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Veranda Magazine: Issue September 2009 - page 2 High Technology and Perfect Finish David Salisbury's wonderful conservatories and orangeries are unique in the fact that there is nothing home made about them. Contrary to appearances, they are entirely prefabricated according to a state of the art industrial technique and put together on site with ease. David Salisbury’s factory has machining benches and digital robots which means most tasks are automatic: raw wood preparation is made with a six cutters machine which removes the sapwood layer all over. This process guarantees time stability for the material and protects it from eating insects. Each part is then sanded down, put to length and mortised before it is sprayed with three-coats of paint. The painting phase is absolutely essential to the wood's resistance to weather changes. The introduction of electro-spraying came from a Danish technology (it is a known fact that Scandinavian houses made out of painted wood must be resistant to extreme weather conditions). |
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The process involves subjecting pieces of wood to around 80 000V of electric current under a wet atmosphere. With such electro-static, the wood absorbs micro-particles of paint in its most microscopic fibers. This technique also allows to perfectly control the thickness of the paint. This three-coats paint protection turns out to be very productive and has a faultless appearance. David Salisbury's workshops have developed another trait: on each piece of wood, the perpendicular section to the grain is coated with a special resin that totally locks out moisture. This soft resin is also used during the assembly process to avoid the top layer of paint cracking. It is worth noting that all parts that are directly exposed to rain (particularly the conservatory roof rafters) are protected with a very discreet foil rollover. The quality of finishes is totally astonishing. Because the parts, which are made out of exotic hard wood, have such high precision machining (with a tolerance of ± 0.2mm) they can be assembled to near perfection. Salisbury only uses exotic hard wood, particularly Idigbo, which is a very stable wood, with a barely furry fine grain that is easy to polish and taint. On the other hand, it is a tree which grows particularly quickly which enables forestation to replenish forests. In other words, using it does not jeopardise the forestry heritage in developing countries. |
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