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I've got to thinking that a proper CNC machine might a) save me some money when building the kitchen for my new extension, and b) allow me to then make a bit of cash making CNC bits and bobs afterwards.
I'm looking at non-hobby machines, spending approx £6-7k. Given I've just spent £3k on cabinets and doors for a tiny L-shape kitchen and the new one will have around 3x the number of cabinets it's making sense to me, at least in a man maths kind of way.
I'm aware there's a learning curve with these things, but I know my way around Autodesk and I've got about 6-8 months to figure it out.
There must be some CNC folk here. Am I staring down the barrel of a 5-figure mistake?
I guess you are looking at a CNC router?
Do you have space for it?
Have you factored in the cost of some kind of vacuum/dust extraction?
Are you able to design/program it?
Do you know how much raw material will cost?
What other bits will you need? Stuff to join the cabinets together - dowels etc. slides for drawers, drawer boxes (or would you make these too?)
Have you included the cost of any cutters, clamps & other ancillaries to allow you to use the CNC?
Presumably you would be using solid wood? How will you treat the wood - not just the doors, but the cabinets?
Will you have time during the rest of the extension work/planning that needs to happen to commit to the extra work?
I think it would be a great thing to do, so long as you have thought it all through, are aware of the complexities/pitfalls, have the space & time to do it etc.
I reckon by the time you have got the tool itself, materials, learnt to use it, designed the cabinets, spent time programming the CNC & running it to create the parts, building the cabinets etc. the 'cost' would end up more than buying it.
If you do it, make sure you create a thread on here from start to finish. It would be a very interesting process.
FWIW - for years I have been pondering building myself a CNC router from one of the many online kit builds available (root4 CNC etc) but I am not sure I would ever have the time to do it properly & space to use it, so have never taken the plunge. Good luck with it!
Don't forget all extra bits you are getting in the kitchen price.
- Edge banding
- Painting
- Fixing
- Hinges
- Feet
- The cost of the sheet material isn't cheap at all.
- Wastage
- Guarantee (on everything mind, how good is your painting, edge banding etc)
- Will the cnc you are looking at drill all the holes for hinges etc.
- Is the kitchen prebuilt?
And the workshop stuff.
Can you handle an 8x4 sheet safely manoeuvring them is a right bastard and your cnc just took up a huge lump of floor space.
Autodesk licence?
Dust extraction.
Spray booth with extraction, that will need to be in another room from the cnc or you're going to have a horrible time.
Would you be better off with a decent mft and track saw? Peter Maillard seems to do okay with that. A kitchen is all straight cuts.
Carcasses will be built by my FIL, he's been a joiner/kitchen fitter for 40 years and is fully kitted out for the task. I just need doors & hardware. There's a paint shop with booth about 4 doors down from me that'll let me spray & bake the doors.
Size wise, I've got a relatively empty garage and could feasibly fit a 4' x 8' machine in there, although I'm looking at 4 x 4. I've even got 3-phase to the house.
Material will be whatever it costs I guess, but I'm doing the majority of building work myself so I'm saving money in some areas leaving some spare for others. The current kitchen was from DIY Kitchens 10 years ago and it's stood up to everything extremely well so I was just going to go the same route and build with MDF. If it was going to be solid wood everything I'd just hand the job over to the FIL. At a rough guess I'd be spending £12k on a kitchen from DIY Kitchens, 2-3x that if we went with e.g. Wren, so even if I spend £6k on a machine and £6k on tools & materials I've still broke even.
And then when all the work is done I've still got a CNC machine that I'm thinking can be used for other stuff, like guitar building, custom inlay pieces, etc. to make a bit of beer money.
My Dads run 2x Heiz High-Z CNC machines for a decade or so. Smaller format than what you'll be looking at but similar concept. Lots of Brass work, Alloy, Corian, plastics etc. The machine itself is just the start, you'll need:
- To seriously think about and engineer where the machine is sitting, its base.
- How to manage noise. If you just run this in your garage you'll be deaf in a month and your neighbours will have the council round.
- How to manage dust. You really need a sealed cabinet/chamber.
- Some sort of Uninterruptible Power Supply. Do not ignore this. VERY expensive if you get a powercut mid job.
The garage and house in general isn't particularly close to any neighbours and it's insulated, but I could section off a part of the garage and add sound deadening without too much bother.
