With the car you’re driving today, whether it is anything from a Toyota to a Tesla, there’s a good chance your seats were assembled on conveyors manufactured by Tekno Inc., a company based in the small Kentucky town of Cave City, population 2,360. A critical piece of technology that goes into making the conveyors is an upcut cold saw from Scotchman Industries.
Like the success stories behind many of today’s flourishing companies, Tekno began in a garage. In 1988, it was a one-employee company – Tom Clopton, an engineer who at that time was working out of a garage 12 miles north of Cave City in an even smaller town called Munfordville. Tom has since passed, but his son, Trevor Clopton, has taken the helm, keeping the company in the community, in the family and maintaining a customer-centric mission.
Tekno didn’t stay small for long, as it was recognized in the mid-1990s as one of Inc. 500’s “fastest growing companies” three years running, and Tom’s entrepreneurship didn’t go unnoticed – he was named 1996’s manufacturing entrepreneur of the year by Business First of Greater Louisville.
After a handful of expansions over its 36-year history, Tekno today has a total of 125,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing space, as well as 50 full-time engineering and manufacturing professionals. To date, the team at Tekno is responsible for 13 patents and continues to introduce highly customized products and systems for local customers, as well as Fortune 500 corporations and international conglomerates.
Take a seat
Dave Thoma, director of manufacturing at Tekno, says for the past 20 years, the company’s focus has been on producing conveyor systems for the automobile industry. The conveyors, which are comprised mostly of aluminum extrusion, are used in automative plants throughout the United States, specifically for seat assembly. These plants include one in nearby Louisville where Corvette seats are assembled, a BMW plant in South Carolina, a Mercedes plant in Alabama and a Toyota plant in Texas, among others.
“The vast majority of North American car companies finish building their seats on Tekno conveyors,” Thoma says. “We’re pretty confident Tekno conveyors have (helped build) more than half a billion seats in the last 20 years.”
The team of engineers on staff at Tekno is vital, as automakers send Tekno layouts on how they want to build their seats and Tekno “specs out the conveyor system that we feel will do the best job for them,” Thoma says. “All those manufacturers build seats differently.”
Upgrading machinery
While Tekno relies on its highly skilled team of engineers and manufacturing professionals, the machines used in the shop are equally as important. Given the amount of aluminum that needs to be cut down to size and then linked together, accuracy matters.
“Cut quality is critical for us,” Thoma says. “We need those cuts to be true, straight and clean. Engineering spec drawings – they’re down to two decimal places, so we want to hold to that, especially when we build conveyors because we have to link our beams together.”
For two decades, Tekno relied on a manual saw, but the saw began to show limitations.
“It was getting old,” Thoma says. “It wasn’t cutting very straight and we were having to work on it a lot. It was time to replace it.”
Thoma received an invitation from a customer to see one of their saws in action – an upcut cold saw from Scotchman Industries. The price was competitive, he says, but a bigger perk was that the saw had something on his wish list – a servo-positioning cutting table, something the old saw lacked.
Thoma and Tenko’s manufacturing supervisor, Larry Cline, did their research, watched videos and developed a relationship with Scotchman and the local distributor before placing an order for the Scotchman SUP-600 NF (non-ferrous) with a 22-ft. automatic feed system.
Critical cutting
The SUP-600 NF is a large-capacity, mitering upcut circular cold saw. It features a 24-in. blade with 132 carbide teeth, making it fully capable of producing fast, burr-free cuts. One of the first things Thoma and Cline noticed was that it cut faster, cleaner and more accurately than the previous saw.
“This is the first saw Tekno has invested in in 25 years and it is the most critical part of our operation,” Thoma says. “If we don’t cut extrusion, we don’t build anything.”
Jon DeAmond, cold saw specialist at Scotchman Industries, says part of the reason the SUP series of saws is capable of achieving such tight tolerances is because the saw head, advance mechanism and miter table are bolted together as one solid unit.
“With the minimum necessary moving parts between the saw blade and table,” DeAmond explains, “pinpoint accuracy is inherent. We use large, precision, industrial bearings on the blade shaft and advance mechanism. This serves to reduce wear and maintain accuracy over the long life of the machine. Like the topping on a cake, our highly versatile clamping mechanism atop the miter table ensures parts of any shape may be firmly secured so movement cannot occur during the cutting process.”
Cline says Tekno’s saw operator had no problem picking up all the SUP-600’s capabilities, and a secondary materials employee has also become up to speed on the saw’s operation.
“We had two days of full training,” Cline says. “By the end of the second day we were running comfortably.”
DeAmond says ease of use is essential for cutting equipment on shop floors today.
“Drawing from our long history of tool production,” he says, “much thought has been put into our user interface to ensure it is as streamlined as possible. Intuitive machines like Scotchman’s SUP-600 come with a number of benefits.”
The benefits, DeAmond says, include increased safety via reduced distraction, reduced operator fatigue, greater output, reduced waste from operator error and “better maintenance from a team that likes and takes pride in its equipment.”
