How long does it take you to build these doors (paint grade)?

[andrew whicker]

Hello all,

Trying to get a feel for my inefficiencies (of which there are plenty). I made these doors (eight total, 4 tall / 4 short). I do NOT have a wide belt sander. Would like to know how long it takes a competent builder to make these paint grade doors. The stiles and rails are 1" thick. They are made of soft maple. I used 3/8 MDF for the panels w/ 3/8" T&G.

(I made some of the long stiles with laminated pieces from my vacuum table when I didn't have straight lumber and made the other stiles out of 5/4 lumber when it was straight)

The short doors are 25" H x 18" W. The tall doors are 52" H x 18" W w/ a middle rail.

What do you think your estimated per door time / total time / however you want to split it up would be?

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[Ron Citerone]

Hello all,Trying to get a feel for my inefficiencies (of which there are plenty). I made these doors (eight total, 4 tall / 4 short). I do NOT have a wide belt sander. Would like to know how long it takes a competent builder to make these paint grade doors. The stiles and rails are 1" thick. They are made of soft maple. I used 3/8 MDF for the panels w/ 3/8" T&G. (I made some of the long stiles with laminated pieces from my vacuum table when I didn't have straight lumber and made the other stiles out of 5/4 lumber when it was straight)The short doors are 25" H x 18" W. The tall doors are 52" H x 18" W w/ a middle rail. What do you think your estimated per door time / total time / however you want to split it up would be?508006508007I wouldn't even want to guess. Every time I try to guess how much I will get done in a day I almost never get that much done. I try to get things right and don't sweat the time. Maybe post in the business section and a contractor might have estimation experience.

[James Pallas]

Table saw, jointer, miter saw, hand held belt sander, finish sander. Maybe one days work.
Jim

[Greg Quenneville]

I was going to say a long day’s machining and assembly work assuming no stock lamination, assuming batch processing all the parts, assuming using a power fed shaper for grooving, fast panel sizing.

I would domino the joints right through the groove so that takes 20 minutes per door.

Assuming enough clamps another couple of hours to assemble.

Another probably half hour per for belt sanding and finish sanding assuming good tools for those chores. Add time for distractions, problems, looking for that box of 180 paper etc.

I have done lots of similar sized shutters like that. It takes longer than I imagine initially. A couple of years ago I was really improving my workflow until I workflowed my finger right into a router bit. So that added a couple of extra weeks.

[glenn bradley]

An example of doing it production style (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25GbUnlOHh4).

[Jamie Buxton]

Realistically, a week and a half. I'm including time for the lumberyard trip, making flat and straight 4s4 stock from roughsawn lumber, setting up the shop for doing this job, setting up to mill the tenons, glue-up, sanding, and stuff I forgot to add in. No power feeder, no wide-belt.

[Phillip Mitchell]

I am not a cabinet shop and don’t push myself to work “fast” anymore and that would probably take me 1.5-2 days if I already had the material in the shop and the dimensions/design details sorted. That’s raw materials to sanded and ready for paint. Hinge boring could/would likely happen along with that in same time frame.

I would use a shaper with power feeder for grooves and also shaper for stub tenons if not using dominos. No wide belt in my shop so hand sanding with Festool ROS and hand sanding to break edges/inner corners for no accidental finger slicing and better paint adhesion.

Clear finish grade with attention to grain matching and continuity and either solid wood or nice veneered ply panels would take longer for sure.

[Andrew Hughes]

My best guess for my shop is 2 6/8 hour days. They look simple enough I would use my tablesaw for the jointery .
I could easily hand plane any milling marks it doesn’t get any easier then soft maple. I don’t sand
One thing would be different I would make 7 or 9 pieces.
I don’t like making even numbers of anything.
Good Luck

[John TenEyck]

Four hours to mill the rough stock 4 square, an hour or so to mill the dados, another to cut the stub tenons, a couple of hours to size the panels, a couple of hours to glue up the doors, a couple of hours to sand. So, what's that? 12 hours, a day and a half. So probably two days for me.

