Post
by simso » Sat May 17, 2014 11:49 am
Perry, making the "Box" as we will call it, can be incredibly fast or incredibly slow
We hobby builders are different to commercial builders, as you are aware, commercially we are talking 100s per week, hobby builders maybe one per week, or per month or per year.
I can see how its possible to make a closed box in about 3-4hrs, maybe even less, but this involves many commercially setup jigs.
Let me give an example
To make a top, we "myself included"
Joint the wood, sand and thickness the jointed wood, hand shape the braces, fit the braces with a deck, sound out the board, scallop the braces away, setup a jig to etch the rosette, then carve away the rosette recess and then wolla we have a rough made top, approx time easily 4-8hrs of time
In a commercial shop, I would envisage the same process as follows, to joint the wood, it would be achieved by placing the two pieces onto slow spinning fine gritted surface about 3 minutes of sanding, then the two pieces would be clamped and vacuum sealed under heat, so 10-15 minutes it could be reworked, it would be sanded to an exact thickness on a machine with preset height of say 3mm, it would then be drill pressed for the rosette with a dedicated cutter, literally 20 seconds to cut the rosette. The braces would be cut on a table saw, on a dedicted jig, about 10 minutes, so could be done during the jointing drying time,, then you would use a vacuum clamp press with alignment pieces for the braces, which would take maybe 3-4 minutes to align and then clamp under vacuum and heat. One finished top in theory could be achieved in about 20 minutes in a commercial setup
The key to success is machines set and made for an exact specific purpose, not to be adjusted, just to do one job
How do I know this, couple of years back, I had to draw up a bank proposal as I wanted to make acoustic guitars on a commercial scale, compete with the likes of cole clark and maton, but be west Australian based, we had to develop a business plan and building schematic layout to show how we would achieve this, the loan for the building and all required machinery was in excess of 4 mill, we needed a factory floor for manufacturing of 720 square feet, and then you need facilitys for drying and storing wood , with a minimum of six months wood to be stored in advance of manufacturing, we based the requirements on the minimum amount of guitars needed to stay afloat and meet overheads, this worked out to be 37 guitars a week, which were to retail at just under 1000 aud so this equaled another requirement of 225 sqm, after nutting out the figures and loan repayments and so forth, the risks were to great, so I ended up backing out, but we spent a lot of time researching and developing the process to see if we could do it.
If you had the property and the funds to setup, then a single person enterprise could still achieve this with a healthy profit, but the trick is a single machine per build step, with no setting up or alteration of jigs as required
Steve
