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.
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