Thermood Corporation

THERMWOOD CORPORAT ION Thermwood Corporation, which is headquartered in the small southern Indiana town of Dale, has seized on these dual opportunities presented by additive manufacturing (3D printing by another name) and large-scale thermoplastic forming. About five years ago, they were approached by Purdue University and an aerospace company to hang an extruder on their 5-axis router. Fatefully, this crucial component would allow them to perform the additive functions (melting and depositing, or “printing”) and the subtractive ones (trimming and slicing) on the same machine. They’ve been leading with this approach, using their proprietary Large Scale Additive Manufacturing (LSAM) systems, ever since. The company began its life in 1969 as a plastic molder of wood grained parts for the furniture industry. Its founder, Ken Susnjara, was a graduate of the prestigious Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, IN. “He came up with the method to thermoform wood grain plastics and then evolved to the CNC router,” shares his son, Jason Susnjara, Vice President of Marketing. “I always hear stories about Thermwood having a multi-tasking operating system before Microsoft was even around.” Thermwood is now known as one of the oldest computer numerical control (CNC) router companies in the world, having developed their automated cutting machines back in the 1970s to trim their own plastics. “When we first started producing the plastic parts of our furniture, we had our own injection machines,” says Dennis Palmer, Vice President of Sales. “We were extruding the plastic sheets. We made our own control for the machinery when we got into routing. We’ve also been an OEM for Mastercam for about 30 years, so we knew the controller. We knew how to build the machines. We knew how to write software and we knew 5-axis programming. All this knowledge lent