What Are Beam Saws? And How Can They Improve Manufacturing Productivity

Have you ever heard of a beam saw? If you own or work in a manufacturing facility you might want to learn about this saw if you want to increase your cutting capacity and speed. A beam saw is an industrial saw with motorized circular blade that is mounted on a horizontal arm guided by a set of rails that can perform a high volume of straight cuts on a wide range of materials .

These machines have high powered motors and crosscut saws that are perfect for cutting wood, metal, aluminum, steel and other kinds of materials.

But what should you look for in a beam saw? What type of blade should you use? We are going to ask our guest Dave Brown a customer service representative from The Original Saw Company, the only US manufacturer of beam saws.

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Transcript

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Welcome to this edition of the Manufacturing Experts. In this episode, we discuss what are. Beam saws and how can they improve manufacturing productivity. A beam saw is not a typical machine for home use. It's designed and built to handle heavy duty cutting operations like those found in manufacturing plants. Unlike a band saw or a radial armsaw, a beam saw has a carriage that is support it at both ends, resulting in a faster and more accurate cutting cutting operation. These saws offer improved productivity for operations, cutting raw materials at a high rate. They're designed to cut multiple pieces of material at the same time while maintaining high precision and accurate cuts. To help us understand how beam saws work and how it improves productivity and workflow in the manufacturing environment, we will be speaking with Dave Brown, a customer service representative of the Original Saw Company, who are the only manufacturers of beam saws made in the United States on this episode of The Manufacturing Experts. With me is Dave Brown, customer service at the original Saw company. Welcome Dave, to the podcast. How are you doing today? Good, thanks for having me. Glad to have you. Dave, we want to talk about beam saws today. So I think the best place to start is what is a beam saw and how is it different from other types of saws? A beam saw is just a much larger platform than our other radial arm saws that we produce. So it's for customers looking to cut sheet goods and thicker panel materials. I guess that our normal radial arm saws wouldn't cover walk through. How does a beam saw work? Okay, so a beam saw, it's similar to the radial arm saw, but it's supported at both ends of the beam. And what's different about it? The radial arm saw, you could swing the arm and you could do some miter cutting on the beam saw. It's a strictly straight cross cut. The carriage is going to travel from one end to the other and then return at home. We can do those manually with a hand crank, or you can make them a semiautomatic platform with a power cross feed on. Talk about what a power cross feed is. So power cross feed takes the manual operation from your operator hand crank and you're going to set a feed rate, put a limit, switch how far you want the saw to travel. You press a button, it's going to come out and cut and return to the home position after it's made that cut. Oh wow. So that's going to be really add a lot more to accuracy and consistency too, it sounds like. Yeah, and your operators are going to love you for it. While we're on that, let's talk about some of the features that a beam saw has that would be uniquely different than other types of saws or maybe some features that kind of make it stand out. Okay, so the biggest thing about them is the capacity on a radial arm saw or even like, sliding table saws, you're limited to how much length of travel you're going to get for a cut on the beam saw, we can get a 61 at the three quarter inch depth. You can get a 61 inch cross cut. So you could cut five foot sheet goods right. And as far as, like, depth of cut, we can put it. So it's a seven and a half horsepower motor that we put on them. You can run a small blade, like a ten inch blade if you're doing really thin, like dado work, if you're trying to make, like, banding and some pallet boards. And then you could go up to our biggest saw, you put a 22 and a half inch blade, and then you can do an eight inch depth of cut. Wow. Yeah. So like, those insulated foam panels for doing roofing and wall building and stuff like that, it makes it really easy to process those sheets. That brings up kind of an interesting thing because I look at things from a homeowner's perspective, just doing things myself. One of the things we wanted to bring, especially in this talk, in this podcast, was all, how can this help somebody in as a carpenter or somebody that would be using it commercially, like they have a small business, what benefits would a beam saw have? And I think you've already touched base on some of them. But talk about if I was an owner of a business that did carpentry work or did woodwork, how would this give me some of the application? This would really benefit my organization. Yeah, just to go back a little bit. So this one probably wouldn't fall into the homeowner type saw. This saw is going to be four foot wide, and