I am looking to get a new 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?

The Rehau website suggests that they will do single roll orders and custom colours. Did you contact them?
I have ordered doors with laser edges and they are virtually seamless.

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

Here is our experience.

Quite a few years ago as textured melamines and matte and gloss acrylics started to become more popular, and our normal client base started pushing us harder and harder to get into closets we invested in a hot air machine from Hebrock. We chose Hebrock because at the time they were the only one offering a glue pot machine with hot air / infrared / laser that didn't require a lengthy change over time. I didn't care then and still don't which method (hot air / infrared / laser) my machine used, just that it could apply coextruded edgebanding.

At the time, the machine was marketed and supported by Martin. We had some trouble with the installation, set up and support for the machine that took a few years to get sorted out. Altendorf has now taken over the line and things seem to have improved. It is not a heavy duty machine in my opinion, but thankfully we are not a heavy duty user. Nevertheless, our earlier experience with the machine breaking down prompted my to buy a backup machine, an entry level Homag. We now use the Homag for the bulk of our glue pot work, and only use the Hebrock for secondary work and when hot air is necessary. The hot air (airtronic as they brand it) works great.

The problem is the market for coextruded edgebanding never took off like it should have. It's very hard to get. The sheet good manufacturers who promised single roll availability to match all of their colors have failed to live up to that promise. I suspect the cost of edgebanders with this technology has made it uneconomical for coextruded banding to make the in-roads into the industry that I had hoped for. That's unfortunate, because it's a great product. PUR is good for commercial shops that do miles of edgebanding per day. For the small shop doing a couple hundred feet every other day, PUR is a nightmare. Compared to the ease of pushing a button and changing from Air to pot and back again, the idea of PUR being more popular than coextruded makes absolutely no sense to me. I am confident that coextruded will prevail in the end. It's just going to require more demand, which will require more shops investing in the technology.

I have a Biesse with Airforce. We bought back in 2016 as mentioned above. Loud, lots of compressed air. We were trying to buy banding direct from manufacturer and had horrible results with customer service. We tried another brand and it didn’t stick near as good. Never ran much with it and machine is now out of service. Personally wouldn’t do it unless I had a specific product that required it and the product was in high demand.