Reliable | with Adam Luxton, APL Fabricator Development Manager

Adam sits down with Simon Farrell-Green, editor of HERE magazine, to talk about why choosing New Zealand made products is a reliable choice for Kiwis. He talks about APL's rigorous testing, designing to the Building Code, and having the right people on the ground. 

00:00 Introduction  
00:35 Adam’s Introduction  
01:40 What’s the difference between fabricators and APL? How does that all work? 
02:19 How does APL ensure its products perform the way they’re meant to?  
04:40 How well do APL frames actually perform?  
05:15 Expectations from high-performing windows and doors  
06:17 What happens when things go wrong with a product?  
07:19 What’s the real cost of cutting corners or choosing an inferior product?

🎙️ About the Series – Made here, for you
Made here, for you is a storytelling series by APL & AGP, shining a light on the people, places, and processes behind New Zealand-made windows and doors. Every episode captures the craft, care, and Kiwi ingenuity that make our products truly local and built to last.

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Produced by APL. All rights reserved.
“Made here, for you” stories of New Zealand-made windows and doors, told by the people who bring them to life.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:35 Adam’s Introduction
• 1:40 What’s the difference between fabricators and APL? How does that all work?
• 2:19 How does APL ensure its products perform the way they’re meant to?
• 4:40 How well do APL frames actually perform?
• 5:15 Expectations from high-performing windows and doors
• 6:17 What happens when things go wrong with a product?
• 7:19 What’s the real cost of cutting corners or choosing an inferior product?

Transcript

0:00

Kilda, I'm Simon Farrell Greene and I'm the editor of Hair Magazine. Welcome to New Zealand Made, a series of podcasts we're making with our friends at APL Window Solutions. The question we're asking is essentially, what does it mean to build or renovate in an increasingly global and interconnected world? And how do we balance a desire to reduce carbon emissions and improve the performance of our buildings with the ever increasing cost of doing it? To answer this, we're chatting with experts on the latest building developments and building tech and a few other issues. I'm joined now by Adam Luxton, fabricated development manager at APL. Hi Adam. Hi Simon, welcome. So to start off, you need to tell us who you are, what you do and why you do it and you've got 50 words or less. Okay, so my name is Adam Luxton and I'm the fabricated development manager at APL. Essentially there's three technical teams that report into me and we look after one of them being technical services, which handles a whole lot of technical questions coming in from our fabricators and clients and they also look after our manufacturing packs, which detail how to put our windows and doors together. Then another aspect of my team is the V6 team. V6 is a software which our fabricators use to quote and manage the production of all the joinery units that they make and then the third facet of my team is a fabricator support team and they're basically in the fabricators factories looking after all their machineries, CNCs, training them with products, looking after their punch tooling, etc. Stuff like that. You've sort of talked there about fabricators and we've talked about APL. What's the difference? How does that all work? So APL is a window system supplier. So we design and test the window system and then we sell the lineals. So six meter bars of aluminium in the right profiles that match our design system and our fabricators then put just those lineals and then they start chopping them up, making them into the right size windows and doors and then on sell them to the builders. So when I'm doing at my house and I'm getting new windows, I'm talking to the builder, he's talking to the fabricator and then they're talking to you. Exactly right. I think we've probably, you know, especially in recent years, seen what happens in the New Zealand building industry when things go wrong when they're not done well. What does APL do to ensure your products will perform the way they're meant to? Yeah, APL has got quite a vast knowledge base. I guess you could say we've got a lot of people throughout the industry for the business that have worked in the industry for sort of 30, 35 years. So we rely heavily on all that knowledge through our team. Mainly in the design team, we have a few key senior designers who have been one with APL for close to 30 years, some other parts of the industry for as long. So all of that knowledge over all of those years into that team, designing the new products, that's a big aspect of how we can make our products perform, how they need to. Not just in the design team, also throughout the other aspects of our business. So that's one big asset that we have and also that leads into the knowledge of the building code. So building for New Zealand based products, that's exactly what we do well. So we've got the knowledge of being part of organ for a very long period of time and having that knowledge of the industry, how it's related to the building code, how the building code has changed over so many years, what worked well in the building code, what didn't work well in the building code and what we've changed in order to make that work. So that's, I guess, the key part of what we do well is integrating the knowledge and the people into the design process. And that design process is really all around one getting the feedback from the right people, constantly talking to our fabric at a network, their builders, architects, engineers, and getting all of that knowledge into that new design that we're trying to make. And then obviously once we're developing that product, then we're into the rigorous testing that we do on site. So when we start to product up products, we've got our own specialist test booth in Hamilton, built specifically to test our products. We've got a couple of different sizes of test booth because we make small products and large products. And they're tested to our New Zealand standards, which are referred to in the New Zealand building code. So we know we're doing all the right testing for our products. How well do APL frames actually perform? What sort of performance are you actually talking about, right? So you've got water performance, you've got strength performance, you've got air leakage performance, you've got aesthetics in there as well, you've got operational forces. It's all around how do you juggle all those performance criteria to get a product that the end user actually wants to use. Obviously, you've also got a big factor in there of cost as well. So you can't have all of these features and also expect people to pay a huge amount of money for them. So it's all about balancing effect. And our expectations have gone up, you know, both in terms of how they perform thermally and how they look and what they do, even at a sort of a relatively basic level. We expect really high performing windows and doors. Definitely, the expectations are there that we can just cram everything into one product and doors pay the same amount. That is one of the trickiest aspects at the moment with the speed of change going through our industry with MB, I guess, pushing the thermal envelope a few years ago and then also now trying to retract it a little bit as well. So there's a huge state of flux at the moment throughout the building industry which we believe we're leading the charge, but it is quite a struggle to, I guess, we feel like we designed the right products for the market, but then it may change in a year's time. So we invest all of that money and it might not ever come to fruition or a market change a year later. So that's definitely a key struggle that we have at the moment. I'm not saying things would go wrong, but in the rare case they do, what happens? How does it work? Yeah, okay, so I can just explain that. We've got over 70 fabricators throughout the whole of New Zealand and they are supplying joinery to builders all day every day. If things do go wrong, then obviously they're there to pick up any issues that they can spot and fix and they often do. 99% of the time they'll have it sorted with the client and they'll be happy, no problem. On the rare occasion, if there is something the fabricator can't sort out by themselves, then they'll come and contact us and because of the design experience that we have in our team, we can work through a solution that'll work for the client on site. I guess the point though is also that you're there, right? Well, the fabricators are there, you're in Hamilton. These things can be resolved. Yeah, that's right. So ultimately, if the fabricator gets stuck, then we're always there to support and back up our brand. People are really conscious of cost at the moment when it comes to building and renovating, but what's the cost of cutting corners of going with an inferior product? Yeah, we're acutely aware of this. We're always trying to do the right thing and test our products rigorously over the top of what the standards are. It's quite deflating to hear about instances where people have had really made test reports when you're just filling the banks and say, here you go, here's the test report that you said you wanted. We always try to test our products the way that they should be tested. As an example, when we're testing some of our hinges, we'll be slamming doors closed rather than, you know, lightly closing them to make sure they get through the cycles. So we're trying to test them how they are intended to be used and not just to get across the test pass. That was Adam Luxton, fabricated development manager at APL, talking to us as part of the New Zealand made podcast series. Thanks Adam. Thanks aamn.