Several times I’ve been asked do I make items in bulk. I answer “sure do”.
Not every woodworker wants to do ‘production’ work, making one of something is challenge enough. I want to make a bunch of something that I think will sell, and make it quickly enough to actually make money on it. I’m a ‘one-man’ shop, so production needs to have as few tool changes and set up changes as I can get away with. Fixtures are a must.
Here is a stack of Eastern Red Cedar, also known as Aromatic Cedar. This stack will be small soap dishes when done. I’ll run the whole stack, and however many soap dishes I get is the yield, whatever the number is, this stack made 1400 soap dishes… more or less.
Planed for thickness, cut to length, and cut to width, we now have blanks. Not all blanks are shown on this table, there’s more on another cart… but they’re grouped in stacks of ten by five stacks per group for easy counting.
Next is grooves, and the use of a fixture.
Here’s a run that has had some cuts done, I just move them through the steps and group them together on fixtures to cut more than one at a time, usually three or four per cut setup.
Here’s Western Red Cedar, more expensive wood, and these are slightly larger than the other cedar ones, but they do smell good. Notice how the same cuts are on all yet more cuts to be done.
Laser engraved soap dishes are also done in bulk. I do them in groups of 15. This goes pretty fast, and adds some value and price to the product if the customer is interested.
I do love woodworking and I love making new things, but I also like filling bulk orders as not many woodworkers out there, at least ones I know, are into doing a lot of something.
One thing is, the more you do, the faster you get at it, and if you’re doing things the way I do, the build time is actually shorter than doing them all one at a time.