Hello, my name is Gun, the Chief Products Officer here at TEMCo Industrial. Philbert had emailed us that there's been some talk about our FP1000 here, and we wanted to make sure we went through the proper channels to make sure our responses here would meet this ArborSite's rules concerning advertisement. Justin, our Chief Technical Officer and one of the brains behind this new product, asked the mods and got a response from Jennifer, who confirmed via email that comments would be acceptable, so long as we do not provide links or mention where to purchase it.
I've sent a detailed e-mail to Philbert, but will also provide a direct response here to all the questions and comments currently posted. I'll also be checking the forum daily to see if any new questions or comments arise. Also, mods and admins, my intent is to respect the people and rules of the forum, first and foremost. If my response at any time needs to be edited, please let me know and I can make those edits to meet your standards. Thank you for having me!
The “proprietary” wheel throws a red flag for me. Many times before I retired we would try new tooling and generally the one with proprietary wheels or cutters presented a problem if they had to be replaced and the salesman or company was nowhere to be found.
We do provide replacements for these proprietary wheels, for both the grinder wheel and raker wheel.
I understand that proprietary parts can be a pain, but we have a good reason that you can only use our wheels: because the machine operates at such a high RPM, if the wheels were not concentric enough, or their axial and radial runouts were off, the machine would vibrate tremendously. If you were to use wheels from difference brands, we couldn't guarantee you a smooth machine.
I wonder how it deals with chains that have 2 cutters in a row on the same side?
Maybe have to start there?
A proximity sensor detects which side the cutter is on, and will then tell the cutting head which sided cutter is up next. Therefore, it will cut any permutation of left or right sided cutters.
Automatic is a misnomer if you can't take your eyes off it or have to manually check drive counts or if skip, etc. At best it's semi automatic and only with some significant conditions that would disqualify it for many people at any price.
That said, if the raker depth can be programmed then it might be worth changing bars to get correct drive link counts and running full comp at less aggressive raker depths instead of skip, or a hyper skip that would match a full comp set up so the grinder does air grinds where cutters should be.
We are aware that the FP1000 cannot do skip links, and just to note: neither do the really expensive sharpeners. That's not an excuse, though. I've let Philbert know that for several reasons I can't disclose any information about future developments (several departments would be pissed at me), and especially about those developments that would be available at a price point similar the FP1000. Ahem.
Without calibrating and counting cutters, we'd have to engineer (and therefore add cost) a way for the machine to know where it started, and therefore know where to end.
Also, what we mean by "automatic" is that, once calibrated, a non skip tooth chain placed on the tracks will have ALL of its cutters sharpened (or rakers lowered, if calibrated to do this, too). You really can set one on and walk away.