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Waterbury-In this small professional company, 25 people and 6 robots work together to quietly produce 12,000 carbide saw blades every year.

Super Thin Saws manufactures and grinds circular saw blades used by manufacturers of wood floors, furniture, kitchen cabinets, doors and windows. The fact that the blade is thinner than industry standards (as low as 0.031 inches) is attractive to large manufacturers who want to make as much wood as possible into products instead of sawdust.

The cost of Super Thin Saws products is four to five times that of thicker competitors, but for companies that cut large amounts of wood, the extra cost is worth it. Founder John Schultz said he worked with two partners Owning the company, they are former long-term employees Rob Bisby and Dave Strom.

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Schultz of a large wood products company said: "They might pass 50 million boards through the saw blade, and they spend $20,000 on the saw blade each year." "So if we triple or quadruple the cost of the saw blade , And even worse, so long as we save them a lot of wood costs, it doesn’t matter."

The origin of Super Thin Saws can be traced back to the 1970s, when Schultz, who was a ski instructor at the time, and his wife founded the current Green Mountain Valley School. Both work at Bisbee's Hardware in Whitesfield to help make ends meet. The shop was thriving in grinding saw blades, and the couple saw an opportunity.

Schultz, who holds a degree in abstract mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has always regarded skiing as one of his top tasks. Since it is necessary to continue living near the ski resort near Mad River Valley, he sees the saw blade as a good opportunity in the moonlight.

Over the years, the company has continued to grow, and its wealth has fluctuated with the development of the real estate economy. In 2008, Schultz and his then partners sold the business to a Florida company, and in 2011 they bought it back together with Bisbee and Strom.

Now Super Thin Saws occupies the former industrial building of Ben & Jerry. The company purchases laser-cut, heat-treated hacksaw blades from two suppliers, then puts the saw blades into a series of processes to meet customer specifications, welding very precise shaped carbide tips to the teeth.

The company also provides sharp saw blade business for professional manufacturers. Many saw blade customers are large companies in Quebec, Maine, and New York, although Super Thin Saws has several Vermont customers, including Appalachian Flooring, a Quebec-based company with a manufacturing facility in Troy.

Schultz said that for smaller equipment, such as most Vermont companies, the cost of transportation or trucking for sharpening the knife is not worth it.

"The small single and five-person stores in Vermont produce amazing products," Schultz said. "But the service they need is cheaper than the service we provide. If the transportation is free, it makes more sense. But it's only worth picking up blades in Maine, Quebec and New York, because what we picked up is not a blade. , But 40."

The advantage of Super Thin Saws lies in the rigidity built into the thin blade. The technology used by Schultz was created in the 1950s by Charles Berolzheimer, then the owner of California Cedar Products, who wanted to make thinner blades to improve efficiency, Schultz said. 

"He likes wood and thinks you shouldn't waste it," he said.

Berolzheimer works with local sawn timber manufacturers and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and they use mathematical models to analyze the thickness of the saw blade. Schultz said the researchers held seminars on the product but never commercialized it.

Schultz adopted this technology in the late 1980s. He said that the creators have held seminars on thin saw blades, looking for people who can commercialize this process, but because the market is too small, this technology has not attracted the interest of large saw blade companies.

"We started to get involved," he said. "In most cases, almost all the engineering we need to do has been completed, just turn it down so that it can run on a real-world machine worth $250,000, rather than a customized million-dollar machine. "

Schultz and his wife also ran a ski lodge in Moretown at the time, and they changed the name of the company from Schultz Tool Sharp to Ultra Thin Saw.

Most of the company's customers are in the United States, but they also have relationships in Japan, Europe, South America, Australia, and China. The company is the 2014 Vermont Exporter of the U.S. Small Business Administration.

"We will not actively look for customers in China," Schultz said. "But if they find us, we won't refuse them."

It is a complex mechanical task to make a saw blade that does not vibrate or vibrate when rotating (which can cause uneven cutting). Defects in the wood and slight misalignment of the machine itself can cause lateral forces on the saw blade.

It's not just the stiffness of the circular blade that matters.

"It's really important to have the correct teeth installed," Schultz said. "If the customer is cutting maple wood with a moisture content of 8% to 10%, you can customize and customize the angle. Or we will say,'You can consider using a different blade for that oak tree.'"

This is very precise work. However, the factory floor of Super Thin Saws looks more like a mechanical workshop than a laboratory. The work of robots in steel cages is limited to chores like picking up blades and moving them from one place to another.

"If we give it to someone as a job, they will resign within a month and a half," Schultz pointed out. "We haven't even considered using robots for serious work."

The thinnest blade starts from one-eighth of an inch closer to the inside and becomes thinner to half of the cutting teeth, as thin as 0.031 inches, where the carbide tip is connected with silver solder. Some tips are made of materials such as polycrystalline diamond or ceramic/carbide mixtures.

The company's largest saw blade diameter is about 32 inches; 99% of the company's saws are 25 inches or less. Super Thin Saws limited its sharpening work to industrial saw blades and sent its hardware store-type saw blades to a company called Sharpening Shed in Newport, which came once a week.

Super Thin Saws collaborated with the Vermont Manufacturing Expansion Center (VMEC) to learn value stream mapping, which is a system similar to just-in-time processes that can improve the efficiency of the manufacturing floor. In the case of ultra-thin saws, this means coordinating the schedule so that the blade does not take 10 days to complete the necessary sharpening steps, which may also take 5 days.

"It's very expensive, but it's worth it," Schultz said of the VEMC training. "They did a great job." The cost was covered by a $40,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Vermont Training Program in October.

For humans, manufacturing runs in shifts for 10 or 11 hours a day; for robots, it is 24 hours a day.

Like many Vermont manufacturers, Schultz said it was not easy to find workers. There are only two women in the company.

"We let women apply to work here, but they don't seem to like it and stay," said Schultz, who let workers choose their working hours as long as they maintain the same schedule. He said one of the women and some men chose to help them manage the childcare schedule.

"Long before it became the only way to attract employees, we tried to make it a good place to work," he said.

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Anne Wallace Allen is a business reporter for VTDiger. Anne worked for the Associated Press in Montpellier from 1994 to 2004, and recently edited the Idaho Business Review.

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