slab flattening

[doc henderson]

Jim also has a winery and a first-class observatory to do astrophotography.  If we ever do an event here for the forum, a tour and wine tasting would be on the agenda.  We also have an underground salt museum, and the cosmosphere, a world class rocket and science museum.  here are some projects, Jim has start doing on his CNC.  He tried to cut two-part chess boards.  tolerance down to a few thousandths of an inch.  He tossed that for now and cuts alternate depressions and fills with epoxy.  he had a jig to make the aggravation boards with a router.  now if he wants to make it, he has saved the program. 

[tule peak timber]

Still working on getting back a response from a couple of manufacturers but I did figure out where to put the machine from an easy loading point of access. Doc, thanks for the pics! I do very few cabinet jobs and only custom work so my needs don't exactly align with the average CNC buyer. I want to get into the widget business with the tons of walnut scraps generated here and I have a few ideas in that direction. Door panels are another idea let alone stock M&T frame parts. My wife's son wants to work here and being the operator of the machine would be a good match for him.  

[doc henderson]

there is a learning curve and having a primary operator is a good idea.  work ethic and common sense go a long way.  full use of the material you buy with a ROI makes sense if you can do it fast enough (wages) to turn a profit.  as well, working it 6 or 8 hours a day will make more sense than throwing a cover on it, and using it only when needed.  I am sure you can find a few machines close to observe, but if you are in the neighborhood, stop by.

[Larry]

I want to get into the widget business with the tons of walnut scraps generated here and I have a few ideas in that direction.

Somebody wants a table 7' long and all I have is 10' slabs. The off cuts were threatening to take over the shop recently. To small for most of my stuff but I'm to cheap to throw it away.

To use some of it up, I've been making treenware and pushing the theme "From the Tree". Folks like the thought of something made from a tree that came from there own neighborhood. Demand is high, but with me making it on manual machines the price is high and not much profit. Maybe with a cnc.......but than I would have to actually work to pay for the cnc.

Most of the scrap left the shop a couple of weeks ago. I cut it into 6-8" diameter bowl blanks and donated to our woodturning club for teaching youth groups how to turn on a wood lathe. Pay it forward......

[longtime lurker]

I got this little bit repeat customer, has a cabinet&joinery shop but he doesn't do a lot of solid timber hence being a little bit customer.

His shop has an old altendorf table saw, an edgebander and a few other bits and pieces and a whopping great cnc machine. No jointer. No thicknesser. No mortiser or spindle moulder or drum sander or any of the machines of a traditional joinery shop. No need, that big cnc machine in its climate controlled room replaced all that.

Anyway long story short old mates apprentices spend their first two years basicly learning to operate the cnc gear, after that he starts letting them out to do installations etc. So there's a learning curve with this technology and it takes a while to be a skilled professional rathrer than a gifted amateur. But I want one.

I just need a few other things more

[YellowHammer]

So you're talking about doing widgets and stuff, but what size capacity machine are you looking at?  

[tule peak timber]

A 5 x 10 or a 5 x 12 table cut size. I have some ideas on incorporating it production line style into another long table all referenced together with rollers.
I've been reading since 2AM this morning, mostly on caveats and cautionary tales, hidden costs and what exactly is involved in entering the CNC game. For all these years I have intrinsically known and resisted going anywhere different from techniques I have developed here. There are a great deal of videos out with the pros and cons of a commercial or industrial sized machine, commensurate with prices starting at around $50k and going to well over $1,000,000.
I'm at the first cobblestone on the yellow brick road and I can't even see Oz from here, it's so far down the road. Along with the usual business decisions, I have to look at my supply chains for logs, definition of the market beyond my custom work, the competition and who the heck is going to run the machine and support equipment. Yes, I have written business plans in the past for everything except my own business.

[21incher]

Sounds  to me like baby steps would be a Slabmizer to handle your  current needs. Then possibly a small cnc to develop prototypes. For big runs there are many shops with trained employees and machines that could probably  be competitive with your  costs to make items.  That would leave more Alaska time on your hands  . 

[YellowHammer]

We have lots of customers with CNC and I can offer a few observations, anyway, even though I don't own one, I hear lots of stories, both good and bad. 

We had a local business who bought a cheap machine and it let him down, and so he bought another, and then got so successful and busy with it that he bought a third, which after a short time, went off line, and so he sold them all and got one good one.

On the other side, we have a company that bought a million dollar one many years ago, used it, but it was so complicated and had such proprietary parts that when it went down, it stayed down for a long time.  I think they gave up on it. So don't get one that is so expensive and rare that the company has no support base or even reason to support it.  Software is key, make sure it's modern and well maintained, I've hear horror stories of people who have been let down by poor or glitchy software ruining parts while they are being cut. 

There is one company who used to build internet widgets of all kinds with pieces of scrap and sells the end product for $20 bucks, about a 10X profit margin with a CNC.  I believe he sold out a couple years ago for a huge amount of money.  $20 internet sales for a knife holder, kitchen utensil, wooden spoons, stuff like that doesn't sound like much until you sell a couple thousand per month and then it's nice money.  So a faster machine is better than a slow one. 

We just had a customer leave, they bought some walnut for a table top, and they told me they bought a CNC table kit online minus top, full mortise and tenon, and it fit together perfect.  His words were, "It wasn't cheap but I've already ordered another."

So I would advise don't get one too expensive, or too cheap, but get a common and well known mainstream one that has been around awhile, or at least the company has, and make sure it has good after sales support.

We have another customer who sells custom cutting boards for $300 apiece to a local real estate  company.  When they sell a house, they have him CNC the silhouette of the house and the new owners name into the cutting board and the real estate lady gives it to the new homeowner as a gift.  She could care less how much the cutting board and housewarming present cost when she sells a quarter million or half million dollar house.  The cutting boards a glue ups from scraps. 
 
I've even thought of getting one myself but Martha would kill me.

[teakwood]

I don't have personal experience and this probably doesn't apply to Tule as he has a special market with lots of custom customers. (can i say that?)

In Switzerland, as a woodworking shop if you don't have a CNC your ether very small or not competing. At minimum 5000$/month/employee wages they need a CNC. need to do 10 doors throw then on the machine and 3 minutes later you have every pocket, groove and hole made for all the hardware the door will have installed. A worker would need 30min per door and less accurate. i doesn't matter that the machine costs 1 million plus, it will eventually pay for itself 

[tule peak timber]

Probably going to need more that a SlabMizer. I received my first quote from ShopSabre and they look pretty good from a number of standpoints. ShopSabre and their owners have a ton of informative videos on UTube and I've been spending lots of hours going over them. Realistically for me to be competitive, I need to upgrade my kiln operations, showroom and dry wood storage area. For example, right now I have vast amounts of valuable walnuts and other woods sitting out in the snow this afternoon. That's like wasting $. I've contacting Onsrud and will be getting a quote from them sometime next week. I'm planning a visit to a friend's big cabinet shop to look at his 2 Onsrud machines and get a little education. I've also put out feelers for a concrete guy as I have no place to put another machine in my shop. So, step by step. I think this machine can work for me and who knows what other avenues it might open up.

[longtime lurker]

Yah ain't that always the way of it... you need more kiln... then once you have the kiln space  you need more storage then once you have the kiln and storage you need more mill, and then you need more logs so you need to enlarge the yard and buy a better loader.

Then once you get all that sorted it all runs great for 6 months and then you need more kiln again.

Story of my life.