How I make doors.

[Martin Wasner]

Martin or others, I am interested in what quantities you need to order before your suppliers will offer 2 sided planing or SLR options?

Usually I'm trying to get a dollar amount so they'll deliver for free. I think most of the suppliers I deal with are about $600, which unless I screwed something up isn't a problem. I haven't had anyone give me any crap about surfacing or straight edging though regardless of quantity.

One question though: if this door were in a run of doors would you let it sit after glueing before moving on to the finish prep?

Things sit for a bit typically. It doesn't take long for glue to tack up and be good for going through the widebelt though. I also don't pull the door out of the clamp until the next one is ready to go in either. That gives it a minute or two to sit with pressure on it.

I really like that pneumatic clamping table.
One question;
How do the fasteners get hidden that were shot into the frame after glue up? Are they to be painted?

I really dislike that door clamp. It doesn't mash things together hard enough for my taste. I'm running on a lower pressure here than I was at the old shop, and the performance has really fallen off. We end up putting a pipe clamp on a lot of doors because of it. I'm hoping to replace it with a JLT rotary door clamp this year. I really don't want to buy a new one as they're over $20k, but they don't come up used very often. The only one currently available that I've found is in BC. The price is reasonable, but I don't know what the international shipping requires, or costs. It's also REALLY far away.

The nails just get puttied. Whether stain grade or painted. That door just went into the dumpster after I made it. It was just for the video.

[Mark Bolton]

Super cool video. I as well am in the camp that your running far from a small shop. I could fit multiples of my shop in that space. Really nice to have a place to spread your wings.

Our process is nearly identical to yours with some equipment differences. We break down material almost identically, back fence on shaper, and so on. We do mostly natural finish and raised panel only difference. I have never been satisfied with pinning the doors and quickly out of the clamps so they sit clamped while another is assembled on the other side of the table.

As stated, there is no doubt you cut that number drastically in batch production or just in dedicated focus on making the door and not making the video. Id bet youd shave a bunch off if someone else was filming with a stop clock running.

[Mark Bolton]

Martin or others, I am interested in what quantities you need to order before your suppliers will offer 2 sided planing or SLR options? Nobody ever returns my call here unless I ask for more than 1,000bdft. That does not fit in my storage container with all the other things. I chatted with Mark B one time and he orders his most of his stock that way. He has not used his planer much in quite a while, and that sounds sweet. Making blanks seems like too much time without the big machines.

Our suppliers will SLR, S2S, S4S, on any order. Its just a per BF additional cost. We have one supplier that will not allow orders of any individual grade or species under 800'. So if your order has 3 grades of Oak they each have to be 800'. They will surface any or all of it as requested. Another supplier we only pull full and half packs from. 600+ feet in a half 1200+ in fulls, and they also have 1 1/2 packs at 1800+. Same deal on the surfacing. The third will sell a single board or a tractor and trailer load. They are the most expensive across the board even on full packs usually by at least 30% which Ive spoken with them about often when they quote full units but they swear they cant get their numbers down to the other two.

You and I have talked bout the supply issue up there. I know how hard I have had to work to get decent supply here, and have had to buy in large quantities to make anything work. I feel your pain. Seems like youve got it even harder than we do.

[Mark Bolton]

Your router was made not too far from me. I was considering a Shopsabre for a while.

We have one of their 408PRO's, 10HP HSD, 10 pos ATC and its been flawless. Their customer service through the sale and after have been nothing but great.

[Martin Wasner]

I was kind of thinking you were cheating a little with that pre-planed frame stock. I average one door per day in batches of 6 to 10, but they are 3-0x6-8 and I start from rough sawn with glued up panels. That also includes jambs, stops, and mortising for three hinges on the door and the jamb. My shop is under $100,000.00 by a good bit too. My time is improving though as I just got a slider in December and used my shaper for the first time this past week (I was waiting on tooling). I'll knock an hour off the week in shaper setup alone going forward.

Cheating is subjective. This is production where it's cheaper for me to throw away lumber than it is to mill it flat piece by piece on the jointer, then plane. Is that a better way to get straight lumber? Yes it is. But I have to make money at this too and I'm already on the pointy end of pricing. There's a lot of stuff too where bowed lumber doesn't matter. Like face frames. Throw a clamp on it and mash it down tight to the box for a couple of minutes for the glue to tack, and it's not going anywhere. So some of it that wouldn't fly for doors can be used for other things.


