Drove 3 hours to a custom shop in Nashville and now I get why they charge so much for shaker doors

I always figured paying 80 bucks a door for shaker style was just brand markup. But I visited High Point Woodworks last month and watched a guy run a cope and stick set on a mid 2000s Martin shaper. He had to stop and adjust the feed rate twice because the wood was slightly cupped. Took him 11 minutes per door and he still had to sand the inside corners by hand. Now I get it. Has anyone else seen the behind the scenes at a shop that changed how you price your work?

2 comments

2 Comments

elizabethtaylor18d ago

Watch the guy run those doors through a shaper and you'll change your mind real quick. I've been in maybe a dozen custom shops over the years and I've seen what happens when the wood has a little twist or a bow. They're not just slapping doors together, they're fighting the material every step of the way. That 11 minutes per door sounds about right for a one man show, but that's not even counting setup time or the cleanup afterwards. You're paying for the skill to make a bad board look good, not just the machine time.

the_jason17d ago

Exactly. @elizabethtaylor nails it with the shaper comment. I've seen guys try to run a door through a shaper with a slight twist in the stile and it'll either grab and kick back or leave a wavy profile that takes forever to sand out. You're paying for the time spent reading the grain and adjusting the setup for each board, not just the 11 minutes of machine time. The real skill is knowing when to jog the fence a hair or swap to a different cutter head to make that bad board look like it came out of a CNC. That's the stuff that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet. Have you ever had to fix a door that someone ran through a shaper without checking for bow first?