Why CNC routing?

Many years ago, I worked in a very old-school cabinet cabinet shop with a simple table saw, a shelf full of manual routers, and an inch of sawdust on the floor. My boss had gone to a woodworking trade show and told me about an “optimizer” machine he had seen there. What he described was a router, controlled by a computer, that cut wood by moving a spinning bit through the material rather than a saw blade.

This seemed like a horribly inefficient way to cut wood, when I could just adjust the tablesaw fence and push a sheet of plywood through in a matter of seconds. But a few years later, I started a job at a shop that had one of these CNC routers. Yes, it could make the same straight cuts as a table saw. But because the spinning bit could move in any direction, it could also cut angles, circles, pockets, letters, curves, holes…anywhere on a sheet of plywood. And, using computerized nesting software, it could arrange multiple cabinet parts on a sheet of plywood so there was almost no waste. The completed parts came off the machine with all the hardware holes drilled and assembly slots cut in precise locations; no measuring was required to assemble the finished cabinet.

Once I had seen the versatility, cut quality and precision that was possible with this technology, I was hooked. Over the following years, I learned as much as I could about CNC including programming and operation of various machines. In 2013 I purchased my first CNC router for use in my cabinet shop and it immediately transformed the way my shop worked.

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