Used Uni-saw

[Karl Brogger]

Any idea on what a used Uni-saw is worth? This one just popped up on Craigslist. 3hp 1ph right tilt. I don't care for/hate the unifence does anyone know what it costs for a Biesemeyer setup? This will be a strictly dado saw for me. That's gonna be nice.

http://images.craigslist.org/01010501020701160320080322f9e6942de2069cc98700e51c .jpg

[Cary Falk]

Used Unisaws are listed for $1000 around here. I don't know what they sell for. Unless you can find somebody selling the Lowe's Biesemeyer I would probably expect to pay $300-400 for a new one.
Cary

[Karl Brogger]

This one is listed for $900. He sounds firm. So long as there isn't anything wrong with it when I go look at it I will probably buy it. From the picture it looks like something has been done with the switch. The ad says it hasn't been used in 5 years. I wonder what 5 years of neglect has done to it?

[Vernon Taylor]

Any idea on what a used Uni-saw is worth? This one just popped up on Craigslist. 3hp 1ph right tilt. I don't care for/hate the unifence does anyone know what it costs for a Biesemeyer setup? This will be a strictly dado saw for me. That's gonna be nice.

http://images.craigslist.org/01010501020701160320080322f9e6942de2069cc98700e51c .jpg

I have a uni with the unifenceand love it for it's versatility particularily the ability to slide the fence back and use it as cutoff stop.One option which I have is the uni-t-fence which directly substitutes for the OEM fence face, IIRC the price was less than $100, this gives you the ability to attach jigs,holddowns etc.To me this gives the most useful arrangement and
would cost substantially less than replacing with the Biesmeyer and takes less than 5 minutes to accomplish. I got mine from Peachstate.

[Brad Noble]

Any idea on what a used Uni-saw is worth? This one just popped up on Craigslist. 3hp 1ph right tilt. I don't care for/hate the unifence does anyone know what it costs for a Biesemeyer setup? This will be a strictly dado saw for me. That's gonna be nice.

http://images.craigslist.org/01010501020701160320080322f9e6942de2069cc98700e51c .jpg

A dado saw? I mean, what would you consider your main saw? I'm not trying to be a wise guy here but for $900 I could probably get a pretty good used saw of lesser quality to use for a dado saw and give you change back big time. Just my opinion.

Brad

[Karl Brogger]

Right now I'm using a PM66 for everything.

The plan is to have at least four table saws in the shop.
One for general wood use. 50T
One for Dado-ing
One for cutting sheat stock 80T
And another for just ripping solid stock w/ a feeder. a 12-14" of some sort.

Changing blades takes too long.

My tooling is growing, unfortunatly my building isn't. Last year I spent around $25k on tooling. I'm hoping to do about the same this year, but I don't have anywhere to put anything at this point. This saw will be going into my garage at home just waiting to for space once the shop gets moved. Right now I can't add anything else and still have room for staging boxes.

When I do get a new shop I'm going to be really poor for a really long time.

The short list: (Hopefully in the next 2 years)
Vertical panel saw
more table saws
a few more shapers, (at least 2)
Frame table
Door clamp
Whirlwind pop up saw with Tiger stop
Forklift

The long list: (Hopefully in the next 5 years)
43" dual head Timesavers widebelt sander, replaces 37" singlehead
grinder
beam saw
more shapers
32 spindle double row line bore, replaces 13 spindle single line
Straight line rip saw.

The biggest choke right now is the space I'm in. Due to a marginal housing market I'm not too sure I can afford to build a new building, so I can expand, to do more work, to buy more tooling, to build a new building, so I can expand, to do more work, to.............

My goal is to have about 10 employees in ten years or less. No more. Keep things small enough to keep it semi manageable. Right now I have one, and hardly enough to keep him busy. It would be nice to crank out two moderate sized kitchens, ($15K-25K) every week. That would get me to about $1.5m-$2m gross annually. Right now I'm no where near that with two guys. A shop I worked for did $25.7m gross one year with about 50 guys. That place was a finely tuned machine.

[Peter Quinn]

Karl, stop playing games with these silly cabinet saws and get your self a 14" Northfield and a 10' Martin slider. For that matter get your self a Martin shaper, stack for sets of cutters on it, program it, and lose a few of those other shapers that are getting in the way.

Think big man!:D:D:D

PS...can I give you an address to ship those extra shapers to? And maybe the uni too?

[Brodie Brickey]

Karl,

A couple years ago, I bought an older ('90s) uni with 2hp for $600 off ebay. I think you may still find some better deals than that for 900. Its not unreasonable, but maybe a little excessive.

