Cabinet door production time

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For those of you that produce cabinet doors on a regular basis, how long does it take you to make an all wood, raised panel door with edges from start to finish? No mdf, no shaker 1/4" flat panels....all wood glued center panel with cope/stick stile and rail construction. I'm looking for an average time per door over a set of doors. Do not include any time for office work (computing parts, invoicing, etc.). I'm looking for just production time from the time your list hits the production area until the door is finish sanded and stacked for pick-up/delivery.
I'm checking to see how my production time compares with other shops.
Thanks.

Leo G

Member

I don't have a line or anything. Just a single man shop. But I do have 3 shapers setup to do the doors.

I figure about an hour per door, but that does include me figuring out the parts list. This is for doing doors and drawer fronts in a full kitchen of about 31 doors.

As a note, I don't have a widebelt sander so the sanding portion does take longer.

Geoff

We use one hour. Door only, no hinge pocket, no finish.We use two shapers and addition to coped rails we use one 3/8" dowel/joint (done on a horizontal boring machine)

Kenny

It would be helpful to know what equipment you guys are running to get those times.

A shop with slr, moulder, rotary door clamp, and 3 head widebelt should be significantly faster then a guy with a table saw, shaper, and pipe clamps.

Tracy, I am curious what your production time is?

keith farr

if I just walked in by myself ( no help) and needed one door - about 15- 18 minutes. Thats saying the desired cope and stick and door edge cutter was allready set up. If not add another two minutes. That from allready planed lumber in the pile to finished sanded . With all my regular door guys at their stations and a multi door list per door time would come way down

Tracy Yarborough

[X] Member's Business Categories: CNC Services - General Cabinets - Custom Cabinets Woodworking - General Member

I'm running about 30 mins per door.

2 men running the following processes:
13/16 slr1edge lumber, glue line ripsawed to 2 5/8 wide. Panel parts cut 1" oversized with chop saw and tiger sawstop. Glued up on a doucet clamp carrier,(glue applied with brush from bucket - we've tried glue pots and glue rollers, our best time is with the brush & bucket). Stiles and rails cut to length on same chop saw with electronic sawstop. Stiles and rails shaped and coped on dedicated shapers (unique 250 for coped ends and arched parts - scmi t110 with powerfeed for rails). Panels removed from clamps, planed flat (single sided 20" planer - min 2 passes), wide belt sanded (150G min 2 passes), then ran through a shape and sand for profiling. All parts are assembled in a doucet door clamp. Then ran through the widebelt as a finished door (again, 150 grit min 2 passes, usually 3), trimmed on the sliding panel saw for squaring to final dimensions, edge profiled (on shape and sand) or edge sanded on vega oscillating edge sander - depending on edge profile. Then putty applied if necessary to any minute open joint or cracks, then random orbit sanded to remove cross grain scratches, soften edges, and finish sand.

I'm trying to identify bottlenecks and overlaps. We are currently using batch methods, but have been looking at one piece production methods that look promising.
My goal is to get to a comfortable 20 min per door mark without burning out my guys.
Thanks for all responses.

Mark B

Member

We are a super small shop in comparison but with larger batches we can cut time dramatically. I dont think we are anywhere near 1 hour per door though I havent timed it specifically because it seems batch size affects time drastically for small shop.

We have been trying to move towards one piece flow as well but it can seem to be a major issue in small shops where re-tooling/setups are in the mix.

As stated in Tracy's reply as well, what material (grade in addition to surfacing/edging) is a major factor in the time line. For instance our suppliers sell miles of lower grade material to larger shops who internally grade and sort out various grade from larger low grade packs. We are simply too small to do this (though we do in certain areas like drawer material where we make a LOT of additional profit). We opt to buy packs of higher grade material (if we are in a time crunch it may even be FAS) where we can simply take any board from the pack and move it straight into production. This is of course on standard work where no fussy grain matching is required.

The whole one piece flow thing is very interesting and we are trying it quite a bit but it seems, at least to me, that it works much better in heavy-ish production environments as opposed to small operations. For instance there is simply no way I would be faster process, breaking down parts, and completing a single door as opposed to breaking down sticking in long lengths, breaking down panel material in long lengths, and batch processing parts gluing up many doors at a time in the rack. If I stationed single parts and came out with one door (using overlapping stations with guys covering multiple stations simultaneously) we would be making far less doors per day.

Larry

Mark, One pc. processing is a great idea but either requires no setup changes or lightening fast changes. If you are using shapers, you can reduce change over times by stack tooling on a spindle. It doesn't require digital readouts or CNC. Just dedicated height gages, preferably adjustable metal ones. Use inserted tooling so it is always the same size. I like to run to an outside fence so parts are always the same width, power fed of course. Use a metal fence with built in clamping. You can attach swing arms to the side of the shaper table with multiple notches or pin holes to locate the fence. I like to locate the center of the swing arms at the CL of the spindle. There are other ways of locating the fence that work just as well. They just need some fixed reference points. The miter gauge slot works also. At any rate, use the KISS principle. Make as much of it as visible as possible. The use of color coding can reduce stupid mistakes. Paint the tooling to match the ht. gage, etc. Set the tooling surface next to the ht. gage. You finger is accurate to better than .002" in feel. Eliminate all measuring, test cutting etc. For initial setups it is worth it to have some adjustability on your gages, then lock them tight. Get help from a machine shop if you need it. Give them a good drawing of what you are trying to accomplish. Most can maintain .001" accuracy very easily. I have a metal lathe and milling machine, with DROs, which helps sometimes. A CNC router can also be used to accurately cut aluminum, but AL is pretty soft for use as a gage. You can buy magnetic bases (like used to hold dial indicators) for your gages so they stay flat to the table. Nice because you can turn the magnet on & off with the switch.

