Touring Karhu fine cabinetry and millwork![]() ![]() I met Alan Lester at an Ottawa woodworker association meeting. He was demonstrating some jointer techniques. I had brought in my homemade jointer to that same meeting to show it off. The three-phase power needed for the jointer in the school's shop needed a key to turn it on, which nobody present had. So Alan ended up demonstrating using my jointer. I could tell from how he used it that he's accustomed to a more powerful machine!
Most orders come in through designers who work on custom houses and renovations. They don't make kitchens for new subdivisions, because the builders primarily want many identical kitchens at the lowest possible price.
At left, a 24" thickness planer and a 16" jointer. Alan says he didn't really need the jointer to be that wide, but he needed one that was 8' (2.4 meters) long and sturdy. (it's definitely sturdier than the one I built!)
But it's not all fun and games. The business is about building custom cabinetry. Although it's working with wood, it's very different from the sort of woodworking that magazines such as Popular Woodworking or Fine Woodworking write about. Alan says he has to be careful about hiring people who say they are "into woodworking". These people may be amazed by the equipment, but they usually aren't a good fit for production work.
Although wood is not cheap, they usually buy a little extra to be safe. "Compared to the cost of the time and labour for making up for being short one piece, wood is cheap". For large panels Alan prefers veneered particle board and MDF. About Baltic birch. He says that Baltic birch "often comes to us twisted. Particle board and MDF are generally flat and stay that way." I was a bit aghast at having my favourite plywood compared unfavourably to MDF. After all, I made jointer tables from it and they stayed flat. I'm happy if my one set of hand-picked and carefully treated surfaces stays flat. But if one in ten panels for a cabinet job is warped, that's unacceptable for a business. And I have to say, I was surprised at how much less balancing my bandsaw wheels from MDF needed even compared to Baltic birch. The more finely chopped and mixed the wood is, the less likely it is to warp.
I watched a guy make some cuts on this saw that would have been easier on a smaller saw. I asked "why don't' you just get a cheap saw for doing that sort of cut". "There's no such thing as a cheap saw" Alan responded. "Even a cheap machine needs floor space, needs to be wired in by an electrician, and needs to be plumbed to the dust extraction. And then how often would you use it? It's too easy to get carried away buying lots of equipment". I guess Alan doesn't live by the motto of "whoever has the most toys wins". For a business, that makes sense. For a hobbyist, it's a different matter. :)
The machine has a 5' x 12' bed (1.5m x 3.6m)
Also visible is the "drilling block" which can drill many holes at once. These are for shelf pins and mounting European style hardware. Aside from saving a lot of labour, the CNC machine also leads to greater accuracy.
They use a lot of air tools. Alan says the air tools generally last longer than their electrical equivalents, though not so much with the orbital sanders because they don't oil them like they should. The oil has a tendency to get out of the sander and onto the work. They get about a year out of these sanders before they wear out.
They upgraded to a screw compressor, which is smaller and quieter, with greater capacity.
I asked Alan about using a heat exchanger to recover some of the heat from the paint booth exhaust. "Heat exchangers for spray room exhausts don’t exist to my knowledge". There are many rules and regulations relating to labour, safety, and the environment, and spray booths are especially difficult in this regard. Sometimes rules from different bureaucracies even conflict with each other. That all these rules might handicap a business man not concern a government inspector. But inn the mean time, there is competition from China, where wages are low and people and the environment are treated almost as expendable. Most cabinet shops buy the doors pre-made, but it's hard to get consistent quality and good colour match that way, so Karhu builds most of their cabinet doors from scratch. The costs work out to about the same as buying pre-made doors.
Very different from my sort of tinkering work, where the bandsaw is one of my most frequently used machines. Despite all the nice equipment they have, for my type of work, I'm better off in my modest basement workshop where I have my most frequently used machines very close together.
Despite doing it professionally, Alan still enjoys doing some wood turning and wood working as a hobby. Here's his bowl turning lathe, along with some rough-turned bowls. Bowls are turned rough from green (not yet dried) wood. The bowls are then let dry. Drying causes the bowls to warp to some extent, but with the thick walls on the rough-turned bowls, they can still be turned completely round again.
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