Oikos, translated from Greek, means an inhabited house or as we use the word in English, a home. It is also the name of an Italian model of a CNC machine designed to cut timber. Our Oikos will then fulfill its meaning or origin cutting the timber frames and glulam homes for our Oregon shop. Sure, it will cut commercial buildings too, in fact we’re pretty excited to be able to offer more to our commercial designers and builders given the machine’s ability to cut 12" x 48" in cross-section and 60' in length. But let’s just for a moment consider the beauty of a machine named home creating homes.
Name is certainly not the reason we chose the Oikos X for the NEWBeamery in McMinnville, though it is poetic. “The Oikos X is a six-axis robotic arm style CNC machine.” said Kelsey Boyer Timber Frame Engineer for our West Coast team. “This significantly differs from what we’ve typically operated with, which is more of an assembly line style of CNC machine where there is an all-in-line variety of tools and the machine grabs the beam and brings the beam to the tool. This CNC machine brings the arm with multiple tools to the timber and moves around the timber.”
“We looked at three separate machines,” continues Kelsey. “And we ranked each machine in a series of categories. As we worked through this decision matrix, and looked at the rankings of the categories that we value highly, the Oikos was ranked above the other two competitors.”
After making the decision, Kelsey and lead timber framer Darren Watson traveled to Italy to spend time actually running some of our joinery through an Oikos X that is nearly identical to the one that would be ours. Then we worked with a company to create some customized tools for our arm, so that we could use the Oikos more. This makes our machine even more personalized to the way we cut frames.
Upon return to the states, an order was placed and then we…waited. This June, arriving in three truckloads and unloaded by a specialized team and heavy-duty equipment (turns out the Oikos is heavy, the main machining compartment is 10 tons) out CNC arrived in Mac. Turns out installing an Oikos is not like putting together a Billy bookshelf from Ikea.
“Installing a piece of CNC machinery like this is always a challenge – logistically and technically,” explained Kelsey. “The tolerances that are allowed are very fine with pieces needing to line up as perfectly as possible. SCM (makers of Oikos) include installation, an on-site subject matter expert, and various test runs when you purchase the machine.”
Beyond the training, testing, training, testing, and more training (did we also mention testing?) the west coast team has been brainstorming what to do with the additional bandwidth and capabilities the Oikos will provide.
“Having the Oikos has been eye-opening in excitement and in new ways of thinking,” says Kelsey. “We’re used to a machine that works in 4-axis of movement but now we have six. Those two extra axis provide a unique challenge to ensuring the programing of our drawings is correct. At the same time we’re finding that a piece of timber that would have had a run-time of an hour and half on the old machine has a a run-time of 20 minutes on the Oikos. It’s much more efficient.”
What the Oikos X also adds to the team’s arsenal is an ability to do more on the machine than before, which means that our human labor is spent where it is most useful – doing the skilled hand-craft, problem solving, and raising.
“This machine completes over 50% more of the joinery on the machine than our previous CNC,” Kelsey continues. “Our team will move from a lot of the mundane work, like tapping out the rounded corners of a housing, to more skilled parts of timber framing. There still will be joinery the machine can’t do, because of the nature of our pretty complex frame designs. The team will still be doing that joinery by hand.”
The Oikos is an opening to efficiency and better use of human labor. But is also is a door to new capabilities. We can machine larger timbers. We can run locally produced CLT panels. We can work with more hidden/embedded steel thanks to some of our custom tooling. And it opens up the potential for significantly more glulam work, especially with commercial construction and multi-unit housing.
“What I’m most energized by is the ability for us to do more with glulams. We’ve always incorporated them when they’re required in a project,” said CEO and Founder Jonathan Orpin. “But the Oikos capability to do such large timber means that we can do more glulam, quicker, easier, and larger. The prospects of being able to really take two of the entities of mass timber, timber frame and glulam, and combine them in our typical high-level of craft and known attention to detail style is going to make for some really beautiful work. I hope our partners are ready to push the limits of glulam and timber with us.”
“Oh! The Oikos also has a pen,” shares Kelsey. “And our pen has the ability to draw out our logo.” I had to add, “I mean, if an expensive, technical machine doesn’t have a pen or a stylus it’s no good. Start over.” “Exactly.” Kelsey laughingly agreed.