Since you can get a new one for only 500-600 more, I'd be inclined to negotiate down especially if I'm going to have to bend down and drop the plywood I'm feed to turn the saw off.

[Karl Brogger]

Karl, stop playing games with these silly cabinet saws and get your self a 14" Northfield and a 10' Martin slider.

I've never cared for sliders. I've never used a really good one though. A veritical panel saw is slick. I don't know about Holz Her, but striebeg's will crosscut or rip 3 sheats at a time. At some point I hope to have a beam saw for doing most of the sheat stock cutting and use the V. panel saw for cross cutting shelf stock, or for cutting angled parts.


I love Northfield equipment. It is some of the best made. But holy hell is it expensive. And made in my home town. Hence alot of bias!

I was at another shop a few weeks ago. They had a sliding table shaper with the cutters stacked. It seemed like a really expesive way to do things. It did have a small foot print compared to having 3 shapers set up all the time, but how do two people work on one machine? Ideally you have two cope shapers setup to do each profile. One left, one right. You never get any tear out this way, or have to mess with a backer block on the profile side. Which is a hassle, and semi dangerous to make.

[Joe Jensen]

Karl, I am not commercial (yet), but I seriously investigated and did a business plan about 2 years ago. I read a ton online and found several shops that tried to replace people with automation whereever possible. The logic was that turnover and training were a huge cost. One shop went from 10 heads to 4 in 3 years and doubled their business. They moved from lots of small machines to a big CNC, tiger stop setups, etc. I looked seriously at an Onsrud 3 axis CNC as the cornerstone of the shop. For cabinets, one CNC should replace several people, zero waste, no turnover. On doors, I didn't see how I could make money making doors. I was getting quotes of around $5-6 a square foot for sanded raised panel red oak doors. I don't see how I could make them with $2.50/bd ft red oak. Turn around seems pretty good. The big concern is when you screw up a measurement, you have a 3 week wait for a replacement.

My plan was to use the CNC to cut, dado, and drill carcases. Buy doors until I was comfortable that I could make them cheaper. Also, I planned to use the CNC to go after the front entry door market. Before the housing crash here in Phx, nice custom 9 ft solid hardood entry doors were selling to contractors for $3K. That Onsrud CNC dealer demoed cutting all the parts for a 40" wide 10 foot tall arched top entry door on the CNC in 8 minutes. Lots of non precision glue ups and laminations ahead of time, but perfection once cut.

The other area that scared me was the finishing operation. Lots of zoning issues, and a place where you could get out of control quality wise very fast.

I was planning on a $1M startup budget. $400K for tools and building, and another $600K for operations until profitable. I'm lucky I didn't pull the trigger as the housing market here is dead.

[Alan Schaffter]

Sell the FX-1 and buy a Northfield :D:D

[Bruce Pennell]

Karl saw this on CL Tucson (http://tucson.craigslist.org/tls/611755965.html)thought you might want to take a peek. Don't know if shipping would be to much. Hope this is the type of clamping system that on your list.:D

[Karl Brogger]

Alan- How many people know what an FXone is, or an FX-1? (I have a jet ski that is a FX-1 as well, sad I know)

Bruce that's a good price. Shipping would probably be a killer since it is so over sized. The big ones don't come around too often. I don't think I would be so brave as to call it "highest production", but that's just me. That big shop I worked at had a clamp carrier that could handle something like 100+ panels at a time. It worked on a kind of conveyor. Put the panels in the clamps, hit a button and it leveled them out, then clamped them. Rotate the next set of clamps up. Pretty slick. I don't even want to guess what that cost.

Joe- CNC's need to have a beam saw in addition to work at thier most efficient. They shouldn't be used for cutting, just for the machining. I don't care what the salesmen says, or the brochure. If you have one machine cutting the parts and another machining it goes way faster, with better results. Plus there is less wear and tear on a very expensive piece of equipment that will flat out ruin you if it goes down for a week if it is the only way you have to produce parts. I worked at a shop that had a CNC put in about 6 months before I left. There was some serious teething problems. They did it kinda goofy. They only used it for base cabinet parts, and then only for partitions and for ends. No decks. I honestly don't think it was any faster, or produced better parts than what a well trained person could do with a table saw. That shop produced on average 5 custom kitchens a day. Granted this wasn't high end stuff. Metal drawer boxes, no backs in base's, and melamine. Another thing they did wierd was that the design didn't come from one of the computers from the office. There was a catalog of parts that the operator would punch in the number of what was needed for the cabinet and load the appropriate sized piece. This CNC used the pods, not the full flat table. Two parts would fit in the machine, one would be being machined while the other was being loaded/unloaded on the opposite side. The biggest thing for saving time I thought was for cutting out tops for trash roll outs, (we made our own), the half hole wine racks, and arches in rails. That kind of stuff saved a bunch of time, but I don't know if it justified the almost expense. I don't know what they payed for it. I thought they spent almost $200k, but that sounds kinda/really high.

