Tanglewood Conservatories Blog – Alan Stein's Writings about Custom Conservatory Design and More

Today, I leave Munich Germany for my return trip to the US. This has been a really great experience – in no small part because of the skill and experience of our trip coordinator Lorraine.

As she has frequently pointed out, her successful trip should combine one third educational experience – learning about trends in the woodworking industry, seeing how other industry professionals in Europe work and learning about some of the equipment that is available to us, one third “camaraderie”, as she calls it, by which she refers to the interaction between all of us participants and the direct and indirect benefits we all gain from rubbing elbows for a week with industry colleagues. And one third, the culture – the opportunity to experience another country, another culture and to visit interesting places, expand our view of the world and our understanding of how it got to be as it is.

I’d also emphasize a fourth key element to the success of a trip like this – to have some one else, who really knows what they are doing, set it all up for you! This was particularly appreciated.

I haven’t mentioned the Homag groups’ line of products much. I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical of participating in an organized trip sponsored by any one particular supplier as I thought the presentation would be too heavily slanted.

While we did get quite an education about the Homag Group and its products, I was impressed by the way our Homag hosts (and beer drinking buddies) tried to present a very broad range of solutions to common industry issues by using real world examples. These were demonstrated by the shops and factories we visited, not all of which were filled with Homag equipment.

For example, we witnessed first hand how a small, a mid-sized and then a very large company produced windows in Germany. We got to see the decisions each company had made about how to go about making their products, what production steps they used and what technology they were using.

This was a real eye opener for me. In some cases, I saw what were clearly better methods of production than Tanglewood currently uses and in other cases, I left thinking that we were actually doing certain steps more efficiently than what I had seen.

The companies that we visited were almost all extremely open about sharing what they were doing and answering all of our questions. It was very obvious that they all had an extremely positive relationship with Homag.

At least one participant, when asked about something unexpected that happened to them on the trip, remarked that they hadn’t expected to leave thinking they needed a new CNC machine!

But now I’m glad to return home. Spring was just barely evident in many of the areas we passed through and in some places there was still plenty of snow on the ground. We even drove through a few snow squalls on the way. I wasn’t expecting that.

Alan

I’ve been spending many hours looking out of the humongous front window of this fantastic futuristic looking tour bus. From my seat right at the front of the bus high on the upper level, I feel as though I’m on the bridge of a Star Cruiser as we pass through the many lovely small villages and towns in Bavaria and the surrounding Black Forest region. The factories that we have been visiting are spread out, many in tiny towns often nestled among a small residential cluster of homes!

We’ve visited small woodworking shops that produce a variety of items from wood windows to conservatories to furniture to cabinets using only a few machines and a small workforce. We’ve also visited several major manufacturing facilities with hundreds of workers. We’ve also spent time at the Homag plant and the Fritz plant near Stuttgart.

Interestingly enough, the machine manufacturing plants were some of the most useful visits for me. Because Homag and Friz produce a large percentage of their machines on a custom basis, their engineering design to manufacturing processes, though much larger in scale than Tanglewood Conservatories, had some real similarities.

I was intrigued to see them dealing with some of the same issues that are also on our plate and in fact I thought we had made more progress in some areas.

Last night there was dinner and great German beer at the famous Hofbrauhaus in Munich which is without a doubt, the largest beer hall I have ever seen! Three levels of raucous eating and drinking filled with many foreign tourists.

One of the facets of the plants that we visited which has impressed me was their regard for energy conservation. Costs of fuel are of course substantially higher here than in the US so they are forced to be more conservation minded. Most of the facilities made extensive use of day lighting- the use of large skylights and windows to illuminate their interior spaces. There was one building we went into that needed no artificial lights at all even though it was a fairly cloudy day. We can certainly learn a lesson from them on this subject.

Alan