A Brilliant Invention
In my early corporate days at Thomasville Furniture, I was given the opportunity to try many things to improve the performance and quality of the operation. This story isn’t about me, but another engineer, who came up with something so creative, he saved the company millions of dollars and improved quality of the product for our customers.
We used many types of wood to create the fancy veneer tops of tables, cabinets, drawer fronts, and other parts of the furniture. The most expensive wood we used was burled walnut. It’s wood that has many swirls in it and multiple knots. Because of this, it’s prone to damage easily, and much of it has defects and cracks.
Some of the cracks could be “filled” using tape. This tape, when applied, would add moisture to the wood, causing it to grow and actually join one cracked side with another. After gluing and pressing onto a wooden core, the tape was sanded off and most of the time, the crack would be invisible to the eye.
Some of the defects couldn’t be repaired using tape. Because of this, full sections of the burled walnut veneer would have to be removed, leaving very little usable material. Our yield numbers were quite low, and even though we were making money on furniture with burled walnut veneer, we knew there was huge opportunity to reduce scrap and improve our profitability.
Jack, a mechanical engineer, thought there might be an answer, based on our ability to bring cracks together with tape and moisture. He wondered what would happen if defects could be cut out and replaced with non-defective material, and taped in place before pressing. Some of the operators were using this technique by hand with mixed results.
Jack realized doing this by hand was challenging, as the cut-out defect had to be the same size as the replacement material. Our most experienced operators could get pretty close, but less-experienced operators weren’t successful.
Jack built a small punch press in our maintenance shop and then tried different shaped punches to see if the defects could be hidden with tape and pressing. He started with a few basic shapes: square, rectangle, and circle. These shapes could cut out the defect cleanly and then create the replacement of the same size. When the new material was applied, taped, pressed, and sanded, you could “see” the line between the insert and the original hole. We weren’t sure why, but Jack had an idea. What if he created a random shape the naked eye wasn’t used to?
After a number of experiments, he came up with a shape that looked like a bumpy potato. We had all sorts of funny names for it, some I can repeat, others I can’t. My favorite was the “Doody Punch”! We stopped making fun of his idea when he showed us the results and challenged us to find the original defect. We couldn’t!
After showing his invention to the quality control director and other leadership, he got approval to implement his solution in the veneer plant. He created a variety of sizes for the Doody Punch and from then on, we were able to salvage almost every square inch of burled walnut veneer. Jack went on to invent many more devices and solutions for our manufacturing operations. This is the one that inspired me the most in my early problem-solving efforts.