Setting up a ‘Lean’ Woodworking Workshop From Scratch

[Music] [Music] [Music] this is the [Music] [Music] space [Music] you [Music] it’s now about one year since we first discovered this unit i thought it could be a great space for our business little did we know that the move would end up happening in the middle of a global pandemic the landlord had been renovating it for some time before he was ready to agree us moving into it and by that time we were into spring 2020 we almost pulled out but it was both the best of times and the worst of times really because the government british government announced a bounce-back loan which we realized would be a better deal than we would ever get for finance and it was now or never really so here we are and let me just talk you through what we’re trying to do here in terms of lean manufacturing principles boards get delivered through this shutter and are loaded onto these racks the racks to the left are the waste bays at least the central three of those are the idea is that any off cuts that we decide to keep going to one bay the next month you use the second bay then the third bay and when you come back to the first bay you have to throw everything away if you haven’t used it after three months you don’t need it so there shouldn’t be any off cuts anywhere else waste management is a key principle of lean these wheeled carts are a really good way to be lean as well you can easily move things off the panel saw and between workstations you don’t want to be stacking anything horizontally ever except when it’s on the rack prior to cutting everything should be stacked vertically so you can access any piece and with these bays and this big design of cart you can separate out parts for different units so as you can see those carts can come right up to the workbenches we’ve got two workbenches here this is brady’s bench at least for now brady’s bench my bench over there i’m in here less so brady gets the run of the main tools again lean principles everything is close together you want to reduce distance between tasks and you want to think about the flow so typically off the saw we’re cutting mdf for painting the next step would be pocket hole drilling there may be some cutting to length and for some of the jobs we do there are these little battens right where we need them straight onto chalk saw straight to the router when you need to do it drill press hand tools are here and this is the sanding bench which has down draft extraction but that was one of many experiments where we we set something up and then we just don’t quite use it or don’t use it quite how we thought there’s been a lot of thought and a lot of experimenting gone into this whole place and it continues to be developed i’m quite quite pleased with this clamping arrangement on my bench here this is the craig clamp track system and you’ll see lots of things on wheels so these are meant to be tall carts brady’s one is better set up so he can have his fixings here and tools on top starting to put things up on the walls although originally we were trying to keep everything as kind of clear as possible and not put stuff up just for the sake of it but inevitably things things have been added now we’ve got the edge bander here that is broken at the moment needing renovation and the table saw second hand that took a lot of setting up but that is cutting square now this is my standing desk which may in future be replaced by a wood burning stove since i’ve really got enough workspace here now this corridor again thinking lean sometimes things will push straight on down there to the assembly area which i’ll show you in a minute certainly when we get up and running with edge banding and cnc which will be over there where that tall extractor is hopefully early next year then certain things will come straight off the cnc to edge bending to some processing here but then straight on down a lot of the work we do right now though goes into the spray booth which is through this door here i’ll just switch that light on now this spray booth has really transformed things for us we do quite a lot of painting we were lucky enough to have this booth already here in fact there were two we dismantled one we’ve put the sprayer into an insulated box here for the winter with a little tubular heater in there that’s the graco finish pro 395 same with the paints in there install the sink we’ve reused the ceiling tiles that were in the whole space originally and we’ve reused and modified some wheeled carts that were also here these are the inlets filters and the booth itself has big fans going straight out the roof through these filters we’ve been experimenting also with infrared drying because it is only water-based paint we use having some trouble with that gas infrared thing over there so we’ve reverted back to the electric infrareds here so on down the corridor good to have a bit of overspill space there may be some extra tools like a planer thicknesser that i’ve still to still want to bring from my old workshop that may live there and then this is the area where things are finished off final assembly is done boxes are packed four components and then projects go out this shutter to the van this space here can be for doors and panels that are ready to go out usually usually wrapped or they may be vinyl wrapped doors which we just buy in and they wait here again ready to go straight out to the van everything should be as near as it can be to where it wants to end up packaging in here nice big workbench these are all made from old racking material i’m just now in the process of trying to finalize the kanban storage area the idea with kanban is a japanese system is you keep your standard components in a two-part box i mean there are other ways of doing it this is the way we’ve gone with it when the first section of the box is empty you pull out your kanban card and you reorder according to the instructions on that card which includes a pre-decided reorder quantity so it just becomes very quick and second nature to get stuff ordered the second part of the box there should be big enough that you’ll have stock until the order arrives i’m working on putting all our lighting components in these nice tipping boxes here and these by the way are from a company called our packaging au er it’s a german company a little brochure over here actually lovely boxes if you get excited about boxes like i do then this is a great company to look at look at ourpackaging.com now if you’re interested in what i’ve shown you here i’ve been documenting the whole process of setting this place up on my member area over at barneycoffee.com freebird every step of the way each week in the first few weeks i was sharing what we were learning and what we were implementing about lean factory flow i’m actually paying a coach quite a scary amount of money to to learn all this stuff and passing on what i can for a lot less money at my membership site is just an example of a principle of lean the wastes of lean so if that’s whetted your appetite then go have a look at the member site there’s lots else there there’s a long series about the manufacture of one of our biggest fitted furniture projects to date and lots of new content coming out every month if you do decide to sign up there it helps to support me through this process of setting up until we are really running at a pace where we can start to be paying back that loan we took but more importantly for you it gives you really great value content if not just catch my updates here on youtube and instagram quite active on instagram with stories sharing what we’re doing for example we recently shared the squaring process for this panel saw try to share whatever whatever i can that’s helpful um because it’s not easy setting up in woodworking it’s very complex thing to get going with a woodworking business well i’ll leave it there i’m doing this just before christmas have a great christmas if you’re watching this in christmas 2020 and check in and see how our business growth journey develops throughout 2021 [Music] you …

Download Today! 👈