Question
I am in the process of purchasing a CNC router to build Euro and face frame cabinet boxes. I observed two different methods of assembly at the Las Vegas show that I liked which were blind dado and dowel construction. It seemed like a no brainer that the blind dado construction was more efficient and less work, but I talked to quite a few people who prefer the dowel construction. The machine that I am looking at doesn't have horizontal boring capabilities which would probably require that I purchase another machine for dowel construction. Does any have any thoughts?
Forum Responses
(CNC Forum)
From contributor M:
Dowel construction will require another machine. There are many manufacturers of 32mm vertical/horizontal boring machines. You may however want to consider a dowel inserter instead if your production is high. These machines drill, shoot glue or water and insert the dowels in one operation. Many of them will insert 8 or so simultaneously. It just requires a little thought into standard drill patterns to minimize setup.
I think it is more efficient to drill the vertical holes in your panel on the router and save the horizontal drilling to be done on a line boring machine so you can insert dowels at the same time you drill. Very little time is spent to match drilling between the two machines. Definitely look at Gannomat machines from Tritec for the horizontal drilling and dowel insertion. A Weeke and Gannomat together are a great high volume combination, but you need deep pockets for this.
Is it the best machine? I have no idea. I can say that it was fairly easy to create DXF outputs for their wop software to import. There were lacking certain things in the pocketing department, when it came to assigning different bits to certain types of pockets, but they did have a few different types of ways they you could assign a pocket. Fortunately for me, I already had a routine that created pocketing paths and I just fooled their software that it is a route, when it is really a pocket it will end up doing. On the flip side, their software did pocketing and other operation on any side, more then 6, and so in some ways they were very advanced, even more so then I could output.
I have worked with quite a few people and companies that have used several different machines and have yet to have any customer complain about the machine they have. I guess this is a good thing. There are differences between what they can do and if you can do more things that that you need with one machine, but not another, then clearly that is a better machine for you. For someone else, it could just be an unneeded added cost.
The reason is that there are issues with pod placement and it is just too complicated for me to want to deal with it. It does look like it would be involved for the operator to set up, but if you were doing repetitive parts it would be doable for anyone with an understanding and the initiative to do it. It appears to me that it would be much easier to setup and run then setting up a certain popular name brand CNC software, for example, but would still require some thought and only under the right situation would it be the way to go.
I have never run any machine, so please take my comments with a grain of salt. My main point was that all the machines my customers use, Rovers, Morbidelis, Weekies, Homags, Onsruds, Thermwoods, and Andersons I have never heard a single complaint. I think that that is a good thing and the general quality of most name brand machines is pretty good.
I have heard many complaints about other machines, but they are not my customers yet, and it is always that they can't use the machine because they can't integrate their software easily enough or that their operator is not educated enough or both.