I'll look into UPS though, never considered that.
You've also got to have enough space to store 8x4 boards flat and in a controlled environment?
And if you're then selling commercially you'll be needing appropriate liability insurance!
If you do decide to go for it - can the machine you are looking at be put to other uses? Eg - this type of thing is heavily used in the signage industry for cutting foamboard, correx, dibond etc.
Extraction, extraction, extraction. It’s surprising just how much waste is generated using a CNC router and MDF dust is carcinogenic. Wood dust is an explosion risk too.
I can’t see it being worthwhile TBH.
For the sake of a single kitchen I 100% agree, and between my FIL and myself there's no doubt we could knock up a great kitchen using standard carpentry. But there's a little voice at the back of my mind telling me I'd be able to find something for a CNC milling machine to do after the kitchen, and that something might bring in enough cash for it to be worthwhile in the long run.
How useful is AutoDesk/AutoCAD for CAM? I used to be pretty handy with AutoCAD and probably still know most of the shortcuts. But I have the feeling that Solidworks and various gcode plugins/apps are better aligned for CnC and other CAM?
As for the OP my outside perspective is that for a 7k machine you're probably going to end up spending double that after adding all the things you will need to build around it. Savings on a single kitchen isn't going to make much of a dent on that kind of investment, the key is what you do with it in the longer term. Perhaps sketch out a business case on what return of investment you would get over 3 years and what hours you would need to put in to achieve that.
If you're offering just CNC-ing and finishing of sheet materials, then I guess your main business would be MDF doors and drawer fronts. Talking to some kitchen fitters to get a sense of their needs, level of interest, and price expectations could help you.
I assume you're thinking you'll make cabinet doors, perhaps Shaker-style using a single sheet rather than stile and rail components?
I used to do this sort of thing for a living and always wanted a cnc router but I think i just wanted a toy really.
For kitchen cabinet doors, in my experience, having used cnc cut doors, they're a pain in the bum in some ways.
If the inset section has only been cut on the face side for example, you tend to end up with bowed panels as you're removing tension from one side only.
Really, you ought to relieve both sides. That obviously adds to handling time where you need to flip them.
Despite having the CNC set up the best, when you flat cut larger areas on a CNC you still often get micro ridges where cuts meet.
Sure, these can be sanded out, but again, that's more processes. Also, mdf for example, it's softer inside the board and you'll tend to have to seal it well, sand it well and finish it very well to get a decent finish.
With frame and panel construction for example, where you're enclosing say a 9mm mdf panel within a frame, the compressed surface of that panel is pretty much ready to go and to paint etc. A panel that's been CNC cut into has to have a lot more work done to it to get it to a good painting surface, especially with the high gloss finishes these days.
Get one if you want a toy to play with, but I can't help thinking they're not really that useful for a one off diy kitchen.
Probably worth considering if your future idea os to be a cnc service or produce something that neds a cnc. Because i imagine the former you would be up against multi machine facilities who do it much faster and cheaper.
I think people are putting everything that is 'CNC' into the same bracket here with mentions of 'cnc milling machine' and the stuff Burf had - What BTR had that died on him was an industrial machining centre designed for cutting metals that weigh's about 2T, is 8ft tall and would probably need new foundations in the garage to support it, the same as a standard type cnc milling machine.
What the OP is talking about is essentially a large router table, designed for cutting soft materials like wood etc, various sizes available, much lighter, etc etc
I wouldn't put the former in my garage, but I would put the latter, but I am only talking from the practical perspective, getting real I bet you can double or triple any costs you have estimated to actually get things working once factoring in transport, tooling, electrics, compressor, extraction, software etc etc etc.
There is room for people who offer cutting services in all materials and sizes in the UK - multi million machine facilities don't do jobs for a few hundred quid which you will be able to take on.
Do some market research and see if local carpenters etc need cutting services for custom kitchen's and restorations etc - sounds fun if you can pull it off.
