In addition to being the world market leader in the Sports and Seedmech divisions, the company is also the global number one in Woodtech, the division that interests us most. Under the umbrella term 'World of Woodtech', five product areas for the wood industry are included: precision thin sawing and surface refinement of wood, saw blades developed and produced in-house, mobile and stationary sawmill technology, automation solutions, as well as sawing solutions for a range of materials, including lightweight materials.

For small and large, all over the world
Among the numerous woodworking machines are state-of-the-art filling machines for the parquet world, for both small and very large applications. More specifically, these are TRC machines (short for Timber Repair & Cosmetics), for semi and fully automatic repair of wood surfaces. We have an exchange of views with Markus Weissenbrunner and Johannes Schachinger, respectively Head of Strategic Product Development Woodtech and Area Sales Manager Benelux Woodtech.

"After pre-cleaning the knotholes and cracks comes the filling work, and that's where you find our filling machines, which are primarily aimed at the furniture and panel and parquet manufacturer, not the installer," explains Markus Weissenbrunner. "We offer two types of technology in this respect: filling process with thermoplastic and organic filling material. With thermoplastic filling, thermoplastic polymers in a molten state are injected by high pressure into the wood defect with a maximum of precision and in the calculated quantity. These are immediately cooled down by a cooling plate in the same process step, which makes processing possible. For organic filling, we work with a mineral and water-based one-component filler developed especially for machine use. It is suitable for all common processing methods and surface coatings in parquet production. The time for further processing depends on the damaged area and thus on the applied volume of filler. This application is also often used by parquet manufacturers who only use natural raw materials in their floors.

"I would add that we also have a 3th technology: The Woodpatch for repairing defects in wood with real-wood-patches. But that is not intended for the flooring industry, rather the panel industry," adds Johannes Schachinger, who in the same breath points out that quite a few large flooring manufacturers are customers of Wintersteiger: "In the Netherlands you have, for example, Veno. Elsewhere in Europe there are big names like Hamberger, Admonter, Bauwerk/Boen, Meisterwerke, Scheucher,... Outside Europe, Canadian Preverco is a good reference."

TRC Easy and TRC Automatic
Earlier in the discussion, the speakers indicated that Wintersteiger focuses on both smaller and larger customers. How does one go about doing that in practice?
Markus Weissenbrunner: "We have a very broad and also modular product portfolio of TRC machines or systems. TRC Easy includes entry-level manual machines that are chosen by customers to ensure consistently high quality wood repairs. The automatic machines and systems are divided into various products, which are compared with each other for their capacity, the filling material technology used and the dimensions of parts. Because we go to great lengths to diversify the machines and build them modularly, we can serve anyone, from very small to very large customers. The great advantage, of course, is that we can adapt our machines/systems to individual requirements and thus optimally integrate them into the customer's process."

Johannes Schachinger: "Another interesting thing is that you use the filling material optimally. You never use too much or too little and thus save money. A great advantage is the possibility to even fill out parts or top layers before gluing them to the boards. You fill the imperfections beforehand and not afterwards!"

Markus Weissenbrunner would like to conclude with a closer look at the scanner developed by Wintersteiger itself. He explains how this scanner, which was named 'Faulty Spot Eye', detects damaged spots, along with the detection of the exact extent and structure of the damage: "Faulty Spot Eye is an essential component of any fully automated TRC system. It has the necessary visibility and guarantees highly accurate detection of all types of defects. It works quickly and accurately in 2D and 3D mode and evaluates images in milliseconds. The repair units then approach the detected damaged areas and fill them in at high speed. Only the damaged area with the required amount of filling material is addressed."

TRC Preclean
When asked about recent developments, Mr Weissenbrunner immediately refers to TRC PreClean, which automates the pre-cleaning of wooden cracks and faults.
"This modular machine is particularly interesting in terms of reducing labour costs. Until recently, unprocessed floor sections had to be pre-cleaned manually before defects were repaired. This is no longer the case because TRC Preclean works with the aid of a scanner developed in-house that scans defects. It then evaluates the data and processes these areas so that the end result looks natural."