Good things take time at Tuatahi Racing Axes and Saws. With the help of new technology, they should soon take a little less. By Caitlin Sykes

It’s an enviable problem for a business, but it’s a problem nonetheless: so many orders, so little time.

Just ask Tuatahi Racing Axes and Saws. Last November, for example, it had orders for its racing axes booked up until at least March this year. For its racing saws, the orders stretched out to this October.

Good things, you see, can take time, and the tools made by Tuatahi are recognised in the world of competitive wood chopping as the best. About 90% of the Masterton-based company’s products go offshore, and the world’s top axemen turn to Tuatahi for a couple of good reasons: quality and the degree of customisation the company can offer.

The use of axes and saws stretches back centuries and Tuatahi’s approach reflects the somewhat old-world nature of what it makes. High levels of handwork are used in the production of the tools, and the bulk are customised to suit individual customers’ needs. An axeman preparing for an upcoming competition may request a tool not only of a specific weight, grind, and handle type, for example, but also suited to a particular type of wood.

Former saw doctor and competitive wood chopper Eddie Fawcett started the company more than 25 years ago, when he noticed many of the axes being used in competition weren’t up to scratch. Today the company has grown to include four staff, plus Eddie’s wife, Bev, and his daughter, Jo, who is office manager. Significant responsibility also falls on the shoulders of son Grant, who forges the company’s axes and makes its racing saws.

Which leads us back to that problem. Each week the company can make 20 to 30 axes, as well as a couple of its in-demand peg and raker saws, but production is restricted by the amount of hand crafting that goes into the tools. In this age of the chainsaw, the skills required to make saws and axes aren’t as common as they once were. And when Tuatahi looked to buy an automated machine to help do the work, it couldn’t find one – because they don’t exist.

So the company decided to make its own. The focus so far has been on creating an automated system for grinding saws, which Eddie and Grant designed using their combined experience of working with manual machines. Funded primarily through turnover and with some government money, the company commissioned a local engineering firm to build the machine.

It has since been working with Wellington Institute of Technology and Eketahuna-based company NC Graphics to tweak the machine to accurately deal with the variety of saws the company produces – the main challenge of the project, says Jo Fawcett. While the company is still unsure exactly how much the machine will boost production, results so far look promising, she says. Work saws that were taking two-and-a-half days to produce manually take the machine two-and-a-half hours.

“If that’s the kind of result we’re going to achieve, we’re going to be pretty happy,” she says. “We’re always out there to improve our product and we need to get things out to the customer a lot quicker, but we also need to maintain our quality.”

So the good things the company makes will still take time – just not quite so much. Grant will continue to do the finishing work on the saws, but the machine will afford him and others in the company the time to visit developing markets, like Europe, and to focus on other innovations. The company is also developing a manual saw grinder to back up its automated system and is working on new ways to make and grind axes.

“We’re at that point where we’re really ready to take off, and we will take off,” says Jo Fawcett. “It’s just a matter of time.”