The 'Greening' of England (3)

Why SupaWOOD?

The SupaWOOD system was designed to be a complete departure from traditional joinery in all but appearance. Trade skills have been declining for decades. In a technological age, hand/eye skills have not been fully appreciated, and the failure to allow schools to teach vocational skills have meant that the traditional apprenticeship all but died in the latter half of the 20th Century. The cost of running a traditional joinery shop just rose, and rose again as the prevalence of good tradesmen steadily declined. I decided that the way forward was to design a framing system that treated wood as just another engineering material. Fully finished components should be assembled by fitters in much same way that a motor car production line works.
No glue, no careful trimming and fitting. Just screw and snap accurately made and finished parts together. The manufacturing process relies on Production Engineers rather than joiners. Once the tooling and machinery is set up, repetitive production is simple in comparison with the traditional model.

The pre-finished, pre-glazed cassette system de-skills the installation process, and sets wood windows on a par with pvc. Fitters of the SupaWOOD window need no woodworking skills, just as fitters of pvc windows need no plastic working skills.

That’s it.

The whole range started with one small window and ended up as a complete range of interconnecting frames to form bows, bays, and conservatories, with inward and outward opening residential doors, french doors and sidelights, inline sliders, rising sashes, in almost any combination you care to use. They all share one characteristic: The 20mm sealed units are dry channel glazed into ex 2” (50mm) profile to preserve a traditional appearance suited to the vernacular architecture of the British Isles.

For more than twelve years, the inline sliding patio doors were supplied to a competitor in flat-pack form – two doors, three doors, four doors, overdoor lights, almost any combination in standard sizes and made-to-measure. I am particular proud of the low (all but zero) call-back rate. Those few call-backs out of thousands of units were mostly due to failures in the assembly or adjustment process, although until a proper piece-rate bonus system was set up in the factory, I confess we did manage to sent out incomplete kits from time to time. A system of rewards and penalties for the workforce soon stopped that.

Sliding patio doors fell out of favour during the 1990s, to be replaced by a love affair with french doors, which continues today.

More next week.

The "greening" of England (2)

A big problem with traditional wood windows is that they do not take sealed unit double glazing well. Even when heavily modified to accept sealed units, the edge cover or the drainage (or both) is often inadequate, or the frame is excessively bulky. That doesn’t stop manufacturers making them and customers buying them. By the time the problems show up, the seller is often long gone. I have stood in the lounge of the very expensive home of a retired Captain of Industry who was apoplectic with rage because he couldn’t see out of a single one of his large picture windows. All of them fogged up just one year past their 5-year guarantee, and the manufacturer (not me) had shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

The problems first became evident to me many years ago when I was asked to replace a neighbour’s 1930s bay windows. I made them out of untreated softwood, primed the frame, then bedded 14mm sealed units in butyl mastic (I said it was a long time ago) leaving the customer to paint the topcoats himself. Not ideal, I decided.

A year earlier, I had been building loft conversions as a sub-contractor, and had discovered that an aluminium window went in, fully finished, in about two hours, but next day the customer was bending my ear about the gallons of water all over the floor (from condensation, of course). (PVC hadn’t yet arrived in the UK, although there were rumours of them appearing on the continent).

A wood window, however, (usually a stock item from the Boulton and Paul catalogue) glazed with stepped units looked horrible and took days to install, glaze and paint. Out on a 45 degree roof, in the rain or snow it was no fun at all, and I soon decided there must be a better way to make a wood window.

After the experience with the softwood bay, I sat down with a sharp pencil and a clean sheet of paper and designed the first prototype of the Supawood window.

I decided from the start it had to be:
· a good-looking product that would sell to my customers in traditional Warwickshire cottages
· technically excellent
· fully finished in the factory before glazing.
· glazed in the factory before installation
· capable of being installed in a flash in all weathers.
· Guaranteed zero-callback (ie no jamming, warping, or swelling to deal with)

From the start I concluded that channel glazing was necessary to get a 20mm sealed unit into a traditional 2” profile, and mechanical fixing was necessary to allow the glazing to be replaced if necessary. The early versions still involved carrying heavy glazed sub-frames up ladders, but that was soon changed in favour of an inside fitting version, and it fast became clear that there was no way I would ever want to return to carrying glass up a ladder in the rain.

The development of the present version took many years of continuous refinement, with some useful ideas coming up along the way. It’s a long story with many twists and turns, but it does look as if, with the advent of this new miracle timber, the SupaWOOD window is about to truly justify its name.

More next week.

The "Greening" of England

Anyone who truly believes in making the world a greener place will welcome the latest brilliant development in timber technology.

Just imagine a miraculous discovery of the 21st Century:

A timber that :
· Is more durable than teak.
· is a plantation crop with a growth cycle of just 35 years
· can be recycled, burned, buried, or otherwise disposed of with no nasty consequences

better still...
· machines better than any hardwood
· takes a better finish than pine, as durable as pvc
· has no knots and comes in 6m lengths to minimise wastage.



A material such as this would be truly miraculous, and who could doubt its advantage in “green” terms over any plastic or metal: Just plant a seed and stand back for 35 years.
The small amount of energy required to fell, transport, convert, and machine it into useful products would pale into insignificance compared with the energy required to extract, smelt and refine aluminium, or to produce the chemicals from which pvc is manufactured.

Well, believe it or not, that material is here.
This wonder material of the 21st century actually exists.

And guess what: The ancient Romans understood the basic process, even if the technology to make it work in economic terms had to wait almost 2000 years.

The fundamentals are simple:
Soak any timber in vinegar to improve its rot resistance.

A more sophisticated process to impregnate softwood with commercial acetic acid was first proposed in 1928, and the race has been on since then to develop a commercially viable process. Only in recent years have the Dutch succeeded in bringing a commercially viable product to the market. They have branded it as a new species, and it certainly behaves like no timber I have ever previously encountered in a woodworking career spanning more than 35 years.

Because extensive trials with these acetylised timbers have been carried out over many decades, there is a massive database to back up the claims. The Building Research Establishment (BRE) for example, will back a 60 years lifetime, even in the most demanding wet and heavy applications. Treated timber used for canal lining has, after ten years in service, not shown the slightest deterioration.

Of almost as much interest to this joinery designer is the fact that it just does not absorb water at all. After extensive soaking of test-pieces, the swelling I have measured is less than 0.5% (yes, that’s less than half of one percent) compared to the usual expectation of between 5% and 8%.

That means the annual winter swelling/summer shrinkage of windows and doors can be consigned to the past.

Having beaten my head against the brick-wall of consumer resistance for more than two decades (we prefer zero maintenance upvc, dear), the answer is here:

SUPAWOOD WINDOWS DOORS AND CONSERVATORIES MADE FROM THIS WONDER MATERIAL OF THE 21ST CENTURY ARE EVERY BIT AS DURABLE AS PVC, AND INFINITELY LESS POISONOUS TO OUR PLANET

More next week.