Wood material features and technical defects that affect the yield in a finger joint production process

A cost efficient process is the goal for every production process. In wood manufacturing, each step in the process may affect the material utilization and the cost efficiency. Wood as a material has got high diversity in its inherent features and the different manufacturing steps must be able to handle this. In most end products the proportion of the raw material cost is high. Thus, material utilization and cost efficient processes are of great importance. The overall aim of the project was to study the potential and problems in manufacturing production processes in terms of material utilization efficiency. A production process of finger jointed bed sides for IKEA was chosen as a study case and its chain of production units are; a sawmill for plank production, a finger joint company producing components and finally a furniture company that produce the end product. The aim of this article is to describe the impact of different raw material and what wood and technical defects that affect the total yield of a manufactured product. In total 177 logs of three different log types were tested; butt logs, intermediate logs and fresh knot logs. The quality of the wood material was detected and measured by aid of 3D-scanning and X-ray (logs), FinScan (planks), and WoodEye (planks/components) and manual inspection of the final products. With a full traceability data collection the quality of the test material was followed through all steps in the manufacturing chain. The result show differences between log types in down-grade causes, reject volume and the final yield of accepted products. Also, the test material showed high levels of reject with non-biological background which suggest the need of technical improvements in the finger joint and the furniture manufacturing process. The intermediate log group showed overall the best result.Godkänd; 2011; 20110616 (olof)