Wood’s@Work

Wood’s@Work
®
All In a Day’s Work
Michael Hurt
President
New Products For
More Wood’s @ Work
Success In 2003
In 2002 we introduced new products to
offer more opportunities to put “Wood’s
@ Work”. We added to our product portfolio
a broad line of gearmotor and gear
reducer products, and a new line of E-
traAC ® EF1 Microdrives. These new products
combined with our existing AC drive
products and broad mechanical product
offerings of belted drives and couplings
should offer many more opportunities to
put “Wood’s@Work.”
As we leave 2002 and move into 2003, I think it’s
worth reflecting on the past 12 months. From a
revenue growth perspective, 2002 was a disappointing
year for TB Wood’s. We continued to see
soft demand due to the sluggish industrial economy.
However, we remained committed to our
business strategy consisting of these key elements:
1. Aggressively develop new and differentiated
products and services
2. Serving our selective distribution partners with
excellence
3. Drive for continuous cost reductions and efficiency
improvements
4. Make accretive strategic acquisitions
Continuing our tradition of bringing you new and
differentiated products, we remained committed to
Our drive
churns through
a blizzard of
gizzards
Chickens are peculiar birds. In order to
better digest their food, they eat small pebbles.These
pebbles wind up in the chicken’s
gizzard. Grinding up the pebbles with the
gizzards for use in animal food can dull the
blades of the gizzard harvester, but more
importantly, in the manufacture of humangrade
food, the ground pebbles are not
acceptable by either the food processor or
the FDA.
“TB Wood’s chicken and poultry manufacturing
clients use the NSF Series ® WF2 controller
to sense the load, pause when the
load indicates pebbles, then change direction
so they can be
removed,” explains
Curtis Litten,
applications
manager for TB
Wood’s. “After the
pause to remove the objects, the program
restarts and resets to continue the process.”
The key to the TB Wood’s gizzard harvester
solution is a standard program sequencer
feature in WF2 software.
A Programmable Logic Control (PLC) miniprogram
in the WF2 software allows the
operator to set a sequence of timed operational
steps.
For example, in step one in the gizzard harvester
program, the drive is set at a desired
production speed. If a stone or pebble is
sensed, the drive shifts to the second step in
the sequence and stops.
In the third step, Litten says, the drive is
reversed so the operator can spot the foreign
matter and remove it.
Finally, after pausing the assigned length of
time, the program cycles to the beginning
of the sequence and restarts the production
process.The sequence program runs continuously
throughout the production day.
“Because TB Wood’s builds the sequencing
program right into the drive it doesn’t need
to be added on as an extra piece of equipment.This
is a major difference between the
Wood’s design and competitive products. It
means we can save our clients 15% to 20%
over the cost of competitive systems,”
Litten states.
As the saying goes, that ain’t chicken feed.
Continued on inside back cover.
W i n t e r 2 0 0 3 • V o l u m e 6