Biggest thing for doing this commercially is having the contacts. Having people that on a regular basis need to have something done. I don't advertise its all been word of mouth.
The second biggest thing is debt. When you HAVE to make money you are screwed. My business carries no debt, and has low overhead at this point. If I don't have anything to do, I go sailing, and give my one employee the day or the rest of the week off. There is alot of guys right now who have screwed themselves because they borrowed a ton of money and the housing market fell on its face. I can shut the lights off and go home. Granted I still need to make money, but if I just have a house payment, and a vehicle payment it's not so bad compared to paying $3500 a month for equipment that is sitting idle and having the mortgage and truck payment. One of the key things to making it work for me if I were to put up a new shop is that I'm building it 3 times as large as I need. Hopefully I can generate enough income from renting out the other 2/3's that I will be able to have my space for very little out of pocket cost. That and I'm going to "hopefully" be able to put almost $100k down on a new building, which I'm hoping will be less than $250k. 7500 sq ft is what I'm looking at, and I'll be occupying just the front 1/3rd for now. Which will be almost double the space I have now. I'm sure it'll be cramped in a matter of weeks! If things go really well, I may just put up another building and rent out the whole thing. That's wishfull thinking.

[Dave MacArthur]

Karl,
I really enjoyed reading this thread, particularly the posts from you and Joe Jensen on the economics of a shop business.

In Phoenix, I see used unisaws of various repair going 450-1000. For $900 that looks decent to me; $100 or so less not worth the wait/hope.

[Joe Jensen]

Karl, thanks for the comments. I was definitely looking at trying to go big time. Back before the credit crunch, the lease cost for the big CNC was pretty reasonable. A $150K version was like $2k a month. On top of that you needed like $25-50k in software. These SW packages went from custom design , 3D modeling for the client, and then straight to the CNC.

One of the things I didn't do was meet with any shop owners. None in Phx wanted to talk as they saw me as a potential competitor. Maybe if the market improves, I'll fly to another state to meet with some owners. All the CNC sales literature and DVDs show doing all cuts on the CNC. At only $2K a month, the CNC is cheaper than an employee. Interestingly, robotics are now showing up to feed and unload the CNCs. Something like $50-100K just for the robot. The other big issue is the CAD experience curve. Doing cabinets is a piece of cake with the expensvie SW packages. Doing custom parts looks very challenging. The experienced CAD guy at the dealer spent over an hour on a pretty simple demo part I wanted him to make. Un the plus side, once a part is designed, changing sizes is a piece of cake, (like the entry door thing).

Best wishes, you obviously have a ton more experience here than me.

One more thought, how has it been managing employees for you? My brother in law managed hourly workers in retail for 22 years. Low wage workers were terribly unreliable. At one point he managed a Circuit City and he expected their workers to be more reliable as they averaged over $50K a year. In the end he saw them as unreliable as the $8 an hour folks.

I've had a 24 year career in high tech and I've only managed very reliable, well educated, and well compensated professionals. I'm thinking that I'd like to minimize the number of workers as it seems that skilled guys are hard to find and retain here in Phx..joe

[Karl Brogger]

I jumped into this just as things were on the downside. I spent about $20k out of pocket on tooling right off the bat. I had the bare minimums, but it was a start. I also was working out of space that I already had. I've been on my own since 2004. 2007 was the first year I actually made money. 2006 I had to get a job for 4-5 months to stay afloat. The first and second years I lost money, and drew heavily from savings to stay alive. Last year I added alot of tooling.

I have only one employee, and at best he's unreliable, but he rarely makes the same mistake twice, but he does try to do everything wrong at least once. The trades atracts a lower order of people I think. Generally uneducated, many came from lower middle class homes and have a chip on there shoulder because of it. Now before anyone gets huffy its not everyone, but as a generalization its true. I never graduated high school, so I probably fall in that generalization.

Six years ago you would have been beating people trying to give you money back with a bat. That definetly isn't the case anymore. The last shop I worked at we were allowed unlimited access to the shop after hours to do side jobs. I worked 55 hours a week for the shop, and probably another 15-25 doing side jobs. I was also about 22 at the time and never made so much money. Then the brilliant plan of doing it on my own came along. I went from making almost $70k a year to eating ramen more frequently than I care to admit.

