There’s no point calling Taylor Lane Timber Frame Ltd and requesting a catalogue of standard house kits, because there isn’t one.
“We believe we’re the largest bespoke timber frame company in the UK,” said sales director Barrie Lane. “Most of our work comes from the private sector, from self-builders to developers of all sizes. If a developer wants all 100 houses on a site to be of different designs, it’s no problem.
“Demand for commercial buildings is also growing rapidly, as a result of advances in timber frame technology – particularly the ability to offer multi-storey structures – and because of the increasing focus on rapid, energy-efficient, sustainable construction.”
Lane said his company’s creativity comes into play when it provides the engineered solution to an architect’s design.
“We have to create from what we are given. Some are weird and wonderful designs and it is our job to make them work both structurally and technically. Nothing has been unachievable so far – we have always managed to find a solution – and I feel we can cope with anything the architects throw at us, within the boundaries of common sense.”
Established in 1982 in an old bakery from which Colin Taylor and Barrie Lane – both with long experience of timber frame construction – offered a design, fabrication and erection
service for local private customers, the company now employs 100 and operates three factories. In addition to the 20,000ft2 factory that produces the timber frame structures, another fabricates the steel components needed for construction, and the third manufactures roof trusses and cassette floor systems.
The latter were first made for a one-off project of half-a-dozen houses, but have since become a key part of Taylor Lane's offering.
“Growth in cassette floor production has been market-led, due to the benefits of faster site work, improved health and safety and reduced labour costs,” said Lane. “All of our commercial projects use them and although a lot of domestic buildings still have open floors there is increasing interest in moving to cassette systems.”
In-house production of steel components, trusses and floor systems supports Taylor Lane’s design flexibility and helps it to maintain lead times of around eight weeks, despite rising demand. Order books tend to be full for several months ahead, and longer-term contracts – such as the supply of nursing homes (from 50-200-plus bedrooms) at a rate of one a month – stretch beyond that. á
Ü One of the latter the company worked on was the Ledbury Health Facility. Due to the scale of the 3,640m2 building, which has three storeys and a 5m tower from the eaves, Taylor Lane incorporated new methods of working and innovative technical design solutions. These include carefully phased production to allow for smooth and progressive construction on site, and special tolerances for the exceptionally long panel runs.
Most of Taylor Lane’s projects begin with customers supplying architectural drawings, from which structural design plans are produced by the company's 16-strong design team. The company undertakes the “fully engineered package”, including truss design and manufacture, with additional services such as full plot scheduling for larger sites and erection services for customers of all types and sizes.
To keep ahead of demand, Taylor Lane has a pretty constant capital investment programme. Its plant was initially geared to traditional manual production methods, equipped with table saws, cross-cuts and nail guns. This has since been complemented with more advanced machinery – including a GAMA angle-cutting saw from Avola.
"We'd been looking for more sophisticated cross-cutting facilities to cut angles accurately and quickly and Avola’s UK agent [Woodtech Machinery] took us to see a GAMA installation," said technical director Colin Taylor. "It allows us to cut anything that needs an angle – including gable and truss components and the swivelling head is adjustable to any degree to a tolerance of 0.1 degree. Changing the angle of cut takes a few seconds compared with 10 minutes on our previous manual swivel head cross-cut.”
Despite the productivity boost the new equipment provided, by the middle of last year Taylor Lane was running double shifts to keep up. Further investment was needed. Cross-cutting timber frame panel components – studs, rails, noggins – is a major part of the production process, so it made sense to look at the latest machinery developments in this area.
"We'd seen high-speed optimising cross-cuts made by Paul, which is also represented by Woodtech, at various mills and been very impressed,” said Taylor. “A group of us visited their factory in Germany, which confirmed that the speed and accuracy of the saw would give us higher productivity and quality – and the fact that it's a CNC machine offered additional opportunities to improve efficiency."
Installed last October, the Paul 11E was the first in the UK with the Linux operating system running on the PC controller. To use the full CNC capability of the saw, Taylor Lane installed a high-speed broadband network linking the factory with the design and production offices, enabling cutting lists to be downloaded direct to the machine.
Operators received three days' training in Germany prior to delivery, so the new saw could be used productively as soon as it was commissioned.
Once the cutting list has been downloaded, timber is loaded onto the infeed table of the 11E. The lists comprise components of varying sizes – all 38mm thick CLS in widths from 63-140mm and lengths from 180mm (noggins) up to 6m. The timber is fed automatically to the sawblade, with the optimising software ensuring maximum yield.
"It's doubled productivity compared with our older saws,” said production manager Mike Price. "Set-up times are minimal and the risk of human error is eliminated since there's no need to input data or set stops manually.
"It takes just 15 minutes to cut 700 studs and has automated a key part of our production process. With one operator loading and cutting components of various sizes for a timber frame kit, we need three people off-loading the material just to keep up – but we bought the saw ready configured to accept an automatic destacker and are considering this next."