it's close to nine and a half foot long, and it weighs about £1500. So it's going to go like, into a manufacturing setting. A contractor manufactured homes have them for cutting those panels down. It's going to speed up your production. It's going to free up some operator, because you're not going to have to have multiple people handling one piece of goods. You got a bed big enough to support one sheet. One guy can load it, make the cut, and then unload it on the other side. What should I be looking for? What's most important that I should be looking at to make a decision to buy a beam saw? Well, number one, what are you going to be cutting? What's the thickness of the profile? What's the length of the profile? That's going to determine what size blade, what type of electronics. The next thing would be how much you're going to run it, how many hours a day. If it's just going to be a few cuts, maybe a manual machine is going to be ideal for you. You're not going to use it all the time in production where if you're going to be trying to to use it in a production deal and assembly, then you're going to want to speed up production. You're going to want to save some wear and tear on your operator. Then you're going to look for that power cross feed, and you're going to get a lot of the labor away from a person doing it. This can really increase productivity if you're really using it. This is going to really be a productivity improvement and a time saver is what it is. Then you'd absolutely not want to do a manual machine. It's a one to one chain crank. So when you crank that lever, every time you crank it, the carriage is going to move two and a half to three inches, I think it is. So if you're trying to cut 61 inches, you're going to be standing there cranking that thing quite a bit, and then you crank it to return at home also. So if you're doing a lot of cutting, you definitely want to look at the power cross feed. What are some of the questions you get from people that maybe they're new to this? What do you get from your customers? What do you hear about do you ever hear things like, why should I use it? Or you tell me. You tell me what number people want to know what it will cut. It's not so much a matter of what the saw can do. It's what kind of blade you're going to put on there. The saw really cut anything. We hand wind the motors here. We build our own electrical panels. So it's more the cutting tool that you put on the saw as to what the limitations of what you're going to be able to cut. There's people cutting foam. There's people cutting hardwoods. And then you put a different blade and a missed coolant, and now we're cutting aluminum extrusions, another blade, and we're cutting mild steel. The possibilities are it's kind of endless with it. It all really depends on the tooling. So this really does have a wide range of material. I understand why it's not a homeowner's unit. This has a wide range of materials that a business could actually use. I mean, like aluminum extrusions and things like that. You're talking siding and soffits and stuff like that. That kind of material. You can put custom cutters on it, and you could put like a molding in something that's 60 inches long. It really is endless what the thing can do. There's automotive manufacturers. Some of those guys have these saws. They use them in their model shops, cutting down model blocks, transmissions. They're cutting off the tail sections on a transmission casting. Okay, that I was not expecting. That's pretty heavy duty, then. Yeah, it's built for continuous duty, multiple shifts a day. You're going to want to shut it down for PM and maintenance, cleaning up the tracks and ways and making sure the roller head is still an adjustment and then fire it right back up and right back into the next shift. Why don't you talk about some of the obviously you mentioned that you make all the equipment yourself. I think that's an important thing is obviously you've designed this to work in that kind of an environment, touch base about the motor and things that you've done on that, that kind of stand out. Yeah. So we hand stack their laminations for the motor statter. We hand wind them, we bake them and insulate them here to 450 degrees. We have the rotors diecast, and now we used to do that all in house also. But we are having a hard time keeping up with the production list for how small of a diecasting operation we run. So the rotors are diecasted off site. They get brought in and we press the rotor shafts and we hand assemble the motors and test run them on a bench. And then they get put into the production schedule. And a guy hand builds this saw right here in Brit. We're our own electrical panel shop. So we build the electrical controls here. So we use foundries that are local close to us. Within a couple of hours of us. There's a metal shop that we use about 30 miles away. The powder coaters, there's one that's 10 miles away, one that's 30 miles away. Then all those parts come in here and we hand assemble them. Wow. This is one thing I try to bring up in every one of the podcasts. You are truly a US manufactured product. Yeah, 99.9%. I can't say with 100%. Some of those small electrical things we get, it's hard to say where those are sourced from, but it's as