If you’re planning to purchase any used woodworking equipment or machinery from any of the many sources available on the used machinery market, there are several important points to carefully examine on the machine before you make the purchase. Keep in mind: If there is any way we can assist you in evaluating your existing […]
Consistent, invisible glue joints are the whole point of tapeless veneer splicing — and when something goes wrong, the defect usually shows up immediately and costs material. Most splicer issues come down to one of a handful of root causes: pressure bar and heater bar adjustment, feed chain wear, jointer condition, glue application, or moisture […]
When a straight line rip saw stops producing consistent cuts, the root cause is almost always mechanical — worn feed chains, misaligned pressure bars, deflected blades, or a stock guide that’s drifted out of adjustment. This guide walks through the four most common symptoms we see on rip saws in the field, with a diagnostic […]
A well-maintained wood throughfeed moulder will produce consistent, glue-line quality finishes for decades. A poorly maintained one will cost you in burned parts, chatter marks, snipes, and eventually unplanned downtime as spindle bearings fail or drive components wear out prematurely. The two biggest drivers of long-term reliability on any through feed moulder are consistent lubrication […]
Consistent veneer splicing quality depends on two things working together: a properly adjusted splicer, and a maintenance program that keeps every moving part running clean and true. Missed lubrication intervals show up quickly as increased chain wear, feed roll drag, and heater bar misalignment — all of which translate into overlapping joints, mismatches, and burning […]
A disciplined straight line rip saw maintenance program is what separates a saw that delivers glue-line quality cuts for thirty years from one that’s burning material and producing un-square edges inside of three. Every defect we cover in our straight line rip troubleshooting guide — erratic cuts, no glue joint, edges not square, wedges — […]
A through feed moulder is one of the most complex machines in a rough mill — each spindle, cutterhead, guide, feedroll, and holddown has to work in precise coordination to produce a clean, square, chatter-free finish. When something goes wrong, the symptom usually looks like a finish defect, a feeding issue, or a snipe on […]
This video demonstrates the potential dangers when anti-kickback safety features are disabled, missing, or not properly maintained. You’ll see a vivid illustration of the serious impact kickback can have on a rip saw. Mereen-Johnson has developed a controlled method to simulate kickbacks on any rip saw, helping to underscore the importance of these critical safety […]
Consistent rip saw maintenance is what keeps a Mereen-Johnson Select Rip Saw producing glue-line quality cuts and meeting its full 24-hour-shift duty cycle. On a moving-blade Select Rip Saw — with multiple shifting saw assemblies, an air-actuated arbor brake, anti-kickback finger systems, and integrated laser alignment — that maintenance program touches more components than on […]
Even a well-built rip saw needs periodic rip saw calibration to stay within factory tolerances. Wear accumulates, lasers drift slightly, chain race tracking shifts under heavy production, and small alignment changes start showing up as visible cut quality issues — un-square edges, no glue joint, snipe, wedging. Calibration is what brings the machine back to […]
The Mereen-Johnson Rip Navigator is a complete rip optimization system — the Scout Deck scans each board for width, length, and crook, the Tracker conveys boards from hopper through to the saw, and the Rip Navigator software and controls turn scanning data into optimized cut decisions. The system delivers up to 20 boards per minute […]
The Rip Navigator 4.0 software is the brain of a Mereen-Johnson automated rip saw line. It takes scanning data from the Scout Deck — board width, length, and crook for every piece of lumber that enters the system — and turns it into optimized cut decisions that the rip saw executes in real time. Knowing […]