Hiring out a custom job (planing & sanding)

[Sean Everett]

Hi all, my wife has a business that requires 1" x 2" x 8' furring strips. A lot of them. I buy them by the pallet, which is around 550 count, for around .85/per piece. I then run them through my planer on all four sides and then use an orbital sander with 100 grit on the corners. We aren't looking for perfection. My wife uses these for crafts she sells, and we are just looking to clean them up and smooth them so they look decent and so we and our customers don't get any nasty splinters.

It generally takes me about an hour to run ~50 of these through my planer, and then another hour to sand the edges. I'm looking to hire out this process, and would love some advice. I'm in the Chicago area so I'm guessing there are several lumber yards that offer planing and sanding services.

Can anyone here suggest how you'd go about doing large quantities of these? Hire it out? Possibly invest in a drum sander and use that instead of the planer? I understand hiring out this job will increase our costs, but I'm unsure by how much. Obviously I need to go into one of these lumber yards and get a quote, but I was hoping to get some advice beforehand from the esteemed members of this great forum. :)

Thanks.

PS -- forgot to ask if a better idea might be to have 1" x 2" strips ripped and cleaned up rather than using furring strips. I kind of figure that option would be way more expensive but thought I'd throw it out there.

[Richard McComas]

Have you asked the supplier if they can preform that service for you?

[Brad Shipton]

Phone a custom moulding company. Someone with straight line rip saw can whip this stuff out quickly. They can run it through their moulders too, or you can finish them. A good shop will give you options. S4S from the hardware stores always seems to cost too much because of the greedy markups.

[Mark Bolton]

Either find someone with a brush sander (hard) or invest in one yourself. You can skip the planing and wind up with a finish product in two passes.

[Matt Day]

Or try changing your process. Are you batch planing or one by one? For the corners a disc sander would probably be really quick compared to a ROS.

Are you keeping them at 8' or cutting them down?

[Joe Jensen]

I would start with a molding supplier. the strips should come paint ready which should be smooth enough. At that qty I'd think you would be saving money and have zero work.

[J.R. Rutter]

A couple of my lumber wholesalers run moulding shops right on their premises. The ones that don't have solid relationships with moulding shops. Either way, I would start by searching for hardwood/plywood wholesalers in your area.

[Sean Everett]

Thanks for the suggestion. Sorry for the delay in my response, we had a major holiday market last week so have just been slammed.

I'm not familiar with brush sanders. A woodworking buddy of mine had suggested a drum sander, not sure which would be better suited to our needs. Ideally whatever solution we use would be able to handle multiple pieces per pass, since we have to run all 4 sides through. So for example a 10' drum sander should be able to handle 5 furring strips at a time for the flat sides (1.75" * 5) and probably 12 or so for the edges (.75" * 12). I was figuring (hoping) one pass through a drum sander would be enough, but would be interested in your thoughts as to why a brush sander would be a better solution.

Keep in mind that we're starting with 1"x2"x8' furring strips and in the end we'd like a product that is cleaned up enough that we can run them through our hands without much of a splinter hazard.

[Sean Everett]

Thanks for the suggestion. A 1"x2"x8' furring strip runs us about .85 and a common square-edge board would run us about $2.35. The latter would be much cleaner and would not require running through a planer, but it would require the corners to be smoothed with a sander or whatever. I'm okay with the increased cost for a finished product, but not so much if it still requires sanding. I'm concerned that a molding company is going to be dealing in much higher quality wood than we need, but I'm happy to give it a shot.

[Malcolm McLeod]

I don't work wood for a living but have done some automation work in lumber mills, so I have seen what is possible on a commercial scale (for what that's worth). ...And you say this is a business, so approach it as such.

I have no idea of your margins or volume, but just some simple math on the data you provide: currently 2 hrs labor for 50 units (and assume you're worth $25/Hr) = $1/unit in material prep labor; and you're processing rate is 50 units/ 2hrs * 8' = 200'/Hr = 0.055fps (ft/sec). So, unit cost is $1.85/unit, including labor and material (but no equipment usage costs) to get them 'assembly ready'.

This seems ideal process for a molder/shaper. It should give you a surfaced and sized product in one pass. A dual-head shaper with a power feed could easily process this at 0.5fps in one pass. That is ~10X faster than current, or the same 400' of stock in ~14 minutes. I saw a 4-head molder on CL for less than $10k (yeah, it was pretty rough). Your prep labor is now $0.125/unit.

Obviously there are lot of other check boxes in this, but once you ID the process you want (or need), you could either farm it out or keep it "in house" - whatever works for you.

Best wishes and good luck!

[J.R. Rutter]

I'm not familiar with brush sanders. I was figuring (hoping) one pass through a drum sander would be enough, but would be interested in your thoughts as to why a brush sander would be a better solution.

Keep in mind that we're starting with 1"x2"x8' furring strips and in the end we'd like a product that is cleaned up enough that we can run them through our hands without much of a splinter hazard.

A moulder would be ideal if you don't need a sanded flat surface, just knife finish with eased edges. For example, I have a set of Terminus heads that have bevel knives (that use square carbide inserts) that can be positioned anywhere along the length, so you can put a tiny chamfer along every long edge as the stock feeds through. You might be surprised at how willing a shop would be to run this and how cheap it could end up costing.

That's also why a brush sander was suggested: they knock the square edges off slightly. A drum sander will hit the flat faces, but will leave sharp 90 deg corners, so you would still have to ease them by hand. But good luck feeding multiple strips. You need clearance around each piece for the brushes to get the edges, and in general, sanders like this don't like to feed more than maybe two pieces at a time because of the hold down pressure required for the feed belt (or rollers) to work.