"Pergo, the original laminate flooring from Sweden" is manufactured in North Carolina as well, and earlier this fall Bob and the Home Again crew traveled there to check out Pergo's extraordinary, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility for themselves.
Bob met first with Perstorp CEO, Lars von Kantzow, who shared a bit of Pergo's century old history with him before turning him over to Mike Auer for a tour of the clean, sunny, and amazingly quiet 110,00 square foot plant.
One salient feature is that the entire manufacturing process is automated—utilizing everying from simple robotics to computer guided material handling carts. Human intervention in the actual process is very limited with associates on the floor functioning more as quality control technicians than operators.
The process starts with the core material and laminate being automatically loaded into the bonding line. The laminate layer, which is manufactured by the Perstorp division in Sweden, consists of 1/2 mm thick piece of laminate, a digital photograph of the wood (in this instance oak plank) and then 5 layers of melamine on top to give it its scratch resistance. The core material is created with a very small type particulate with a lot of resin in it giving the product good integrity and ensuring its long life. The wood used for the core material is generally spruce if it is shipped in from Sweden or pine if it comes from the United States.
In the bonding line the core material is treated top and bottom with a pre-hardener to speed up the gluing operation. Ultraviolet lights check to make sure the pre-hardener has been evenly spread across both sides of the core material. Next the core is run through the glue rollers where it's coated top and bottom. As the core travels down the line the laminate sheet is placed on the core via a simple robot and the backing paper is applied to the bottom.
The material is then transferred into a high temperature/high pressure press for a minute or less at several hundred degrees. The glue is a UF resin glue. The finished bonded sheets are automatically off-loaded from the bonding line and transferred to a milling line via conveyors.
On the milling line the 4' x 8' bonded sheets are automatically milled into 4 ' x 8" planks and then tongue and grooved in a four stage milling process. Each plank is inspected at each dimension of the tongue and groove down to .01mm by a computerized vision system. Out of spec planks are automatically rejected.
At the final station planks are automatically packaged and palletized and pallets are automatically prepped for shipment.
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