Clearview North October 2013 - Issue 143 | Page 62

MACHINERY

AUTOMATIC SAWING AND MACHINING
In December 1999, Stuga sold six Flowline
automatic sawing and machining centres
following demonstrations of the prototype
at its factory in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.
The prototype was installed in January 2000
and ten Flowlines in total were installed
during that year. The early success can
mainly be put down to the fact that there
were no economically viable alternatives at
the time.
One of the big problems for German
machines was that they were not particularly
good for the UK’s complex internally glazed
casement windows and the fixed head tooling
systems often struggled to cope with the
many variations thrown up. Stuga’s rotary
tooling system overcame the complexity issues
of British windows. This a specialist field
pioneered by Stuga and considerable resources
have been invested into the technology over
many years. Stuga also put the profile into
the machine on the wide face instead of the
narrow face. This meant that no tooling was
required, such as contour blocks, throughout
the machine. This is one of the key factors
making Stuga machines less expensive than its
competitors.
Having created a successful new machine,
Stuga built many automatic sawing and
machining centres until the ‘credit crunch’
destroyed the market in 2008. After two bleak
years the market started to return, for both
new machines and refurbished ones. With

machines becoming available due to companies
downsizing or going out of business Stuga
purchased a number of Flowlines that were
refurbished to the latest ZX3 specification and
sold back into the market. About half went to
new customers and the rest to Stuga customers
that recognised their machines needed
refurbishing or replacing.
With an estimated design life of around
ten years some Flowlines are clearly past their
replacement date but many fabricators cannot
afford to replace them. These old machines
have been targeted in the last two years when
replacements have been available and quite a
few have taken the chance to trade-in their old

machine and purchase a refurbished one. The
big problem is that many others either cannot
raise the money or cannot justify the finance
repayments. This means that these very old
machines are costing more to keep going. The
key point being not only the servicing costs but
the considerable costs of lost production when
a major breakdown occurs. On top of this the
‘donor’ machines are now rarely available for
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