#Shotbot tools update#

Assembly the company does very little finishing of assembled pieces.Īlmost all doors are made here, but Wood-Mode outsources MDF doors.Wood-Mode is just getting into water-based. Finishing is primarily catalyzed varnish.“Wood start,” which brings doors, frames and sides together for sanding before machining.Component plant, with cutoff saws, sander/shapers.There are five basic steps in the manufacturing process: Special cabinets are done in A2, which is on the second floor. Component parts, drawers, frames, drawer parts are all done in the A1 component plant. May says it’s difficult to describe the flow without describing the buildings. “One side of the assembly area is frame, the other is frameless.” Making both frame and frameless cabinets in the same plant isn’t really an issue, May says. Brookhaven One is frameless, Brookhaven Two is frame. The Wood-Mode 84 frameless line was started in 1984. The Wood-Mode 42 line is named for 1942, the year it was started. The ShopBot allows us to cope with that easily. “A customer can want a completely unique profile. The ShopBots work well in component part production. “In the newest machine we have about $25,000 invested, so about every five weeks it pays for itself.” “We can configure each one differently for different types of products, without the expense of a bigger machine,” he says. Joe May, director of manufacturing and engineering, says flexibility is the biggest advantage of the ShopBots. The first one was purchased as an inventor’s kit in 1999. The ShopBots are primarily used for point-to-point boring for hardware, doors and drawers. It has 16 ShopBot CNC machines in use, equipment normally used in much smaller shops. When Gronlund goes to a trade show, he says he spends half the time looking at big machines with the capacity to make thousands of pieces and the other half looking at smaller equipment normally used in a small shop.ĭespite its size, Wood-Mode employs something small to improve its manufacturing process. Wood-Mode sells through independent sales representatives to 850 Wood-Mode/Brookhaven independent dealers. There are two product lines, Wood-Mode and Brookhaven, in both framed and frameless. Wood-Mode makes custom and semi-custom kitchen and bath cabinets, and custom cabinetry for other rooms. The Kreamer factory produces 1,600 to 1,800 units per day. Annual sales revenue is more than $200 million. The company produces custom cabinetry for every room in the home. The privately owned company was started in 1942 and employs 2,100 in a large, integrated 1.3 million-square-foot plant in Kreamer, Pa., that does everything from process green lumber to carry out delivery in Wood-Mode trucks.

“We are focused on how we can be more efficient in just-in-time.”

“We are, for the most part, a very large job shop,”says chairman and CEO Robert Gronlund.

But it is unlike many other large cabinet manufacturers.

We’ve taken the liberty of adding some photography of the beautiful product that Wood-Mode offers in its Wood-Mode and Brookhaven lines.īy any measure, Wood-Mode Inc. Since its original publication, Wood-Mode has grown its stable of ShopBot Tools to 16 tools. The article speaks to the benefits to large-scale operations of incorporating smaller CNC routers in cell-based operations. Forth, about ShopBot CNC Tools in use at Wood-Mode.

#Shotbot tools update#

Following is a 2009 update to Cabinetmaker FDM’s article by editor Karl D.