This is part of a project that I was in charge of, I was in charge of the planer department length conversion.  Originally a star wheel end trimmer.  We converted it into a clamp fed lug trimmer.  This was part of a larger length conversion throughout the plant.  We built 90 percent of what you see in house.

This is a heavily modified Newman Planer in-feed. We did the initial design with help from Briggs Machine who eventually built it.  Designing this was a fun project.  Turned out to work pretty nice.  If you are familiar with older Newman planers, you'll understand.

Part of the feed table project was redesigning the air system.  We have 3 cylinders that are dual stage, each stage runs at a different pressures going up and down.  Originally there was 3 air valves, miles of hose and extra parts.  This was my design solution.  It all fits nicely on the wall and does the same thing with half the parts.  Using 2 valves running external pilot and a manifold.

TECHNOLOGY PROJECTS

One of Gizmo Computer Solutions Custom Built computers running RS View 32 HMI program.  We have done many of these high quality workstations for this kind of application.

Custom Built HMI machine for a harsh environment application.  This is basically a pc built into a Hoffman box with a touch screen and filtered air.  This box was installed on the production floor in the planer department of a sawmill.

My servers.  These servers power all operations of a sawmill including Optimization, Automated Reporting, Programming Terminals, File Shares, Gateway, Proxy, E-mail, Routing and Internal Web serving.  I setup and maintain this controls network, servers and workstations.

A custom built remote monitoring system.  This was built for my LLTemp, temperature monitoring project.  I deployed several of these on industrial equipment to monitor bearing and motor temperatures.  This wireless unit collects the temps from our custom sensors and sends the data wireless to the web server.

Mandriva Linux 2007 Server hits 1 year uptime mark on 11-13-08.   This server is a file and application server for the controls network in the plant.  It also runs a custom data collection script that goes out across the network and collect data from HMI, PLC, and PC's for automated plant floor reporting.  Custom Scripting done by gizmocomputers.net

Mandriva Linux 2007 Server hits 2 year uptime mark.  Now 2 full years of un-interrupted run time.  Isn't Linux a wonderful thing.  Build it, Run it, and forget it.  Always there, always up and available.  Can't beat the stability of Linux.

New Edger Scanning system which replaced an old Coe DTEC.  This project involved replacing all lasers, cameras and computer hardware.  New top and bottom beams were built for the new hardware.  The old scan heads were replaced with Dynavision LMI

Here you can see the old computer system , and the new computer system on the right.  Parts were no longer available for the old system, making this upgrade a must.  This upgrade resulted in 2x better scan accuracy, and 3x faster scan speed.  New servers are running Asus motherboards, dual quad core Intel processors, 4 gb Kingston DDR2 800 memory, and Western Digital HD in RAID.  We chose MPM Engineering for the Optimization software for this project.

JUST FOR FUN

Mandriva and Virtual Box running WinXP on my Laptop.  Good for those win apps that you just can't live without, ie. Streets & Trips.