A lathe monitoring system has been developed and successfully tried in a mill. The system can measure the position, the hydraulic driving pressure and contact pressure of the backup rolls, the position and the hydraulic driving pressure of the roller bar, the position and contact pressure of the knife carriage against the peeler block and the driving torque of the spindle motor. Some of the monitored data points required additional sensors which were then connected to and then downloaded directly from the lathe controller, i.e., PLC and VME. The results showed that the lathe parameters vary significantly with time and knife position. The backup roll offsets control the lathe performance and peeling quality, particularly spin-out rate and veneer thickness variation. The best results seemed to come from the combination of tighter outer offset and looser inner offset.
Further work is needed to fine tune the software program for user-friendly data analyses. More mill tests are required to understand the interactions between the backup rolls, the roller bar, the knife and the block.