The yeti smartbench would have been the machine you wanted at the price you’re talking about - but they went bust a couple of years ago. Trend bought the rights and are resurrecting it next year but will be over £10k when it reappears (all be it an improved machine so still good value)
I think with any machinery like this you have to have a plan for the machine to earn its cost back quickly because you can easily be caught out by machines obsolescing, loosing spares and software support or new cheaper tech being released meaning your competitors (or even customers) can just buy something cheaper while you’re still trying to get payback from your own customers
when I bought my yeti a few years back I met a guy who had, only a few years previously, spent £60k on a machine that was now half as capable and he was having to keep up payments on it while losing work to cheaper competition
I bought my machine because one big job came in (fitting out a posh golf club) that pretty much payed for the machine in one go, so if had yeti had gone fut the next day I wouldn’t be in any trouble
a cheaper way in is the self build machines from oozenest but I think you’re limited to 4ftx4ft
My CNC machine is only a 400mm x 200mm table. It’s a decent sized piece of kit. Runs LinuxCNC on an old Emco. It’s probably 1200 x 1200 x 1200 plus space for the PC.
It is fab to watch it making stuff while you supervise with a beer
I'm looking at the Onefinity Elite series, 4x4, importing from Canada, but I'll take a gander at oozenest, thanks. The Onefinity comes with controller, software and spindle, I would spec the extra stiffening brace and auto tool changer as well, even if I might not figure out how to use it straight away. Dust extraction I can figure out. It seems like it can be up and running within a day going by the videos I've seen. Again I know there's likely a very steep leaving curve but I have the time.
Future ideas at the moment are:
A family member is a Little Mester and he can't keep up with the orders for his custom knives. A personalised engraved/inlaid chopping board is something that would compliment his work very nicely.
Guitar bodies, necks, fretboards, again with custom inlays etc. <-- ok this one might be a bit ambitious
Fold away bed frames, furniture, units for campervans.
That kind of thing. I'm under no illusions of toppling the already well-established CNC world, but the fact that a person/company already makes item x isn't really putting me off attempting to make a different version of item x. And I'm not talking about replacing my current income. If I can make a few £k a year then I'll class that as worth it. I guess the question is, is that achievable? My current job affords me about 5 months of free time a year, and the kids are at school and the wife works, so I do have the time to put into it. And I love fannying about with stuff.
Very quickly before I head in to programme large metal cutting CNCs.
You'll definitely need exctraction if cutting mdf, the dust is nasty, as said above. Even for wood, I wouldn't consider running without extraction.
As a non-paying hobby, go for it. If you want it to make you some money it will need careful planning, and probably more space. For example. We make tooling that requires a bit of ply for bases, and osb for crates/packaging. We buy our sheets direct from the importers in 100 sheet pallet loads for 50% of what the cheapest timber dealers sell it for. If you want to compete with bigger fish then material costs and space to store will need consideration.
Which Autodesk product are you familiar with? F360? Or is there something simpler/cheaper for sheet work?
I'd agree with everthing kayak says too, and add that machining times on parts where you could just fix on a moulding instead will be likely be prohibitve. Mouldings are cut using form tools, whereas generating these shapes using 3d scanning type toolpaths will take much longer.
But, go for it, it's really fun!
Yeah fusion360. I've made a few models for 3d printing and have been walking my eldest through it for his CDT classes at school, by no means an expert but I know how it works and can knock up a fairly complex shape without too much trouble.
Again with the paying hobby side, I'm more than happy if I can get to a point where it'll have paid for itself over maybe 5 years. But I don't know if that's possible. If someone in the know is going to say that I need agreements with material suppliers, a dedicated store front, patents, goodness knows what else - just to come close to breaking even - then the maths probably doesn't work out.
Again with the paying hobby side,
I'm curious as to the hobby aspect - having just run off 200 or so hours of machining over the last few weeks ... standing next to noisy machine for hours (that requires no input from you for the 2-3hours its running a filei, but will somehow sense if you've let your attention drift elsewhere and destroy £100 worth of material and possibly itself the moment your guard is down ) waiting for it to finish so you can do some hoovering then press play again. I can think of better hobbies. As a means to an end if you have complex and creative work to realise they're great, churning out stuff for other people - which I only really do for two or three friendly businesses I work with- isn't really any more exciting than doing photocopying. I wouldn't offer it as a service more broadly as it's just too dull.
Whether for yourself or farming yourself out to others - something you really need a strategy for is waste disposal. You end up with a lot of bulky, awkward shaped offcuts that can quickly swamp your workspace if you don't have a means to regularly clear it. The waste from the job I've just done somehow managed to be double for volume of the materials the job was cut from