.
But back to products and that original air sifter which proved a good foundation for SPV as the company can now boast sales of more than 2,500 units.
Originally, the purpose of the sifter was to remove oversize particles from a pretty clean raw material, but times change and so has particleboard furnish – in some cases dramatically. Thus SPV’s sifters are now more likely to be required to deal with a wide range of contaminants in recycled wood.
Italy has been a particularly strong market in this respect as virtually all Italian particleboard mills use exclusively ‘urban’ wood supplies.
Recent sifter installations by SPV include the Glunz (Sonae group) mill at Nettgau in Germany and Egger’s mill at Rion des Landes in France.
The air grader splits the incoming material into two fractions: accepts and heavyweight rejects. In the process, 85% of the air used is recirculated to reduce dust emissions, while the balance is cleaned before venting to the atmosphere.
Inside the air grader, the material enters via a rotary valve and central tube. Rotary arms then distribute it uniformly over a perforated plate through which air is drawn.
Separation is effected by differing air velocities, with the heavier fraction moved to the edge, exiting via an air lock. The lighter fraction is separated from the air stream by high-efficiency cyclones known as Hurriclones.
This grader system can be used to separate core and surface material (the SR Grader), or to separate out pollutants where recycled wood material is being used (the SR-R Grader).
The company also offers its Heavy Goods Air Grader SGH for contaminated wood supplies. In this version, the incoming material is split into two fractions: accepts and heavy weight rejects. The rejected material drops into the reject hopper and is discharged from the system, while the acceptable material is carried in the air stream to a high-efficiency Hurriclone. In this system, up to two thirds of the air can be recirculated.
For fibres in MDF and hardboard plants, SPV offers the SGF air grader which again separates the incoming material into two fractions, with reject material such as glue balls, wood shives and sand dropping into a reject hopper. Acceptable material is transported in air suspension to a high efficiency cyclone and the exhaust air is cleaned in bag filters. Up to 60% of the cleaned air is recirculated.
Sand is a major problem in particleboard mills using recycled wood as it is highly abrasive and can also cause severe problems in the dryer. A combination of mechanical screening and pneumatic grading is employed by SPV for sand extraction.
Sand particles of less than 300 micrometres are taken out by screening over a 1.2mm and a 0.3mm mesh. Material retained on the 0.3mm mesh is air graded to remove sand particles between 300 micro-metres and 1200 micro-metres, which are separated from the accepts stream. Material retained on the 1.2mm mesh screen is usually free of contaminants, says SPV, and can be used in production. The company claims that 80% of sand can be removed in this system.
Following on to its success in the grading arena, some years ago SPV moved into dryers for composite panel factories and offers single-pass drum dryers for particleboard and OSB, and flash-tube dryers for MDF.
The drum dryers employ indirect heating with heat exchanger tubes, or coils. The drums are virtually air-tight and have thick walls for insulation. They are driven by electric motors through a pinion system to a ring gear. Dryers with capacities of up to 65,000kg per hour mechanical throughput are available.
Drum dryers have been supplied to many mills around the world and recent installations include some large diameter drums to Saviola in Italy and drum dryers are currently under construction for Kronospan in Russia and Falco in Hungary.
This year, flash-tube dryers have been supplied to Homanit’s MDF plant in Mount Gilead, North Carolina and the Kunz plant in Baruth in eastern Germany.
China has also been an important market for SPV, with three plants currently on order for flash tube dryers and sifters for Gao Feng, Oak and Zenghe – all obtained through Dieffenbacher as the main contractor; the source of about 50% of SPV’s business in the last two years.
The flash-tube dryer employs a singlestage system which reduces the moisture content to around 10%.
For pneumatic transport and extraction installations, SPV offers its Rotaclean Filter. This is an automatic filter which requires no compressed air or mechanical vibrating mechanism for cleaning the filter bags.
However, the latest product to be brought to the market by SPV is the superheated steam fibre dryer for MDF. If you think this sounds familiar, it is because the development of this innovative system has been going on for some time.
The brainchild of Wolfgang Allerödder, who began development of the dryer as a project for his university degree and is now a senior engineer with SPV, the super-heated steam fibre dryer was developed with some funding towards the total €600,000 (US$606,000) cost coming from the German Fund for the Environment, Deutsche Bundessiftung Umwelt (DBU).
A pilot plant was built at SPV’s Leverkusen works and started trials in the summer of 2001.
The plant consists of a refiner, blowline, gluing equipment and the pilot dryer itself. Resination tests were carried out in cooperation with Dynea.
The dryer operates in a closed-loop system. Wet material is injected via the blow-line and dried in a continuous closed super-heated steam loop, with fibres being discharged via a rotary valve. The recirculated steam is passed through a heat exchanger for super-heating before being re-used for drying.
The advantage claimed for the use of super-heated steam in place of hot air is that the specific heat and heat transfer are higher, while drying takes place in an inert atmosphere because of the closed circuit.
The process steam and the steam evaporated from the fibres can be utilised, for example, for pre-heating the chips, heating air for air grading and conditioning of grader air to control the wet bulb temperature, explains Klaus Radzimanowski of SPV.
The idea for developing the system came from the known fact that drying efficiency increases with a higher percentage of steam in the drying air. Superheated steam is in a condition where it is above the saturation line and is thus ‘dry’, explains Mr Radzimanowski. The more the steam is super-heated, the more its properties approach those of an ideal gas. Theoretically it can evaporate water and absorb steam up to the saturation line.
“The saturation point is constant for a defined pressure which means the saturation point moves up with increasing pressure,” says Mr Radzimanowski. “Therefore it is necessary to keep the pressure as low as possible in order to avoid high temperature at the end of the drying process.”
The super-heated steam dryer has an operating pressure of approximately 1.5bar (absolute) and a temperature difference between inlet and outlet of 700C. Outlet temperature will be 10 to 200C above the saturation line.
“The super-heated steam dryer is a flash-tube dryer which means that the drying material [the fibre] is conveyed together with the drying medium while heat transfer takes place simultaneously,” explains Mr Radzimanowski.
The steam is transported by a steam fan of special design with a frequency controlled motor. The cyclone is a pressure vessel and thus has to be approved to the appropriate codes.
The fibres are separated from the stream by a specially-designed rotary valve to minimise steam leakage. The steam goes from the dryer cyclone to a collector which defines the pressure in the system. This collector is equipped with a number of steam outlets depending on the number of steam consumers.
The first part is recirculated by the steam fan, the second injected into the pre-steaming bin for the fibre preparation and the third is used to pre-heat air for the graders.
The advantages claimed by SPV for the super-heated steam fibre dryer are firstly that the heat transfer is better. Secondly, the closed loop is completely inert with no, or very low, oxygen content, thus eliminating the risk of fire or explosion. Thirdly, there are no gaseous emissions to the atmosphere. However, because the steam is condensed into water, there is a need for a water treatment plant behind the dryer.
Higher fibre temperature means that the fibre mat has better heat transfer properties although care must be taken to avoid resin pre-cure – hence the involvement of Dynea, which developed a special high-temperature resin.
It is still early days and there have not been any industrial installations of the dryer to date. As it is a pressurised system, and it has to be constructed of stainless steel, there are cost implications compared with conventional blow-line dryers. However, SPV believes the advantages outweigh any disadvantages and several panel manufacturers are reported to be showing serious interest.
Meanwhile the company continues to supply its grading and more conventional drying systems to panel mills around the world.