Thread: Make my own furniture? : Design in Sketchup > Send for manufacture?

I doubt if a full time maker could afford to attempt to achieve 22 mm from 25 mm rough sawn. The time (and therefore labour) required is too expensive.

In Calgary my local specialist supplier wont guarantee anything thicker than 19 mm from 25 mm stock, and if you want around 12 mm, it's cheaper to send 50% of a 25 mm board (described as 4/4 stock) up the dust shoot than it is to resaw a 6/4 (i.e. 35 mm) board into two approx 12 mm boards.

19mm is infinitely achievable from 25mm rough sawn stock. If you can't get it then either your machining practices are the material are deficient. 2 x 12mm from 35mm stock is generally a doddle as well. Species dependent of course. Vic Ash/ Tas Oak is easy if you have a good supplier. Just my experience.

I would prolly allow a few more metres than previously described to get good grain match.

To be honest, I've had about a gutsful of suppliers selling me less than is on the invoice. I've changed suppliers rather than get angry about it. Vic Ash/ Tas Oak are notorious for undersupply. The argument goes something like this. "the material is cut at 100 x 25 green, put through the drying and reconditioning process and you get what you get" Yeah, well it doesn't have to be that way. Some suppliers, supply what they purport to supply.

I'm just quoting my experience of one commercial supplier, where two passes across the jointer doubles the labour cost and the cost of setting up the bandsaw, and it's power feeder, needs to be amortised across the material being resawn. (I should add that the off the rack price includes machining the rough sawn stock to final thickness, with one dressed edge.)

Enfield Guy is the luckiest dude on earth! His supplier told me very politely to F.Off and try a regular outlet. It was the politest shining-on I've ever received!

Seems that regular 3 cube orders are a complete waste of their time

Oh! To get 100x25 for $8 a metre! You must be famous

Be fair everyone, the OP didnt mention any sizes, that was my estimation just to make the numbers easier for my calcified brain

If the OP's intent is to
1. design a 1800 x 500 x 450 cabinet
2. outsource the material preparation
3. assemble the cabinet themselves, including cutting all the joinery
then I'm sure the material costs can be kept to a figure that is not too outrageous

But if the OP is expecting to receive a flat pack of components that includes all the joinery and just needs to be glued together, then they will very much need to be sitting down with a tight hold on their hat.

Just saw this thread.

You might find a lot of the smaller board and veneer suppliers will have a cnc and edgebander. Most of them will be happy to cut and edge boards that you can then assemble. This might be a good place to start. I get quite a lot of stuff (mainly carcasses) done this way and it's really cost effective.

I kinda feel compelled to stick up for those of us in the custom furniture industry here as well. The statement that an 1800*500*450 cabinet should be able to be cut out and assembled in a day is something you'd only say if you'd never tried to do it. $7k quote for the cabinet John Samuels (beautiful piece of work) sounds about right for an experienced furniture maker that's going to put their heart and soul into it. No it's not cheap but it's what it's worth. The other thing that no one sees is the amount of work that goes into being able to sell a cabinet for $7k. There's usually years of building up a portfolio, marketing, building a brand etc. It's not something you just get out of bed and decide to do one day, it takes years of producing high quality work before people put their trust in you. I'm not going to go through costs but they add up very very quickly. It could easily take 4 hours out of your day just selecting timber for a project. There's usually hours and hours of design work and meetings with clients. Trust me when I say actually making the furniture is the easy bit.

In the custom game, every design is a new experience full of new challenges and if you're not able to anticipate problems and make money on every job then you're out of business pretty quickly. I recently had a hard look at my business and my pricing and I was pretty shocked to find out that actually building the piece (excluding the finishing process) accounted for about 1/4 of the time I'd put into the project.

I recently dropped off a piece to a couple and as we were taking it off the trailer we all had a good laugh about how this desk was worth both of their cars combined. It didn't go to a big house in a fancy suburb but it was important to them. As was the process we were involved in when they engaged me after years of looking in shops for stuff they didn't like. When we got the piece into it's new home there were tears and hugs and it was altogether a very emotional process. These are the sort of people that understand what goes into a piece of custom furniture.

My advice is if you think it's easy to make money in this game you should definitely go and do it, then let me know your secrets!