Tooling Design for the Wood Industry:

This program started in 1998 and was developed to enable Kentucky manufacturers and entrepreneurs in the Secondary Wood Industry to take advantage of expertise and technically advanced equipment available through the UK Department of Forestry and the UK Wood Utilization Center. Nearly every producer of secondary “value-added wood products” uses a moulder to produce many of their products. These machines are very efficient and significantly reduce labor cost. Our producers are basically required to have one of these machines in order to compete nationally and globally. At the very beginning of the process the manufacturer must develop a template that matches the products to be produced. Many times the products themselves need to be re-designed in order to be efficiently manufactured. Traditionally this process has been done by hand, takes a long time, is tedious in nature, and is not very accurate. There is technology available that reduces or eliminates many of these problems; however, because of the expense involved, very few companies have purchased the technology. The UK Wood Utilization Center has acquired the technology and the Department of Forestry extension staff offers template making and tooling/product design as a service to the industry. This creates an open line of communication with the industry that otherwise would probably not exist. We are not just providing a tool for the industry but are involved early in the product design tooling development process and are able to make recommendations about how to design and manufacture the tooling in a way that will significantly reduce error, waste, and set-up time later in the process, providing a huge advantage for our Kentucky manufacturers. From July of 2017 to July of 2018, templates for 32 different products have been designed and provided for the Secondary Wood Manufacturers in Kentucky representing an estimated 77,030.04 in dollars earned or saved.