West Joinery of Harefield first saw the Soukup CNC window machining centre model Crafter at W10 woodworking machinery show at the NEC, Birmingham in 2010 – the company knew that the machine was the ideal machine for its growing joinery business manufacturing casement windows and doors plus traditional box sliding sash windows. But as a new start-up company, it was just a dream.
So forward to 2012. West Joinery visited the W12 show, and again was very impressed with the Soukup CNC Crafter – but nothing else it saw at the show could help its growing joinery business.
The Soukup CNC Crafter is unique in that with its own Soukup Wincreator software, it makes the production of UK-style windows and doors quite effortless. It takes up very little floor space – just 2m x 2m – meaning it will fit into most small joinery workshops. But sadly the dream remained just that as financially-speaking, the Crafter was still out of West Joinery’s reach.
Once again in 2014 the company visited the W14 exhibition and yet again saw its dream machine in action producing casement windows and doors plus box sliding windows – including manufacturing the horn section, boxes for spring balances and traditional pulleys and weights, trenching the cill and head, moulding the cill section, and producing beading – all on one impressive machine.
“A truly unique machine for the UK joinery manufacturer,” comments West Joinery’s Algis Stasiunas in discussions with Ian Brown of supplier IWM and Jaraslav Soukup.
“Compared to the way we made our windows and doors, manually on traditional machines ie old fashioned push-pull single-end tenoner then on a spindle moulder plus the mortising – all very slow labour-intensive processing – we would be lucky if we made 10-15 windows a week! But with the Soukup Crafter, in two days we can easily make at least 20 completed windows.
“And so to October last year, and again we visited the W16 exhibition – but this time we made our dreams come true by ordering a Soukup CNC Crafter with Soukup Zuani Design Tooling. Impressively, the machine which was delivered, installed and commissioned in February in our workshop – we couldn’t be happier!”
07944 108747
[email protected]
www.iwmachines.co.uk
