Woodworking operations are changing with new technology even in small shops. Will Sampson, editor of FDMC and Woodworking Network, continues his interview with Amanda Conger, executive director of the CMA, talking about growing CNC use in even small shops. Sampson also discusses his own personal woodworking path to the 21st century.
This episode of the Woodworking Network Podcast was sponsored by the Executive Briefing Conference, being held November 8-10, 2020, at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, CO.
Woodworking Network is a home for professional woodworkers, presenting technology, supplies, education, inspiration, and community, from small business entrepreneurs to corporate managers at large automated plants.
The Cabinet Makers Association was formed in 1998 by a group of custom cabinetmakers who saw a need for a professional organization to serve small- to mid-size woodworking shops in the United States and Canada.
Intro music courtesy of Anthony Monson.
WWN02: The Changing Face of the Small Shop (2020)
Welcome to the Woodworking Network Podcast where we explore the business of woodworking and what it takes to succeed. This episode is sponsored by the Executive Briefing Conference. I’m Will Sampson.
Today, my guest is Amanda Conger from the Cabinet Makers Association with more survey information on small to medium size professional shops. But before we get to Amanda, I want to start off talking about “The changing face of the small shop.”
I’ve been woodworking since I was a kid, banging boards together with nails to make stuff. But when I first started taking woodworking serious as an adult, I sought out all sorts of information to try to learn what the “right way” to do things was. There was no YouTube back then, so it was lots of books, magazine articles and sharing information with other craftspeople.
Top priority seemed to be to select the tools and set up shop in an efficient fashion. That’s no different today, but a lot of the tools and layout recommendations have dramatically changed over the years as technology and fashion have shaped the woodworking shop.
In the beginning, there were hand tools and a shop centered around a joiner’s bench. While I put a hand-tool-oriented shop together on a workbench in a corner of a garage, I dreamed of having one of those classic massive German red beech joiners benches with big vises on the side and the end and a whole line of dog holes for clamping work on top. If only I could get a bench like that, I thought, then I’d be set!
I continued to collect an arsenal of hand tools, slowly upgrading to better quality tools as I discovered treasures at auctions and yard sales. Then I discovered Japanese tools and learned a whole new way of working. I watched Toshio Odate working in a shop without a workbench. He would sit on the floor, deftly using his feet to secure what he was working on, cutting wood with pull-saws and planing it smooth with Japanese planes that worked on the pull stroke. It was eye-opening, and I embraced the ryoba and dozuki saws, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to toss away my workbench or my Stanley bench planes.
Then I was captured by the siren song of the power tool. If I just had the right machines I could do anything! Look what you can do with a router and the right bits and jigs! But portable power tools had their limits, too, and books and magazine articles showed this shop layout where a table saw took center stage, casting the workbench to the perimeter. Jointer, planer, table saw became the hallowed triumvirate of woodworking. Of course, you needed to have a drill press and a radial-arm saw, too. Magazine ads told hobbyists they really didn’t need the table saw because they could get their Craftsman Radial-Arm Saw to rip, crosscut, and dadoe with the best of them.
Then miter saws and compound sliding miter saws came along as a much safer and more accurate substitute for the radial-arm saw. But before I got one of those, I had other priorities. I was doing musical instrument work and needed to cut curves and resaw wide thin boards. I yearned for a big bandsaw that was way out of my price range. I ended up building one from scratch, using metalworking skills I had acquired over the years. I called it Frankenstein because the 300-pound behemoth was cobbled together with all sorts of parts dug up from the graves of other machines. It worked, and I still have it, but if I had valued my time, I probably could have bought three better band saws for less. I also built a vertical panel saw to cut up plywood.
Eventually, my shop began to resemble those pro shop designs I had envied for so long. I had the central table saw, the jointer, the planer, band saws, drill presses, miter saw, router table, and plenty of portable power tools. But while I was chasing that dream, the pro shop had changed. Fewer and fewer shops I visited looked like that anymore.
The new shop centerpiece was a CNC machine. At first it was mostly a point-to-point machine with vacuum pods to hold the work in place. The CNC was often flanked by an edgebander and either a European-style sliding table saw or a big beam saw to cut the parts before the CNC did the joinery. The CNC could also do spectacularly precise curved work.
Then came the CNC router with a vacuum table instead of pods. It eliminated the need for cutting parts on a separate machine. Now a whole shop could be based on just two key machines: the CNC router and the edgebander. This signaled that the age of panel processing had arrived. More and more professional woodworking was built on manipulating engineered panel products rather than reshaping solid wood.
Of course, these modern machines also required the brains of a computer to do their jobs. But computers had become such a ubiquitous part of modern life that fewer and fewer woodworkers objected to the technological takeover of what had once been a skilled hand craft. Especially if they were seriously trying to make a living at woodworking.
Today, even small shop professional woodworkers find themselves mostly in two camps: one that has CNC production and the other that is thinking about adding it. Oh, sure, there are a few holdouts, making beautiful curlicue shavings with a hand plane on a joiners bench, but they are rare in the 21st Century. Even hobbyist woodworkers are embracing CNC. Now, if I can just figure out where to put one in my shop…
Besides CNC automation, one thing I’ve seen that helps shops move ahead is when they discover the power of information and networking. As mentioned before, our sponsor today is the Executive Briefing Conference, which is a superior opportunity to learn, be inspired, and have face-to-face interchanges with top leaders in the industry. This year’s EBC will be held at the spectacular Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. In addition to top speakers and presentations, there also will be tours of Concepts in Millwork and The MiLL woodworking training facility. It’s an unparalleled opportunity to obtain business intelligence to improve your enterprise. Learn more at executive-briefing-conference-dot-com.
To talk more about CNC and outsourcing, I’d like to bring back Amanda Conger from the Cabinet Makers Association to share more about what we’ve learned from the CMA’s annual Benchmark Survey.