Thode Knife & Saw Newsletter

October 22, 2020

We are now seeing the market return to normality post Covid lockdown with strong orders for knife steel and bandsaws, we have good stocks and capacity to process your orders quickly.

We introduced variable pitch and depth bandsaws to the market some 4 years ago for wide bandsaws and while not a new concept it wasn’t being done to any degree in New Zealand or Australia. Most saw shops in Australasia have not had the ability to service the saws due to having manual cam operated grinders which are unable to vary the depth. This is changing quite quickly as we have been seeing strong sales of Iseli CNC profile grinders which give the mills the opportunity to transition to variable pitch and depth. We have had reports of increased throughput of up to 20% with some customers as well as a quieter smoother running saw.

We have been selling narrow throw away bandsaw blades with variable pitch successfully for many years as there has been no servicing requirement for these.

For those who are interested in trying variable pitch and depth circular saws in their mill please contact us to discuss the potential benefits of this. We can manufacture and service these saws for those that don’t have in house servicing. We recently sold Niagara Sawmilling a new Iseli CNC Circular grinder that is capable of top, face, profile and bevel of the circular saw blade. (see the separate article on this)

We sold Redstag a complete new Iseli saw shop which is now in its fifth year of operation, this was just recently videoed (in our website video section) and you can see it is still like new as the saw shop team onsite operate the shop with the care and precision of a surgical team at any modern hospital.

Our Auckland Circular Saw & Knife Manufacturing and Servicing site shifted to a new premise three years ago and the work that went into planning the layout and improvement to systems has had great customer outcomes in terms of improved servicing turnaround times for both new manufactured saws and saw servicing. We have focused on staff training across all operational areas which has also added to service capability. You can view both the Auckland and Rotorua sites in the video section on our website.

A Safety note.

We recently had a staff member badly lacerate his hand which required hospitalisation. While we had recently had a safety audit with a favourable outcome just prior to the accident we quickly worked as a team to identify improvements to lessen the likeliness of a future injury. We had a Worksafe Investigation for the accident and they were complimentary of our overall approach which includes well documented training records, hazard identification and management & staff participation into a complete site safety system. We usually only read about prosecutions however our experience with Worksafe has been a positive one and we now have upgraded all the machinery of this type to more robust safety features and introduced a different glove which is safer for our staff. We have also shared this across our other sites so they could also improve their systems.