How long does it take you to build these doors (paint grade)?

[andrew whicker]

Hello all,

Trying to get a feel for my inefficiencies (of which there are plenty). I made these doors (eight total, 4 tall / 4 short). I do NOT have a wide belt sander. Would like to know how long it takes a competent builder to make these paint grade doors. The stiles and rails are 1" thick. They are made of soft maple. I used 3/8 MDF for the panels w/ 3/8" T&G.

(I made some of the long stiles with laminated pieces from my vacuum table when I didn't have straight lumber and made the other stiles out of 5/4 lumber when it was straight)

The short doors are 25" H x 18" W. The tall doors are 52" H x 18" W w/ a middle rail.

What do you think your estimated per door time / total time / however you want to split it up would be?

20230922_124632.jpg

20230922_122810.jpg

[Ron Citerone]

Hello all,Trying to get a feel for my inefficiencies (of which there are plenty). I made these doors (eight total, 4 tall / 4 short). I do NOT have a wide belt sander. Would like to know how long it takes a competent builder to make these paint grade doors. The stiles and rails are 1" thick. They are made of soft maple. I used 3/8 MDF for the panels w/ 3/8" T&G. (I made some of the long stiles with laminated pieces from my vacuum table when I didn't have straight lumber and made the other stiles out of 5/4 lumber when it was straight)The short doors are 25" H x 18" W. The tall doors are 52" H x 18" W w/ a middle rail. What do you think your estimated per door time / total time / however you want to split it up would be?20230922_124632.jpg20230922_122810.jpg

I wouldn't even want to guess. Every time I try to guess how much I will get done in a day I almost never get that much done. I try to get things right and don't sweat the time. Maybe post in the business section and a contractor might have estimation experience.

[James Pallas]

Table saw, jointer, miter saw, hand held belt sander, finish sander. Maybe one days work.
Jim

[Greg Quenneville]

I was going to say a long day’s machining and assembly work assuming no stock lamination, assuming batch processing all the parts, assuming using a power fed shaper for grooving, fast panel sizing.

I would domino the joints right through the groove so that takes 20 minutes per door.

Assuming enough clamps another couple of hours to assemble.

Another probably half hour per for belt sanding and finish sanding assuming good tools for those chores. Add time for distractions, problems, looking for that box of 180 paper etc.

I have done lots of similar sized shutters like that. It takes longer than I imagine initially. A couple of years ago I was really improving my workflow until I workflowed my finger right into a router bit. So that added a couple of extra weeks.

[glenn bradley]

An example of doing it production style.

[Jamie Buxton]

Realistically, a week and a half. I'm including time for the lumberyard trip, making flat and straight 4s4 stock from roughsawn lumber, setting up the shop for doing this job, setting up to mill the tenons, glue-up, sanding, and stuff I forgot to add in. No power feeder, no wide-belt.

[Phillip Mitchell]

I am not a cabinet shop and don’t push myself to work “fast” anymore and that would probably take me 1.5-2 days if I already had the material in the shop and the dimensions/design details sorted. That’s raw materials to sanded and ready for paint. Hinge boring could/would likely happen along with that in same time frame.

I would use a shaper with power feeder for grooves and also shaper for stub tenons if not using dominos. No wide belt in my shop so hand sanding with Festool ROS and hand sanding to break edges/inner corners for no accidental finger slicing and better paint adhesion.

Clear finish grade with attention to grain matching and continuity and either solid wood or nice veneered ply panels would take longer for sure.

[Andrew Hughes]

My best guess for my shop is 2 6/8 hour days. They look simple enough I would use my tablesaw for the jointery .
I could easily hand plane any milling marks it doesn’t get any easier then soft maple. I don’t sand
One thing would be different I would make 7 or 9 pieces.
I don’t like making even numbers of anything.
Good Luck

[John TenEyck]

Four hours to mill the rough stock 4 square, an hour or so to mill the dados, another to cut the stub tenons, a couple of hours to size the panels, a couple of hours to glue up the doors, a couple of hours to sand. So, what's that? 12 hours, a day and a half. So probably two days for me.

John

[andrew whicker]

Thanks for all the responses! I'm not feeling as bad. 2 full days is about my speed. I'm glad that's reasonable. Of course, at 100 per hour shop time that makes these pretty expensive...

Hmmm .. I'll have to do some thinking

[Dan Friedrichs]

Not sure if you watched the video that Glenn posted, but that was an example of a single guy in a production shop doing a door in 17mins. Obviously 16 hours is quite a large delta from that estimate...

[andrew whicker]

Yeah, I've seen that video a few times and that's a million dollar shop. Not my speed yet

[John TenEyck]

A takeaway from Dan's comment is that you can't compete with a shop like that, so maybe you should look to outsource the doors to one them. You might be money far ahead and have time to work on other aspects of the project where your shop rate has less impact on overall project cost.

John

[Rege Sullivan]

I would figure about 4 to 6 hours... then reality would hit and take a good 2 days to finish.

[andrew whicker]

Right. And we do have a shop about 30 min away that specializes in making flat pack everything you can think of, assembled drawers, assembled doors and drawer fronts. I didn't like their quality on drawers. I need to buy a door and see what I think. They charge $140 for the larger door (using 4/4 stock, so thinner than the doors I made).

I think if I could get a door down to an one to one and a half hours I'd be in pretty good shape.

My inefficiencies are:
- sanding (potentially reduced significantly if I can get my planer running to run w/ nearly zero snipe)
- final thickness-ing (planer lost some sort of calibration at the end my runs.. need it to be zero snipe or close to it)
- Setting up shaper for both male and female cut (this is on me, I can find faster ways)
- breaking down sheet goods (this will go a lot smoother once I get my RAS up and running... capable of 24" cross cuts. I also need to get build some left side support on my table saw to help me cut full sheets)

My thought process for the stiles and rails:
- plane each side to clean
- joint as necessary to get a clean edge
- TS edges to get straight
- Cut to correct width + 1/16 / + 3/32
- Plane to final width (digital readout on planer)
- Cut to length
- Shaper long side (groove)
- Shaper ends (Tongue)
- Ready for assy