Charles Ransford & Son is a producer of British timber products operating on a 38 acre site at Bishops Castle in Shropshire, with fencing and landscaping products represent the lion’s share of its production. The 55 employees work on a single shift, dealing predominantly with redwood. Ransford invested in an automated post-pointing line from Kallfass to increase productivity in fence and gate post production by reducing manual work. The previous manual post-pointing and feeding of the incising system had been a very time-consuming and labor-intensive manual process. The post-pointing line starts with a longitudinal push-off destacking with stick stripping, followed by an automated feeding of an incising system. Before incising, bad quality wood is marked manually with luminous chalk. After incising, a lumi sensor on the sorting conveyor detects the colored marked wood and opens a flap for disposal via a chute. The zero point alignment takes place before the post pointing station. Four circular saws with a maximum 200 mm cutting depth point the posts on all four sides, with pieces turned three times automatically between saws. A radius milling cutting station is designed for round-topping of square or rectangular posts, complete with clamping operation. Two motors, one turning in and one against feed direction, save the quality without tears at the edge. This station can process five to six pieces per minute. The sawn posts are stacked afterward in single or multiple lengths with automatic stick placement at a rate of five layers per minute. The already existing final stapping operation was integrated by Kallfass. Previously, the manual process to produce a four-way pointed post measuring 125 x 75 mm would take three operators 30 minutes to produce a pack of 126 pieces. Now it can be done in 5-10 minutes. The round-topping and incising process is also now considerably quicker. According to Ransford, it used to take two hours to complete manual incising and round-topping process for a pack, as opposed to approximately 10 minutes on the Kallfass line. Instead of producing order by order, Ransford now batches produce and holds more in stock of the more popular products.

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