Karl E Brogger

[X] Member

This thread got me curious how long it actually takes to build a cabinet door, so I made a little video. I know you said no shaker, but didn't feel like changing cutters or gluing up a panel for this. There's a hotlink at the bottom as well. I have no idea how to embed video on woodweb.

https://youtu.be/25GbUnlOHh4

As of 8:32 central, it's still uploading. YouTube is being a little slow for some reason.

Our process is as follows.

If raised panel, we start with the panels as you run out of clamp space with only 12' of clamp rack if you've got a bunch of doors, and you can be doing other stuff while glue is drying. We do joint everything for panels and we run our panels at 5/8" so they go through the planer twice, and through the widebelt twice before getting cut down to size and getting the profile machined in. We glue them up 1" long, and try to get around 1" oversized in width. We have a shaper dedicated to panel raising using a four wheel powerfeeder, and a continuous fence under the cutter. The cutter is a four wing carbide insert head from Dimensions in Tooling. I want to say it's spinning at 4500 rpm with a 17fpm feed rate.

I'd venture to guess that a raised panel would add another ten minutes to the construction of a door. Way more if it's just a single I'd bet. We started using a Dynabrade sander for the panel profile, it works alright. I'm confident there's no awesome way to sand those, but it's the best tactic I've used yet. The sanding is pretty minimal with that four wing, and the shaper is a tank that runs true so the cut is very nice.

For the door frame, we rip on the SLR an 1/8"+ oversized. Do our sticking cut first removing a 1/16", and then finish getting them to size with a straight cutter stacked underneath the sticking cutter. I shoot for the door being .040" oversized once assembled whether that is inset or overlay to allow sizing and/or fitment. If I want 2-1/4" sticking, we machine it at 2.270"
(If the job has paneled ends, we typically leave the stiles for those a 1/16" oversized so the panel is an 1/8" big. We pull the least straight material out for paneled ends before getting the rest of the door sticking down to size)

After the sticking is made we sort the material usually into five piles
1. Awesome
2. Good
3. Meh
4. Wow, not so good
5. Yikes.
Rails and stiles are cut on a pop up saw with a 10' Tigerstop. We do the largest stiles first out of the "awesome" stack and work our way through the material going down the list. With paneled drawer fronts, we generally work from the bottom of the pile up. If it's wonky, the dovetail drawer box will pull everything straight and it's no problem. Ideally on a decent sized batch you've got a few sticks of "good" and "meh" left over. If you don't and run short, there's usually some in the rack from the last run.

After cutting stiles and rails to length, the rails get coped. Currently we're using a pair of Powermatic 27 shapers for this task. With shaker style, you can use a square backer on both faces to prevent blow out. That doesn't work with anything other than a square profile, so we do left and right copers that are parked right next to one another for anything that has a profile. The long term plan is to replace those two hunks of garbage with a PMK coper, where you can do two single sided parts at once, and they act as a backer for one another. That should add some speed and take the operator out of the equation for the machining aspect. Some guys just can't cope it seems. Being that the other coper is right there, I don't think it adds much time moving to that one.

Assuming panels are ready to go doors are assembled. We use a Unique Machine brand peg style door clamp that I'm not real impressed with. Looking at replacing it this year with a JLT rotary clamp. The door in the video has some loose joints because that clamp just won't mash stuff together. To be fair, my fitment might be a twinge tight. Normally if I'm just doing a single like that, I'll pipe clamp it and walk away and do something else for 20 minutes while it sets up. In my old shop, the old compressor ran at a pretty high pressure, in here at the new shop, I don't go over 125psi, and that clamp's performance has just gotten worse because of it.

After assembly they go through the widebelt. We use a two head, with a combo head on the last head. One pass per face using 120g and 180g. It beats the snot out of the abrasives but it does leave a good scratch somehow.

Size/fit the doors on the edge sander.

Drill for hinges (label location in hinge cup if necessary)

If applicable do edge detail. (95% of what we do is inset, so no edge profile) If it's in a shaper, I'd add a solid minute per door for that process. Probably two minutes if doing it with a router.

Orbital the faces. I don't bother hitting the edge with the orbital.

Break the edges by hand.

Stretch wrap them up with like sized doors.

Send them to finisher. BYE DOORS, see you next week! miss you....

Obviously this stuff becomes way more efficient with the larger the quantity being built. Time wasted on little things like turning a machine on, or walking between stations gets spread out amongst 50 or a 100 doors and it get's pretty small per unit. Even the tracking in the video on the edge sander being a snot takes time that once spread out amongst a large number is nothing really.

I bet the door in this video were it in a batch and I weren't carrying a phone around shooting video, I could knock a couple minutes out of the build time. I doubt any more than that could be done though with my current setup.

http://youtu.be/25GbUnlOHh4

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Kenny