Pass doors are a different ball of wax than cabinet doors. much more labor intensive and the product catches much more abuse than a cabinet door.
I have wanted to try building two big cabinet doors then glueing them back to back to make a pass door. I'm not sure if that would work well or not. My mechanical room needs two big sliding doors that I haven't gotten around to building and I was going to try that as an experiment on those. It'd be kinda cool if you wanted to do two different species on each face though. Or, if you wanted to do say a square profile and flat panel on one face, and different sticking and panel on the other. Or both.


I'm a big fan of tools having basically one use. No set up, just walk up to it and do what you need to do. I've got four tablesaws in the shop, (five, if you count the rip saw), three of them are dedicated to one job each. One for ripping plywood, one for dado-ing sheetstock, one for doing nothing but plowing drawer parts for bottoms. The fourth is for the benches and does whatever needs to be done. We've got six shapers, and I wouldn't mind at least one more. Cabinets take a lot of tools which take up a lot of space. The building cost me almost a $500k, and there's over $500k in equipment if it burns down. I'm thrifty and shop for a lot of used equipment, but the cost to replace it doesn't change if something happens.

[Martin Wasner]

We have one of their 408PRO's, 10HP HSD, 10 pos ATC and its been flawless. Their customer service through the sale and after have been nothing but great.

They are literally 25 minutes from my shop. The proximity was a huge appeal if I had a problem. They didn't seem real responsive though when I said when it goes down, I want somebody on my doorstep in an hour. So, not for me. I don't think I fit their demographic and will likely be going with an Andi/Giben router instead.

That's a big chunk of money though. eek...

I despise debt, but I'm kicking around either leasing or borrowing to get a CNC in place sooner. It's really hard to save up $150k.

[Brad Shipton]

Mark, I think you guys just have better options in the US. We are not a big enough market, so the players in the wood world get to pick and choose. I did get prices from Advantage to do exactly what I want, and they still email asking to supply me lumber. My local guys would never do that in a million years. I have a 1,000 bdft bundle of 5/4 cherry coming and it was basically, take the whole thing or nothing. They almost laughed when I asked about having it prepped. I really like buying in the US because of the customer service and options. It doesn't hurt that you guys live near the area where my wood comes from too I suppose.

Sounds like a nice CNC Martin. That must be a tank of a machine. If I could ever afford a real one I would like a CR Onsrud Panel Mate.

[Martin Wasner]

Super cool video. I as well am in the camp that your running far from a small shop. I could fit multiples of my shop in that space. Really nice to have a place to spread your wings.

It's a good sized building, but it's still a small shop. It's been just me for the last month and a half in here. I've got a new guy starting on Monday, and should probably add another guy, but I'll pull my hair out strand by strand if I have to train two guys at once. I'm fortunate in that some other good/lucky decisions have lead to me not needing much income from the shop, so I dump as much as I can back into the business. The seed money from my building came from paying cash for a hunk of crap house when the market bottomed out, remodeling it way more than I should have, and selling it for almost $100k in profit. I have a very modest home, don't have any expensive toys anymore, and all my vehicles are old. (My wife has a brand new car, but that's her problem) So that's how I can afford the building I've got. Though it is really expensive still. The mortgage, taxes, insurance, insurance, and utilities cost me about $7k a month. (I am on a very aggressive payment schedule as well though) That's a bit much for one guy to swallow.

Moral of the story, I'm trying to grow aggressively, and have done my best the last five years to set myself up for success on that front.

My old shop was 2500 sq/ft. And most of the equipment that's in here, was in there. It was a phone booth. It is amazing how much more profitable, and efficient this place is compared to my old shop. Even simple things like having a forklift and not unloading trucks and racking material by hand is huge. If I have a lot of ripping or cutting of sheet stock to do, I just pull the bunk out of the rack and plop it down right next to the saw. I really wish I would've done it sooner, though I'm not sure the timing would've been correct any sooner.

Our process is nearly identical to yours with some equipment differences. We break down material almost identically, back fence on shaper, and so on. We do mostly natural finish and raised panel only difference. I have never been satisfied with pinning the doors and quickly out of the clamps so they sit clamped while another is assembled on the other side of the table.

That's one of reasons I want to go with a rotary clamp. I figure they'll have at least seven minutes of sitting time, and probably more like ten, with clamp pressure on them with that setup.

