Peconic River Woodworking Newsletter November 2006


				Thanksgiving
				It is once again that time of year when we begin to gather with relatives and friends to stop and reflect on the year as it draws to a close. To me, Thanksgiving is the holiday where we give thanks for our own good fortune. Here at Peconic River Woodworking, we have much to be thankful for. As we recently celebrated our second anniversary, we have been blessed with some great customers and we have built strong relationships with our suppliers. Our team of associates is second to none in their dedication to quality and maintaining high standards. We have had the opportunity to work on some challenging projects that tested our skills and rising to the challenge made us better at what we do. We have met and worked with several outstanding professionals in our industry who have willingly shared their expertise while keeping a watchful eye on not crossing any anti-competitive boundaries. These shared experiences at conferences and seminars with other woodworking companies from across the country have made each of us a little bit better at what we do which will benefit our customers in the long run. We know we can’t rest on our laurels and take our customers for granted. We must continue to earn their trust every day. That is a high priority for us and we welcome your feedback in how we can do that better. We have been blessed this year and we look forward to continuing to grow and continuing to serve. A Happy Thanksgiving to you all. Bill O’Connell


				Dangerous Curves One of the more challenging and, if successful, rewarding aspects of woodworking is doing curved work, particularly curved in plane, that is, where you see the curve most distinctly when viewed from above. It is challenging because when doing curved work there are an infinite number of curves that can be required both of different lengths as well as different radii. After all, a flat piece is flat, there is not much more to describe it other than length, width and thickness. Also, most of the machinery and tools in the woodworking trade are designed to cut rectangles, very precise, nice ninety degree angles. From our school days, we may remember in geometry doing some work with curves. The tool we used for these exercises was a compass, a point on one end and a pencil on the other. Find the center of the arc or circle and set the radius on the scale. Hold it steady and swing the arc. If you did it right it was a small wonder of graceful beauty.For small curved work a compass can still be used, however, there isn’t a tremendous demand for curved work of six inch radii or less. What if the radius is 18 inches, or 60 inches or 29 feet? One way to do it is to clear off a table or in the case of large radii a space on the floor, drive a nail or screw into the table or floor, attach a string to it with a pencil at the other end and strike an arc that way. Another method is to lay it out with the aid of a drawing program on a computer. You could then print out sheets with the arc plotted on it, lay out the sheets and go from there. If you have invested in some newer technology such as a CNC machine, you can actually send the file with the arc it created to the CNC machine and it will cut directly from there.Now that you have the arc of, say, the top of a door, how do you create the whole curved door? One way is to build a curved form and laminate thin layers of material over the form. That is what was done in a recent project of ours. For the vanity pictured here, we took a sheet of ¾” material and cut a series of circle segments. The circle segments were then stacked to create a form that was representative of a part of a cylinder. This form was then used to shape the parts of the door by laminating them. After the parts had set the form was removed and the door was fitted to the vanity, hinges added and it was assembled. A matching curved front had to be cut on the top and deck of the vanity itself. Using a CNC machine made it both very accurate and greatly simplified. Putting it all together took good old fashioned craftsmanship. It was a well matched blend of the old and the new.

				CNC Technology Many people view woodworking as old world craftsmanship and in many cases it is. Truly outstanding pieces of woodwork could not be created without the many years of skill and experience learned during a woodworking career. This skill most comes into play in just determining how to approach the project. However, this does not mean that woodworking cannot also be high tech. Does woodworking and high tech seem like an oxymoron? Well it isn’t. Technology can play a key role in the successful woodworking company and many believe, including me, that survival in a global economy that seems to be shrinking in size depends on it. To compete against other countries where the labor rate is a fraction of what it is here you have to be able to do some things very fast and very well. One of the key elements of this technology is CNC which stands for Computer Numerical Control. Simply put it is a computer that controls a precision cutting machine. Various software tools are used to design a part or a whole cabinet and then the software breaks the design down into instructions called G-code. These codes are in themselves fairly simple: cut a straight line from point A to point B, cut a quadrant of a circle, either clockwise or counter clockwise, cut an ellipse, cut a spline. There are a number of other codes that may stop, pause and do some specialized functions but the list is not terribly long. However, there may be several thousand of these instructions to cut a set of cabinets or parts, but each one is done precisely and it never tires or gets bored or distracted.Cutting curves on a CNC machine is simple. If you can define the curve on a computer with a drawing program or the actual G codes, it can be cut far more precisely than any hand drawn line or hand held tool could do, and in a fraction of the time. It also enhances safety. Since the computer is controlling the dangerous cutting tools the operator can stand far away from the danger zone. But as with any power tool you have to respect it. If one gets complacent and decides to get too close to the cutting tool and you reach into where the cutting head is operating, there is no guarantee you won’t sustain serious injury. Properly used it can greatly improve productivity, speed and accuracy and with the creative juices flowing, it can open the doors to new opportunities.

For more information on how Peconic River Woodworking and three other companies approached implementing CNC technology see the article in Woodshop News