I am looking to buy a new edgebander for a small to mid sized shop that does commercial work. It seems to me the hot air edgeband concept is a great idea....no glue, no joints. The only drawback seems you cannot get edgeband in small quantities (say single 600lf rolls pvc) unless you want black or white. Am I missing something? Does anyone out there use hot air and what are your thoughts on it?

What is your idea of a mid sized shop? Lots of money to be saved with a commercial edge bander.

What is a mid sized shop is an interesting question.

To me, 0-10 on the floor, small

10-25, medium

25-50 big

50+, BIG/fricking huge.

I know less than nothing about hot air banders.....

You will not only be limited on what you can get in banding without ordering a custom run of thousands of feet, but also you will be limited in the bander's abilities. I would guess that you won't be able to find a hot air bander that can process 3mm banding so you will have to outsource for any jobs that will require it. Other options like scraping, buffing, fine trimming and corner rounding eliminate tedious hand work after banding. This can be a massive improvement in productivity for a commercial shop. I have a very basic bander without the bells and whistles. Even with it running well, I spend as much time banding as I do tuning up the edges. Banding is not a big part of my shop process so I; just deal with it.
Glue pots or Holzher cartridges are nothing to fear. Shops run thousands of feet a week, week in week out on a regular maintenance schedule. A bander with all the options needed for your type of work will be the biggest productivity improvement to your shop.

You can get most common bandings in hot air but keep in mind your product will suffer because the hot air will expand PVC banding and then down the road (weeks/months) the banding will shrink back leaving a less than desirable glue line and gaps at the ends.

Hot air, in my opinion, is fine for low temp wood tape. It still a ton of work but for a super small shop (shelves or a few doors here an there) I guess.

If you expected, or expecting, to delivery any type of commercial cabinetry hot air isnt going to fly. Not only is it too slow, its going to land you with a mile of call backs and you could likely wind up remaking entire jobs.

I run a hot air bander and mostly run prefinished or unfinished maple on plywood. It works great for that. I have also ran pvc wood grain on prefinished plywood with no issues. I use a company called Edgeco. They are awesome to deal with and I believe the minimum order is 250’. Goggle them and you will find they have a great website and customer service.
Not sure what you are doing, but as a small shop owner that does his own banding, I have never had an issue as everyone says you will with a hot air bander. Maybe because I give a $hit about the final product? I don’t hire dopes to work for me? Not sure but how I use it works for me.

Run some cabinets for your own house and see how they stand up.

Sorry for not being clear. I am looking at a commercial automatic edgebander with premill, cornerround,scraping, buffing,etc.....e.g. brandt, scm, $70-100K range.

what I am wondering about is all the new banders either have standard or as an option the ability to use hot air edgebanding - e.g. no glue at the machine.

https://www.rehau.com/us-en/zero-joint

The bander sales people note this as a wonderful thing - no glue, seamless edge, etc. It does seem like a great idea if you can get the edgebanding - from what I can tell it is only available if you buy large quantities.

So, does anyone out there have a commercial edgebander with hot air capability and are they able to get edgebanding in small lots?

Long story short...It depends. Locally ,next to impossible unless it a large order.
This is what I use.
https://www.rehau-marketplace.com/store/en/Rehau/Furniture/Edging/ABS/Zero-Joint/c
/Zero-Joint

The local guys will only get it from them anyways. We have airforce on a Biesse Akron and I think its a waste of 40k. Doesn't work as well as they say. Not even close. Spend the money on a separate glue pot and a freezer and use PUR . Or get their dedicated PUR system if they have one.

Joseph Stahl- this is what I have heard over and over from my customers regarding hot air.

Bob- I'm happy to introduce myself and share my knowledge on this topic as well. I have worked as a maintenance technician since 1982 both employed as a maintenance technician or maintenance manager and as an independent technician working on every brand and type of machine out there. Salesmen typically think anything their machine has on it is a great idea, simply because they don't "know" what they "don't know". The factories manufacturing the machinery we are using are typically in Europe or Asia. Hot air may have been a hot thing for a short period of time in Europe but the demand has waned. There was a lot of money spent on R&D and the inability to offer anything else has kept it alive in the minds of salesmen here in the U.S. When it was first developed, hot air was marketed as a way for companies to achieve a better edge without investing a lot of money into a laser but there are several insurmountable issues with hot air that have turned users away from it.
1. Coextruded edgebanding is expensive and you typically have to buy large quantities.
2. If you aren’t using coextruded edgebanding you are using pre-glued edgebanding and the finish looks worse than a glue pot machine.
3. Hot air lacks versatility. Veneers, HPL, and hardwood edges are not coextruded, and you simply won’t pre-glue these if you are looking for an invisible glue joint. Most end up using the gluepot far more than they use the hot air.
4. Hot air is loud and an annoyance to employees
5. Hot air machines use large amounts of compressed air and shops often find they need to upgrade their compressor to a larger size to accommodate the increased cfm requirements on their systems.
Laser is a much better alternative, but it is expensive and once again limited to coextruded edgebanding.

As a technician working on every manufacturer out there, I decided to seek out high quality production efficient machinery that produces high quality products with little to no setup time. Our lines are Ott for edgebanders, Stema for drilling, doweling, and hardware insertion, Modesta for dust collectors, and KRC CNC for machining centers.
Ott is our edgebander line producing invisible glue joint panels and depending on the machine setup the most an operator may need to do is change the edgebanding roll and keep the gluepot filled. The salesmen you are talking to have probably tried to steer you away from using PUR glue and I don’t blame them. Their machines are poorly designed for PUR and very problematic when trying to run PUR on them. Ott on the other hand is perfectly designed for PUR with a top driven glue roller that eliminates the possibility of leaking seals in the lower end of the pot that will ruin bearings and drive mechanism, something that will eventually happen with bottom driven glue rollers. Glue dosage is servo controlled making the glue joint invisible to the eye. The PUR glue joint exceeds the strength of coextruded systems like hot air and laser. The already used PUR glue can be stored in the service station dry box for up to 7 days eliminating daily purging associated with other machines. The glue pot and hopper can be removed in about 30 seconds with zero disassembly of the machine.
Since 2011 more than 95% of the machines Ott sells are used strictly for PUR glue with some shops running less than 20,000 meters a year. Salesman will tell you; PUR can be run on their machines but do their best to talk you out of it simply because their systems really are poorly designed for PUR. With an Ott I would do everything I could to talk you out of running EVA and once you start running PUR on an OTT you’ll never go back to EVA.
Feel free to contact me if you would like to know more or arrange a demo at our showroom.

Rob

https://nutekmachinery.com/ott-combimelt.html