Speeding up edgebanding?

[jack duren]

I ran a Cehisa edge banded for 7 years.You can run it fir 2-3 days and then seems yo have to do maintenance on the glue tank…

My buddy bought a 3M edge bender at an auction for $1000. Spent $2500 to completely go through it and says it works like a charm..

[Minh Tran]

Historically, I do very little edge banding. However, I'm working on a kitchen right now that when all said and done has several hundred pieces. Somewhere along the way I realized I don't actually know how long it takes me to measure, cut, iron on, trim, sand and have a door set aside for finishing. So, I timed 4 doors, not rushing, and it came out to about 80 minutes, or approximately 5 minutes per piece of edge banding. Expanding on that calculation and having well over 200 pieces of edge banding to do in this project I'm looking at 16-20 hours of nothing but edge banding.

I'm all for a good audio book while I'm edge banding but this is a bit much. It got me looking around at alternatives to speed it up if I ever had a project like this again.

So, #1, am I just horribly slow at this?

#2 has anyone used a machine like this before? I looked at a few non iron on options and this looked like the fastest and best bang for the buck, but still a pricey investment.
https://tooltechindustry.com/edge-banding-machine/

I just pulled the trigger on the $3500 Festool KA 65 Set. Comes in 1-2 week. Iron-on edgebanding takes a ridiculously long time and I'm a hobbyist (i.e., time is a premium). I can't justify spending 1 hour ironing on and finishing 8 edges of a single cabinet.

I'm working out of a 1.5 car garage so floor space is a premium; a dedicated edgebander is out of the question. I'm designing and building cabinets for my office atm and just finished building and installing a bank of 13' cabinets and edge banding took a big chunk of time (~4 hours total). Most of the time was wasted on moving the iron and waiting for the glue to melt. I'd say it takes about 20 minutes to iron on 8' of edgebanding and 5 mins to trim the excess. The KA65 can do a 20 minute job in 2 minutes.

From watching some instructional vids on how to use the KA65, this thing is pretty maintenance-free. The only thing that might need cleaning is the heated nozzle. Switching between glue-puck colors is wasteful but not a problem for me - I HVLP spray paint last.

I'll definitely save at least $3500 building the kitchen and office cabinets myself, over the course of several years. And even after a decade of service, I can probably resell this thing to a contractor for $1000.

The FSKA65 is a production-grade tool:
YT: Festool: Doors & Drawers of Ann Arbor: The Festool CONTURO Edge Bander (promo)

[Jim Becker]

Conturo is a very nice tool and very space effective, particularly for the small shop. Congrats on that, Minh!

[Brian Holcombe]

I used the conturo on a job last year, it worked ok. I used it for site-installed paneling. One seriously annoying part of using it, once you start the band it runs until the material runs out. So, I always had to plan the length of my run, which means I'm going through more edge banding because I'm trimming off a bunch of material.

You need to plan your approach on the work, you have to be able to press firmly against the edge and if you don't it'll make a thick glue line.

For shop-made work, I much rather laminate solid material to the substrate, than veneer faces right over the edge material. This looks better than edge banding in my opinion, but it's more work.

[Warren Lake]

Almost always used solid and set up to trim it. Clamped on beams, having a lipping tool and a stroke sander make it a breeze.