Vertical integration. Some else is making money making doors so why not you? Your costs shouldn't be much higher than from a giant company that does nothing but make doors. If you're charged $20 for a door, and selling it for $55 is it really that bad if it costs you $25 to make the same thing? Remeber it's not always about doing things as cheaply as possible its also about taking away work from others. I've bid and gotten numerous jobs that I made 15% less than what I would have liked just so I could take it away from competitors. I may be hungry, but they'll be starving. It's business, suffer now, gain later, (hopefully) I do alot of wood turnings slightly more than cost, just to take it away from others. That and you have to charge an absurd amount of money to make anything doing turnings. Prices that no one would pay.

At this point if a job that had a steady paycheck and decently, $50k+ I'd probably take it. I'd be surprised if I netted $30k last year, and I grossed about a $125k. It's frusterating. If I could get full price for everything I probably would have doubled my take home, or reinvested it into the shop to make things faster and smoother. If I were to quit now, and just do it as a hobby I'd have a pretty awesome hobby shop.

[Karl Brogger]

Another thing Joe- The last shop I worked at I was there 3 years. I learned alot more than I did at any other place that I worked at about the way a shop should work. This is invalueble information. They were very departmentlized. 4 people did cut out. 20 or so did nothing but make doors. There was 3 people making face frames. 3-4 people in the drawer dept. 4, 2 man install crews. 2, 2 man delivery crews. about 10 people assembling cabinets. About 3 people did nothing but run a rip saw and a moulder to make trim, face frame parts, and door stick material

That was the great thing about doing side jobs there. Half the work was already done. Face frame material was all ripped and sized, you just needed to cut it to length. Same with door frame material. Partitions, and ends for boxes were already to size, they just needed to be machined. Decks were all ripped and just needed to be cut to length/machined. Two guys could build a kitchen on the side in a quarter of the time it takes me in my shop. Moulders for raised panels that cut and sanded the profile, same with some of the door edges. We had 3 dual head Widebelt sanders. One for rough sanding, one for fine sanding, and with a buffing head to take out cross grain scratches. With the right combination of profiles you didn't have to do anything other than break the edges. Like I said, that shop was a well oiled machine. The greatest shop I ever worked at. Also the biggest jerk I ever worked for.

[Jeff Duncan]

Karl, sounds like you've got a plan of action and that's half the battle right there. So many guys go into this business without any knowledge of how a cabinetmaking business should run, and it's no surprise they end up closing after a couple years.
For the time being I think your doing the right thing, using cash to purchase and upgrade equipment. This will get your shop equipped enough to handle a reasonable amount of output. Once the economy rebounds and you start to grow then you'll need to start thinking about financing equipment. To efficiently create the kind of production your talking about you'll eventually need to move into the big leagues in terms of machinery. Widebelt sanders that cost $50k+, edgebanders $25k+, construction boring machine or CNC, etc, etc,. All the expensive stuff that you won't easily be able to buy cash but will need to improve flow.
Of course you'll also have to keep in mind that you won't be doing anything on the shop floor, but will be management at that level. Besides your guys on the floor you'll need sales employees, h.r., designer/s, etc.etc.. the only reason I mention this is because I hear of a lot of guys who grow their businesses only to be disillusioned when they wind up with a desk job. Which is when they turn around and downsize their companies to several employees again. But everyone has different goals for their business so you have to do what's right for you.
Lastly, to get way back to your original post, I think the Uni value depends on it's condition. If it's in great shape $1k isn't bad, sure you could get one for less and maybe end up replacing bearings, motor electricals, but sometimes it's better to spend the money and get something ready to go. In general I would recommend buying slightly better than you can afford. I've learned the hard way why Asian import machinery is so inexpensive, your much better off with older American machinery, or certain European made equipment. For instance, I have 3 shapers in the shop now, a 3hp Delta less than 10 years old, a 5 hp Powermatic 27 less than 6 months old, and an old Asian 3hp import about 30 years old that's the best of the 3. For what I spent on the 3 shapers I could have gotten a used SCMI or similar heavy duty shaper and been better off. I also just replaced a brand new 20" Bridgewood planer with a 30+ year old SCM 20". Moral of the story, buy the best you can afford the first time so you don't have to buy everything twice.
good luck,
JeffD

[Karl Brogger]

I picked it up yesterday. The saw for the most part is in good condition. The deck is all beat to hell. Which was disapointing, but everything else was in top notch condition. I think I'm just going to take the top to somewhere and have it resurfaced. I don't understand the thinking that a tablesaw should be used as an anvil.