As stated, there is no doubt you cut that number drastically in batch production or just in dedicated focus on making the door and not making the video. Id bet youd shave a bunch off if someone else was filming with a stop clock running.

I figure about two minutes could be wiped out of that process doing it as you say. I wasn't hustling. I was carrying a phone around. I left my cutlist scribbled on a block of wood on the pop up saw as well which added 15-20 seconds.

[Brian Holcombe]

Martin, Just curious about the glue up aspect. Is radio frequency glue curing something you’ve considered?

I sold furniture for a number of years and one if our solid wood producers was always on about their radio frequency glue curing machine (I don’t know why they included this in their sales info, it must have been expensive enough that they wanted to show it off). I don’t do production work, but I thought it was pretty cool.

[Martin Wasner]

Sounds like a nice CNC Martin. That must be a tank of a machine. If I could ever afford a real one I would like a CR Onsrud Panel Mate.

This is the one that's currently at the top of my wishlist.

Just the router is $110k.
But I need different software than what I currently run, another $25k.
Tooling will probably be $5k to start with.
Another vacuum pump since plywood is basically like throwing a sponge on the table and trying to suck it down.
Training, since I have zero clue what I'm doing.
Rigging will cost probably $2k
I'm not sure what shipping will be, but dead minimum I'd guess a grand
and a little bit of wiggle room so I don't panic when things cost more.

Then there's the little things. Wiring, which there's already a pipe in the rack for it. Dust collection modification. Running air to it. (Getting a CNC is the whole reason I bought the compressor I did since they need clean, cool, dry air. And a lot of it)

I process roughly 400 sheets a year currently for boxwork not including backs. It should take my machining time from about 1 hour per sheet down to about 15 minutes per sheet saving me about 300 hours per year at current production rates. That's huge. Using my baseline $100/hour per man target gross rate, that's $30k per year, which would give me a five year payback. Shorter if growth takes place.

[Martin Wasner]

Martin, Just curious about the glue up aspect. Is radio frequency glue curing something you’ve considered?

I don't know much about it, and I haven't been exposed to it. I think JR does some RF gluing, but I'm not sure if that's for panels, or door assembly. I kinda feel it's for panels.

There's some wacky stuff out there. The shop I bought my dust collector from is huge and built box cabinets for Menards. Like 50-60 people per shift, on three shifts. They would do runs of pallets of doors that were all the same size and had a specialized clamp that not only clamped the door, but nailed it as well. The gal that was feeding it was keeping a pretty good pace just to keep up with that clamp. I don't know if that was RF glued in that scenario or not. I'm kinda betting it was. I don't think that particular setup would work in a custom enviroment where out of 100 doors, you might have to adjust it 40 times. Whereas they were running probably 500 or a 1000 doors that were the same size. It kinda looked like a pain to setup for the next run.


They had two guys feeding defecting saws too. That was pretty awesome to watch. You mark on the rip with a piece of chalk what needs to be cut out, and the machine scans and chops it to lengths. An 8' stick of material became parts in about 20 seconds from the point the operator picked it up to when the parts started falling into bins. It also automatically sorted the parts. Wild. Thats a different game though.

[Darcy Warner]

Just add a facer belted to a planer.

[David Kumm]

When you replace people with machinery that is debt financed you must have growth or at least a good economy. People costs can be reduced faster than monthly payments when things slow down. depreciation rules favor purchasing over leasing but if you front load the depreciation there will be a cash flow problem in the out years when the depr runs out so you are paying tax and principal at the same time. DAve

[Martin Wasner]

When you replace people with machinery that is debt financed you must have growth or at least a good economy. People costs can be reduced faster than monthly payments when things slow down. depreciation rules favor purchasing over leasing but if you front load the depreciation there will be a cash flow problem in the out years when the depr runs out so you are paying tax and principal at the same time. DAve

It's a gamble if I'm not paying cash. I'm hoping it opens some other doors and I can keep the thing running all day long doing outside work. There's lots of small shops around that I can machine their box parts with a cnc cheaper than they can. Plus it opens some doors for my business as there's some work I just won't take on because it's currently not profitable. Like closest systems. They're cheap to make with excellent margins if equip'd correctly.

[David Kumm]

You are right about closet systems. I can't believe what is charged for crap partial box stuff. Cheaper to have custom made when you factor quality. The doors you looked at were all made for closet cabinets. About the only things I make for myself that I figure I get some return for my time on. Dave