American made as we can do it. But the reason I bring that out is I really stress in a lot of the podcasts the importance of looking at American made products. And you actually hit on it right when you just said, we use this company just 30 miles away. We use this company. People don't realize it's not just your staff and your employees and money that is going to these families. It's all these other people that you're using, other US. Resources, build those parts to bring them in. So it starts expounding as to more American workers that can be able to work with those kind of things. Yeah, and that's why we do it. I mean, there's some parts we could get cheaper somewhere else, but these are vendors that we know and trust, and they're close to us. We're loyal to them and they're loyal to us. And it really makes it a lot easier to do this job and stay up with their production schedule. And you can rely on your vendors. What should I be looking for? For what kind of a blade, what kind of characteristics? You bet. Different types of materials. And I'll leave that you can explain that. You bet. So when you're cross cutting lumber, well, number one on a radial arm saw type, which is the beam saw, is another type of radial arm saw. So the motor is suspended over top of the product and it's cutting from the top side instead of down. So you want to use either a negative I'm sorry, a zero or a negative hook blade. Otherwise the blade will have a tendency to try to climb into the wood. So you can't have too aggressive of a blade on there. When you're cross cutting, you want fewer teeth with a larger cleanout. And depending on the material, you might use an ATB alternating top bevel grind on your teeth. Some people just have a wide carbide tip. It really just depends on the material you get into cutting non ferrous materials and it's a different type of tooth grind. The relief is a little bit narrower. You're not trying to remove as much material or build more heat in the blade. So cutting aluminum, you go to a non ferrous blade and you miscool that and it keeps the carbides cooler and get a lot longer life out of your blades that way. Let's talk about long life. And that kind of goes into the next area is maintenance. I'm big on that, on everything I own. I'm very strong about preventative maintenance, things like that. Walk me through what would you recommend if somebody came in it's the first time they bought a beam saw and you want to make sure you have a quality product. You want to make sure it lasts that way for years down the road. What do you tell people about maintenance? What should be maintenance and what should be the most important things that you do and just make it a part of your routine. Number one is getting it wired correctly. You got to have a supply wire and a breaker size large enough to fulfill the voltage and the amp current to the saw. It's hard to explain some of that, but sometimes it takes an electrical design degree to really understand it. But you got to have wire for the amount of feet that it's going to run to get to the machine to get the proper current there. If you starve that motor for power, that's when you run into problems with the motor. Number two is just keeping them clean honestly. So it works just the opposite of what some people would think machinery should be. You want to oil everything and keep it lubricated. Not on a wood cutting saw. You got to keep it clean. If it's oil, that's going to collect more dust and you're going to get premature wear on either the arm or the bearing guides or the bearings themselves. So number one is just clean and dry rag, maybe some denatured alcohol or brake cleaner, and just keep the ways clean where the bearings slide. That's the number one thing. Interesting. That makes sense, though, because the oil is going to trap the sawdust and the material, the removed material. And what happens is problems. Yes, the bearings are hardened and those ways necessarily aren't. So the bearings will wear out the ways that are machined into those arms prematurely and it costs you a lot of money to replace that. So the biggest thing is just keeping them clean and keeping them adjusted so you don't have slopping them, keep the tension tight on them. And if you're using it for a commercial application, it just makes sense because it'll give you the productivity, not just the life expectancy of the equipment, but the quality of the performance is going. To be the tolerances that you're trying to hold. Correct. You don't make just one beam saw, you make a variety, you make a range of beam saws. So maybe walk me through. What are the differences and why would somebody choose one over the other? You bet. So actually, they're all very similar. They're all in the same frame, the same column and post the same beam. I would say that it looks like the same motor, but we do a single phase version. So if you don't have three phase power, you could do a 5 HP single phase, but the largest blade we could put on that would be a 16 inch blade. Anything bigger than that is just too much for the windings inside that motor. So the main differences in them is just the guard, the size of the blade guard, where we put the fence when we're building the tabletop to keep the blade out of the material on