John

[andrew whicker]

Thanks for all the responses! I'm not feeling as bad. 2 full days is about my speed. I'm glad that's reasonable. Of course, at 100 per hour shop time that makes these pretty expensive...

Hmmm .. I'll have to do some thinking

[Dan Friedrichs]

Not sure if you watched the video that Glenn posted, but that was an example of a single guy in a production shop doing a door in 17mins. Obviously 16 hours is quite a large delta from that estimate...

[andrew whicker]

Yeah, I've seen that video a few times and that's a million dollar shop. Not my speed yet

[John TenEyck]

A takeaway from Dan's comment is that you can't compete with a shop like that, so maybe you should look to outsource the doors to one them. You might be money far ahead and have time to work on other aspects of the project where your shop rate has less impact on overall project cost.

John

[Rege Sullivan]

I would figure about 4 to 6 hours... then reality would hit and take a good 2 days to finish.

[andrew whicker]

Right. And we do have a shop about 30 min away that specializes in making flat pack everything you can think of, assembled drawers, assembled doors and drawer fronts. I didn't like their quality on drawers. I need to buy a door and see what I think. They charge $140 for the larger door (using 4/4 stock, so thinner than the doors I made).

I think if I could get a door down to an one to one and a half hours I'd be in pretty good shape.

My inefficiencies are:
- sanding (potentially reduced significantly if I can get my planer running to run w/ nearly zero snipe)
- final thickness-ing (planer lost some sort of calibration at the end my runs.. need it to be zero snipe or close to it)
- Setting up shaper for both male and female cut (this is on me, I can find faster ways)
- breaking down sheet goods (this will go a lot smoother once I get my RAS up and running... capable of 24" cross cuts. I also need to get build some left side support on my table saw to help me cut full sheets)

My thought process for the stiles and rails:
- plane each side to clean
- joint as necessary to get a clean edge
- TS edges to get straight
- Cut to correct width + 1/16 / + 3/32
- Plane to final width (digital readout on planer)
- Cut to length
- Shaper long side (groove)
- Shaper ends (Tongue)
- Ready for assy

[Phillip Mitchell]

A takeaway from Dan's comment is that you can't compete with a shop like that, so maybe you should look to outsource the doors to one them. You might be money far ahead and have time to work on other aspects of the project where your shop rate has less impact on overall project cost.

John

I have done some of both and find it completely impossible and futile to compete with cabinet door factory pricing for paint grade, shaker, off the shelf type designs and sizes if that’s what someone wants. The only time it “makes sense” to make standard design doors is if there’s a timeline crunch or if there’s only a small handful.

I do tend to like to keep things in house, though, and tend to take on projects that are not standard so my value proposition of true customization is actually valuable to the client. And I am not a cabinet shop, though I do tend to take on occasional smaller scale custom cabinetry projects at times.

You could order these doors from a cabinet door factory online or locally/regionally and get them for probably around $1k +/- depending on location, etc.

I ordered a kitchen’s worth of sanded but unfinished doors for a re-facing project once and it cost a little more total than what my estimated raw materials cost would have been, not to mention the labor to build them. Not sure if the scale is there for 8 doors (and only 2 different sizes), though.

[Walter Mooney]

Yeah, I've seen that video a few times and that's a million dollar shop. Not my speed yet

I’m not sure a million dollars covers it :D

[andrew whicker]

Yeah, looks like $900 for those 8 doors from our local vendor. I'll have to see how well they are filled and prepped for paint.

It's a good point. Maybe I should let it go.

[andrew whicker]

I’m not sure a million dollars covers it :D

I don't think so either

[John TenEyck]

I would not try to handle full sheets of anything on a TS. I use a circular saw to break them down into manageable pieces. In your situation, a track saw may make more sense as you could easily cut to finished dimensions, no RAS required (though I do love mine and am jealous of one that has 24" capacity).

