An experience in precision woodworking

A little after I moved out on my own, Dad bought a significant portion of a small company that makes solid wood cabinet doors, and took over as president. Of course, the foremen run the shop. They call it a ‘shop,’ but it’s more of a small factory: around sixty people on the floor. Anyways, I have nothing to do with it and never spend any time on the floor if I visit.
It was an interesting experience, then, when Dad decided to mill up his own flooring out of hickory, and face frame material out of cherry. The shop is super-busy, so Dad and I did it ourselves over the weekend to avoid taking time away from production.
I’m not at all used to the kind of precision that these machines afford. After moulding material from the sawmill, we sent it through the sander to take off about 0.5 mm each pass, checking with digital calipers to confirm uniform depth. Never in my life has 1/2 a mil mattered, and although it was painstaking, it was strangely rewarding at the same time.
We shaped the ends of the flooring pieces with a double-ended shaper, which is quite the machine. Some of the pieces we sent through were 9′ long. Normally, it’s used to make cabinet doors perfectly, perfectly square. It’s kind of unreal to see the doors they send through it – they already look fine. But the company guarantees dimensions to less than a millimeter, so they can’t afford to screw around.
I came to fully understand why I haven’t been given the opportunity to use the shop for my projects – the CNC router could have definitely come in handy from time to time. But: although the functions of all the machines are familiar, operating them was not! The double-ender has a bank of 16 identical buttons, some magic combination of which caused all its components to spool up. And each machine we used had its idiosyncrasies. We needed a good briefing from the shop’s employees before we could get started on anything.
I had NO IDEA prior to this weekend how much hardwood gets wasted in this process. The shop makes doors and drawer fronts, and nothing but. Cut-offs that are too short or too narrow are discarded, and a lot of the wood is selected out because of defects By weight, 30% of hardwood received ends up as sawdust and cut-offs. At first I was a little startled to see a 12′ 1×1 of A-grade cherry in the bin. It’s good for something, right? I need to start turning wooden pens or something. I should also seriously think about wood heat.
Having never worked in an industrial setting, it was all fascinating. Kind of dull for the employees, no doubt, but intriguing for a tourist.
Replies
I've probably got his work in my house. My cabinet guy orders all of the drawer fronts and doors. They are flawless. I'm stunned by the level of smoothness and fit.
Tell your dad I said thanks.
Awhile back I took a cabinet/furniture making class at my local community college. Nothing like the tolerances you're talking about, but still way beyondo anything I've ever built on site. A real eye-opening experience for me, gave me a whole new appreciation for "fine woodworking"!
CaliforniaRemodelingContractor.com
Biff,
What brand(s) of machinery do they use? Just wondering.
Uhhhhh. . . The two moulders are Weinig. The sliding TS is an Altendorf - that thing is really cool. I can't recall any of the other stuff. With a couple exceptions, all the equipment was acquired by the previous owner, who had some eccentricities. I've been told that some of his purchasing decisions weren't good, and he bought a couple machines that lack desirable features. I just have no idea which ones those are.The double-ender is somewhat old. Apparently, Dad would really like to see a new one that changes its own shaper heads, but they don't come cheap. I got the feeling that their machine would be more suited for something like a flooring application. They change profiles often and, of course, constantly adjust the width setting for various dimensions. The machine can go many times faster than a human could possibly load and unload it, which makes it more applicable for running countless thousands of identical pieces.We'll be back on Monday evening to finish off, so I'll make sure to take note of the other machines for ya.
pictures?
You have GOT TO take pictures for us, preferably while the machines are running. And is there a web site for your dads company? How many sq ft is the shop and where is it located?
I'll take some photos. I feel like I'd be burning all my online anonymity by naming the company - I'm the owner's son, how hard is that to figure out. So if you check out my location, google can take you from there if you're really that curious. It's not as if there are multiple door factories in this town. ;-)
Just for fun I will throw a bit of trivia here.
Back in the day I spent a few years in a manufacuring shop. I used to insist that I set the planer for the last run. I would establish (read try to average here) the last cut at .789 inches ( About a 32 nd over 3/4) it sanded out to a fairly close 3/4". I loved that 24" Delta planer........
Anyway my point here is that accuracy is important in mfg. situations. The owner said to me one day that I should be the only person to have a tape measure on the floor. Not meaning I was great but meaning everything should be jigged and stopped.
On a hill by the harbour
What I can't understand is that your dad own a business like that with all that neat woodworking equipment and you didn't spend anytime on the shop floor!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Were you never curious?????????? And you are in construction?????????????????????????
Very strange:)
roger
Yeah, I know. It sounds blockheaded. . . but the floor is not an exciting place. It was neat to look at the first time, but it's mostly workers running wood through shapers. I only came to appreciate it when I understood what it takes to coax wood - a natural product that's neither straight or flat - into completely precise square, straight and flat products on a mass scale.
I had NO IDEA prior to this weekend how much hardwood gets wasted in this process.
We use a lot of oak for paint and stain grade items throughout a house so certain sizes sizes of scraps are used where possible, but there's still a lot of waste. There is a cost effectiveness trade off between selecting cuts to minimise waste and the cost of labor.
Our rough cut lumber is random width and length, not to mention random amounts of curve, so waste under perfect conditions is probably at least 25% and probably closer to 40%.
Labor is roughly $1 a minute and oak at less than $3/bdft, a 1x1x12' is worth $3 if there is a no-brainer use for it and worth nothing if it takes 3 minutes to figure out what to do with it. If it will work for shelf nosings it's typically saved, but there is also a cost to saving material, and it doesn't take long to burn up any savings.
The highest and best use for hardwood scraps is often to simply let the younger carps pick through the pile on their own time and donate the remainder to firewood.
Having said that, I know a retired carp with cheap storage who never threw away anthing for 20 years. As a professional carp it wasn't cost effective to use the scraps, but he was saving them until labor cost wasn't an issue. His current bed & breakfast is full of glued up scraps of all kinds and his days are filled with making big pieces out of small pieces so at night he can build great cabinets and builtins. Hardwood floors are carefully crafted out of large piles of discarded shorts. Long thin pieces are glued up and used for craftsman style door casing and base in his rentals. His trim style always has a plinth block to burn up short thick cutoffs. Soffits are perpendicular hardwood T&G in random widths down to 1". Plywood rips are used to glue up curved stair stringers and whatnot. Wide and very thin scraps are used for curved laminations of all kinds. It's like a museum for reusing waste wood and his favorite agressive cherry stain brings all the color variations together.
Beer was created so carpenters wouldn't rule the world.
That guy must use glue by the barrel.
*chuckle*
He carefully brushes on the glue for an exact amount of squeezout so it goes a long long way. Seems crazy to me.
Beer was created so carpenters wouldn't rule the world.
When I had a cabinet shop I outsourced most of my doors and drawer fronts. I made more money that way. Besides they were flawless.