startup. But as far as the four different models that we do, the only real difference on them is the blade guard itself and the braking of the motor. You get to the biggest one, the 22 and a half inch. Now that one don't have the electromechanical break, it's just an electronic brake in that one. What are voltage options? Anything? We will wire them. We have a transformer here, so we wire and sell motors to the Middle East. That's 380 volts, 50 Hz. Our motors can run on 50 or 60. We wind them for 208 volts, 230 volts, just depends on what you have. All you got to do is let us know what you have. We sell into Canada. So 575, 600 volts power. We wind saws for that or motors for that. Also, what percentage of people look at beam saws? And I'll ask you a personal opinion, what percentage do you think should be looking more at beam saws? Do you think it's something they're aware of it? Or do you think people don't see what a beam saw is capable of doing? There's some limitations to a beam saw. So you can't miter with a beam saw is the number one thing. So a lot of times when people call in here. They're not looking to just do one process on one material. So the capacity is great on the beam saw, but you are limited on some of its capabilities as far as types of cuts that you can make. We have looked at making it able to rip so you could bring that head out and pivot it and rip sheets down. But as of right now, we're not doing that. Right now it's just strictly a cross cut. You could tip the head and bevel so if you're trying to make 45 on the edge of a panel for doing like wall construction, we can do that. But unless you come up with a way to fixture inside the table and pivot your part, you couldn't make mitered cuts on a sheet good right now with our beam saw. But it sounds that if you do a lot of production, it's really good. If it's straight and flat, it's really good. Because it's more designed for capacity, is what it sounds like. Yeah, exactly right. That's why I always start the conversation when I talk to people about what are you looking to do with it. If you're looking for an all in one saw, trying to do multiple operations, probably going to lean you towards a radial arm saw just because it can do a lot more functionality wise. But if you're processing large parts, a lot of the radial arm saw can't handle that. So if you're just cross cutting large sheet goods or panels or a big fixture like cable tray we cut a lot of cable tray on a beam saw for construction in a building where they're hanging the utility wires and sewer underneath and tunnel systems. A lot of those trays are wider than what our radial arm saw can handle, so they end up cutting them on a beam saw. Do you notice any particular industry that buys beam saws more one over another or is it pretty much more application driven? You had to pick one injury. It'd be either manufactured homes or prefab panel stuff like those insulated core panels. Those are probably the two largest industries. But like a bedliner manufacturer, they'll get that roll of sheet good and they'll cut those to lengths and they run through their injection molded to do that. Some metal coil processors, anything wide. So I think the largest capacity on any radio arm saw right now is probably our 32 inches. That's the largest cross cut on a radial arm saw that I know of. Okay, so if you get past that, you're looking at a beam saw or a different type of cutting solution. So what are some of the latest developments or innovations over the past 20 years in beam saws? Number one would probably be the clamping systems that we do for them. We offer just a horizontal clamping where it's going to push that material towards your fence and just hold it from sliding away from the fence. And then we go up to a six clamp system and we set them on a proportioning valve so they close in a cycle or open in a cycle. So you'd press the material towards the fence and then forward, come from above and hold the material down so it's not fluttering. If you're trying to do real tight tolerance cuts, you want your material to be stable during the whole cut. You don't want it to move at all. So clamping is probably the number one thing holding the parts down. And to follow up on that, where do you see anything in the future going with beam saws? Anything you think coming down the road or any changes you think that you're going to see? Yeah, there's actually some more things we've been looking at doing in clamping to try to get it away from the so instead of coming from over top and holding down, trying to develop a way to hold it from the bottom so you wouldn't limit your height to cut. When you start adding that clamping, it gets in the way of the guarding and just a little bit cumbersome sometimes. So trying to kind of streamline the clamping system to free up the space above the work area. Are there any other innovations or things coming down the road that you see that are going to be the future for beam saws? Yeah, so we're looking at like a total enclosure for it. A lot of people want them fully automated. Once you do that, the machine has to be enclosed so nobody could reach in there while it's in its cutting process. So just enclosing it and a little bit better dust control out of it. Right now we put a dust shroud