John

[George Yetka]

1 hours to program
4 hours to cut on cnc(solid MDF)
1 hrs to paint over a day or so
is what your probably competing with.

If it were me:
6 hrs milling
6 hrs cut and prep
2 hrs glue
2 hrs sanding
4 hrs paint

[andrew whicker]

Here's more my speed on future shop set up (short term):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSche40a-O0

I would do some things differently, but tooling wise this is pretty close to my 1 year vision of where I'll be.

As far as tracksaws, I'm using it a lot and I prefer to move on from it soon. They take a long time to set up, etc. Right now I use a track saw both for ripping and cross cutting. For cross cut, I use a MFT set up. It takes a LONG time to break down sheet goods using this method. My RAS is theoretically going to take over my cross cuts and that will speed things up quite a bit. If I could cut full sheets on my cabinet saw, that would speed things up even further.

[John TenEyck]

Here's more my speed on future shop set up (short term):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSche40a-O0

I would do some things differently, but tooling wise this is pretty close to my 1 year vision of where I'll be.

As far as tracksaws, I'm using it a lot and I prefer to move on from it soon. They take a long time to set up, etc. Right now I use a track saw both for ripping and cross cutting. For cross cut, I use a MFT set up. It takes a LONG time to break down sheet goods using this method. My RAS is theoretically going to take over my cross cuts and that will speed things up quite a bit. If I could cut full sheets on my cabinet saw, that would speed things up even further.

Not sure I understand why a tracksaw takes a long time to set up. Flop the straightedge on the cut line and cut. Picking up full sheets of plywood and especially MDF to get them onto your tablesaw will make you old before your time. You need some sort of lift system if you want to pursue that option. Your back will thank you if you do or curse you if you don't.

John

[J.R. Rutter]

Ready to paint in about 4 hours, with the last 45 minutes or so on day 2. But I am pretty optimized for this. And the tall doors would still fit in my clamp. I dislike hand clamping, haha.

Edit: I just made 7 paint grade maple doors this morning for a friend who was under the gun to finish a little project. No center rails, but <3 hours total, starting from 15/16" H&M material. He wanted veneer panels, so I used a mix of leftover maple. It really is nice to have a complete system for door making. Karl and I have compared notes in the past and we have a slightly different approach but similar results. With engineered panels like mdf core, no need to reinforce the cope and stick, just glue the panels in.

[Jared Sankovich]

I don't think so either

You could ask him.

This is the build thread for that shop.
https://sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?247763-My-new-shop&highlight=

[Kevin Jenness]

Ready to paint in about 4 hours, with the last 45 minutes or so on day 2. But I am pretty optimized for this. And the tall doors would still fit in my clamp. I dislike hand clamping, haha.

Edit: I just made 7 paint grade maple doors this morning for a friend who was under the gun to finish a little project. No center rails, but <3 hours total, starting from 15/16" H&M material. He wanted veneer panels, so I used a mix of leftover maple. It really is nice to have a complete system for door making. Karl and I have compared notes in the past and we have a slightly different approach but similar results. With engineered panels like mdf core, no need to reinforce the cope and stick, just glue the panels in.

You don't run your doors through the wide belt immediately after clamping? ;) ( I'm sure Karl did that only to show the elapsed time in an unedited sequence, I mention it only to point out that sanding before the glue dries invites sunken joints.)

Do you reinforce the cope & stick on doors with solid panels?

[J.R. Rutter]

You don't run your doors through the wide belt immediately after clamping? ;) ( I'm sure Karl did that only to show the elapsed time in an unedited sequence, I mention it only to point out that sanding before the glue dries invites sunken joints.)

Do you reinforce the cope & stick on doors with solid panels?

Haha, my understanding is either widebelt immediately after glue grabs or wait until it is dry. I have a wood welder that I use to heat up joints on rush jobs. Then they are good to sand as soon as it cools down ~ 1/2 hour.

On unusually large doors, I'll put a domino in, but otherwise no reinforcement. On doors that I've broken apart, the glue lines stay intact.