Business View Magazine | December 2019

147 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2019 itself perfectly to get into large scale additive manufacturing.” Today, Thermwood still maintains both lines of business - the 3D printers and CNC routers. “The oil embargo hit and that kind of changed our direction,” Palmer explains. “We got more into thermoforming everyday parts. We wanted to decrease the labor of trimming those thermoformed parts, so we created the first CNC router. Before that, it was all NC– punched tape.” “Thermwood took that to a woodworking show, the International Woodworking Fair in Louisville, KY,” Palmer continues. “We had two different divisions, plastic and machinery. We sold off the plastics portion of the business in the early 1980s and maintained just the machinery end of it. Since then, we’ve been building machinery, supplying equipment to the woodworking, plastic, aerospace, composite, and automotive industries.” Thermwood’s modern manufacturing facility THERMWOOD CORPORAT ION