behind the blade as it's traveling to catch the chips off the bottom. And then underneath the table, we hook up four or five ports for dust collection to suck straight down from the tabletop. But we're looking at adding some other fine dust away from the fence. While you're doing the cut, give us. A little history about the beam saws that you make. When did they start making them and how have they changed over the years? You bet. So in 94 was the first beam saw that was built here. That was the type one, and that one ran through probably the early to mid 2000s when they switched to a bolt together frame. They used to be a solid welded frame. It was super rigid and kind of cumbersome to handle that four foot by nine foot platform all in one piece. So now they're bent and powder coated, and then we bolt it together frame. One of the things that's impressed me as we've talked in this podcast is you're an American manufacturer, you're American made products, and I'd like you to tell us a little bit about original saw. Give us a little background on original saw and kind of like that. This is what you really focus on. You don't make multiple different things. You focus really on cutting products. Correct. Yeah. So in 1990, Alan's dad, Robert bought the company and the rights to the radial arms saw. And we moved everything from Pennsylvania out here to Iowa. I think the first one rolled off the line in October. When I say off the line, I mean the floor here. They get hand built on the frame here on the floor. And then I think it was probably mid 2000 is when Allen landed a contract with one of the larger big box stores. We're a fixture in there, so if you go to a lumber department in one of these big box stores, they have one of our saws for cross cutting lumber. And we take pride in being the only American made radial arm saw that there is to that. I wasn't aware of that. I didn't realize you are the only American made radial armsaw. Yes, that's correct. We're the only ones left in America doing it. And hats off to you, because again, part of the whole message of this podcast is about American made products and American businesses. So I salute you. And that's why I really like to like when people mention that because I think it's important, because I think I'm one of those just my personal opinion. We need to support our own businesses within our country if we're going to survive, especially given the economic times we're in right now. Yeah. And if you called our service line to look for recommendations or if you're having a problem with equipment, you're going to talk to a human being when you call in here that's Monday from 08:00 A.m. Till 04:30 P.m.. I'd like you to talk about that as well because I think that's something else people need to know is that I've been to your website. You've got a lot of information, there a lot of videos. Tell us about how you support that. Like you said, you have customer service. You've got the website. Yeah, we got a marketing team that helped design the website and get everything launched. When we started selling Direct, it used to be strictly through distribution. Now we do a combination of distribution and direct sales. But there's two of us that are customer service and sales representatives for the original saw company.

It's 08:00 A.m. Central till 04: 23:49

30 P.m. And we try to help out with any bit of tech calls, any sales questions, recommendations on what you're going to be doing. Don't want to oversell you, but definitely don't want to undersell you either. We make sure you get the right tool for the job. We're going to put the link to your website in the show notes. But if you want to go ahead and say what your website is, and if you have a phone number people can call, that'd be great too. Yeah, it's www.originalsaw.com and the phone number is 641-84-3868. Give us a call. We'd love to talk to you. And on that note, I'm going to give you the last minute to kind of give me your final thoughts and how you want to yeah. Summarize everything you talked about. You bet. It's a family owned company. The president and owner, I mean, his wife is our marketing director. Their kids come in here and help package and put bolt kits together. His mom is my neighbor just down the street. It's a small town company there's, I think 21 of us. It's actually two companies now. We bought another little woodworking machine. We brought that company from New Hampshire out here to Iowa. So we're growing, but we still focused on what got us here and that's the radial arm saw right now. Dave, I can't thank you for not only answering our questions, but giving us a lot of insights not only into beam saws but into your company as well. I think that's really important and I hope that people listening will take the opportunity to go to your website or to be able to call you if they have questions on something like that. You bet. Anytime. It's my pleasure. Great having you on the podcast and thanks again. Yes. Thanks, Neil. Thank you for listening to our podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, we would ask you to subscribe to our channel or share this episode with a friend. We would also love to hear from you and your feedback and invite you to contact us via the email listed. In the show notes.