To produce nearly perfect products, Robert Shaw Mfg. maintains very tight control over their materials. While the company does not actually cut logs, they do build up their own veneer faces, process panels and hand finish all their materials in a 90,000 square foot manufacturing facility.

Once a log is chosen for a project, the leaves are carefully organized and numbered to achieve the design intent. Experience has taught the veneer team to reserve back- up leaves when working complicated sequences, just in case something is added during production. A guillotine cuts both edges of a leaf perfectly parallel, so that it stays exactly square. From there, the faces go to the veneer splicer. “We just bought a new Kuper veneer splicing machine. It applies a thin strip of virtually invisible glue along the edges of two leafs and then glues them together under pressure and heat,” says William Shaw. His lifelong work in the premium architectural woodwork industry makes him the perfect person to head the veneer operation. “The Kuper produces a tapeless veneer joint, which is the typical spec for premium jobs.” In-house splicing allows Shaw to make certain the seams are completely sealed. Anything less could result in a line or crack at the joint after finishing.

While the veneer is being spliced, the MDF cores are sanded through a wide belt DMC sander and machined to match the veneer sequence. “The Medite II SDF is the best substrate for our work. Plywood doesn’t stay flat, it has some warp or twist in it. And particleboard is less dense. We do a lot of edge detail, and there are many processes in our machining operation. So the core has to be stable,” says, Shaw.

Every part (individual leaves, veneer faces core and backer) is numbered. They are properly matched and put through one of two hot presses. The Italpresse XL is well-suited for smaller production runs due to its ease of operation, and the big green Sennerskov feed-through hot press is oriented around large production runs. “If specified or appropriate we will also band a piece of solid lumber to the core before it is pressed to create an edge detail that allows it to look like the veneer flows over the edge,” says Shaw. This technique adds depth to the finished product, so that it closely resembles solid wood. Once the veneer is flawlessly laid up it goes back the DMC sander before being cut to size in the machining area. All the subsequent assembly, sanding and finishing is done by hand.

While equipment gives Robert Shaw Mfg. the in-house veneering capability necessary to manufacture premium products; the machines are little more then state of-theart hunks of metal without the people who operate them. Every piece that comes out of the factory passes through the best available equipment, as well as the careful hands and watchful eyes of master craftspeople. The quality of Robert Shaw Mfg.’s work can be described in terms of the amount of effort and wisdom the people who manufacture the products put into the process. The investment in state of the art equipment is just another way of giving the artisan woodworkers more influence over the their magnificent materials.