CNC router manufacturer Anderson America (AWFS Fair Booth 8716), well established in CNC routers, is making a push into digital inkjet printing on wood substrates. An  installation at MarketCraft, Newburgh, OR, will be covered in an upcoming Wood & Wood Products magazine.

LAS VEGAS - Exhibitors for the season's biggest woodworking show, AWFS Fair in Las Vegas, are moving to digitally driven woodworking technologies, in design, process control and CNC machining, with a strong presence for laser and even inkjet imaging, and a first U.S. exhibition of laser edgebanding.

Woodworking software application suppliers have been upgrading and expanding offerings, to facilitate a growing need for precision order entry and reduced labor in operating everything from panel saws to CNC routers, moulders, and planers. The software link-up is a critical enabling technology that crosses over from design, to sales, job planning and production.

20-20 Technologies will use AWFS Fair as a stage for daily live streaming video presentations about its integrated software offerings for woodworking design, sales, operations and production.

Planit Solutions (Booth 1613) announced just before the show opened that it had established a strategic relationship with Tractivity, giving it exclusive distributorship for Tractivity operations management applications in the woodworking industry.  

Eurosoft (Booth 1016) will be presenting its range of applications for optimizing manufacturing equipment, including
ARDIS, used by ClosetPro integrated with 20-20 Flex software, which handles all aspects of design and creates machining programs for the Biesse Skipper. ARDIS optimization software submits jobs to a Holzma beam saw via the ENKEY automation syst em. 

Microvellum has updated its AutoCAD based application suite Tool Box to run on Dot.net, and will present education sessions on its Version 7 application.

KCD Software will outline the advantages of renting its applications under a recently introduced program.

Laser edgebanding
Stiles will present Homag’s patented edgebanding technology which uses a laser beam to melt a bonding agent on the edging material before pressing it directly onto the panel—producing edges of previously unattainable quality with practically no visible glue line. Stiles has sold several of these edgebanders already, and as exclusive U.S. distributor for Homag (to Fred Smith Store Fixtures and to HIN's Allsteel division) will host a demonstration of the new technology on display in booth #8900 at the AWFS Fair.

Digital printed edgeband
Doellken-Woodtape parent Surteco showed at Interzum its Digital-Edge polymer edgebanding material that was digitally printed. This would allow creation of things like one-off designs in children's desktops, or a restaurant full of tables, for example, each carrying a different theme around the edge. The art of edgeband materials production is intriguing, too -  since edgebanding must be extruded to the delivered dimension to fix its performance characteristics. This means that Doellken is digitally printing on the long narrow surfaces. Doellken-Woodtape is also a supplier of the specialized edgebanding used by Homag's laser edgebander.