Innovation and high technology in mass ply panels production
Technologies for houses and construction elements
Building the future with wood. This is much more than a concept for Freres Engineered Wood, a US family owned business operated for over 100 years, that find in innovation and high technology the most important drivers not only in their continuous growth, but also in the increasing spread of mass timber buildings.
Being innovative is in their DNA. This company began producing veneer in the 50s, and added plywood in the 90s to keep their momentum. In 2007 they built a cogeneration facility supplying renewable power to the local power grid. In 2017, they developed and now manufacture what could possibly be the most significant new mass timber product in the world, as they state: Mass Ply Panels, or MPP. Everything starts from Freres’s core values: first of all, a deep respect for wood, the forests their fiber comes from, and the benefits to society that wood products provide. “We love innovation, which motivates us to do more with less of one of the world’s most valuable resources” states the company. Innovation is lead by a concrete mission: promoting the use of wood and mass timber also for multy-storey buildings, as the same Freres’s projects and constructions demonstrate.
“Mass Ply products are patented, veneer-based, engineered wood products that provide superior performance characteristics over mass timber products such as CLT, Glulam beams, and solid sawn lumber” states the company in describing their core business. “The building block of each Mass Ply Product is Freres Structural Composite Lumber (SCL), which consists of multiple layers of density-graded Douglas Fir veneers. These veneers are glued and pressed in a variety of combinations and orientations, and finally joined together to create 1” layers (called lamellas)”.
Why Mass Ply products? Freres is aware of this: “We love wood, and building with wood have significant benefits over concrete and steel. Our Mass ply products have raised the bar for mass timber construction and can out-perform lumber-based mass timber in many ways”.
A slower char rate and more consistent fire performance, a better dimensional stability with lower moisture content, a reduced volume and cost with their flexibility in panel dimensions and thickness: these are some of the many advantages coming from Mass Ply production that according to Freres can be applied to all structural elements of a building.
High technology is a key element in the production of Mass Ply building components. As stated by Kyle Freres, Vice President of Operations at Freres: “One of the keys to success in mass timber is the ability to cut and route panels, beams and columns, so that when they arrive on the jobsite they are ready to install without additional labor. Whether manufacturing on the product is required for mechanical, electrical, or plumbing (MEP) penetrations, to allow for connections, or simply to cut pieces to correct dimensions, the capabilities of modern CNC machines are essential to the success of mass timber projects”.
Freres Mass Ply Panel facility has utilized a CNC machining centre provided by a German industrial machinery manufacturer since they began operation in 2017. “After a significant amount of downtime last year due to the inability to source parts, we learned that we would have limited support for the machine in the future. This forced us to consider a replacement machine. The universe of large scale, mass timber CNC manufacturers is not large, but we were able to research a variety of options and decided on the SCM Area XL. As luck would have it, a fortuitous chain of events allowed for delivery of the equipment in December of 2023”.
Kyle Freres describes the advantages of Area XL as following. “One of the first glaring differences is that the Area XL has the option for two large cutting heads at 63 kw, where the previous CNC had one 30kw spindle for cutting with a 920mm saw and a 24kw main spindle. The additional horsepower on the spindles is beneficial for the machine feeds and speeds, but also allows for a wider variety of larger tooling that we were not able to use on our existing machine due to clamping pressures and horsepower of the spindles”. An example would be disc cutting tools like the one shown below. “These disc cutting tools can speed up routing operations, such as those for spline connections, by cutting a width of three inches in one pass instead of a typical router bit, which is one and a half inches and would take twice as many passes. We hope that this, coupled with the ability for each spindle to be operating at the same time, will dramatically speed up basic panel connection operations”.
Another difference is that “each of the spindles on the Area XL has a Rapid10 position and a Rapid18-position tool holder, whereas our previous machine was limited to a total of 18 tools. The large saw on the SCM cnc machining centre is 1150mm compared to the 920mm on our existing machine, which will increase the thickness of the panel we can process – up to a maximum of 14 inches. The secondary saw has also increased in diameter size to 800mm. Another great feature added will be the use of a chainsaw aggregate for corner cut outs of doors and window openings. One of the changes our operators are most looking forward to is the addition of a chip removal system, which conveys chips from the CNC bed to one of the dust collection systems to allow for quicker, easier cleanup and dramatically reducing the manual labor involved”.
Freres Engineered Wood
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