134Phone: 516-328-3970www.technocnc.comCNC Articlestheir own projections. Most of these companies try to avoid these problems by scrambling to build customer orders as they are received. But the last thing they want to do is antagonize a customer by making them wait too long. They typically look for small woodworking manufacturers like Cherry Tree that can respond veryquickly to meet their needs. Need to respond quickly in the virtual furniture businessIn the past, a quick turnaround was difficult because Cherry Tree used the typical labor-intensive process that has been used by custom furniture manufacturers for many years. Craftsmen and women cut out pieces from medium density fi berboard (MDF), plywood, or hardwoods using traditional shop equipment. If the piece has curves or other complex shapes, a template is usually produced and the parts are trimmed fl ush to the template. Building an accurate template requires a huge amount of skill. Even cutting out and drilling simpler pieces with straight edges to the required level of accuracy is no job for a beginner. As the complexity of the design rises, the time required to build it also increases, to the point where a company that uses traditional methods may decide that it isnt practical to even bid on the job.Arthur Allison, owner of Cherry Tree Custom Woodworks, faced these kinds of problems. In some cases,he was unable to provide customers with the delivery dates that they originally requested. In other cases, he had to turn down work because he was unable to deliver it in the time frame that it was needed. Arthur was aware that many larger furniture manufacturers had already moved to CNC equipment CNC Router Cuts Leadtime 63% For Build-To-Order Furniture Manufacturerwhich allowed them to take much of the skill and time out of the job of accurately producing difficult shapes. But the equipment that he had seen advertised and in shows was either cost prohibitive or else could not provide the level of accuracy and ruggedness needed to meet his requirements. For a number of years, he watched the CNC equipment market and waited for a machine to come along that would meet his requirements.Low cost plus high accuracyThe LC machine from Techno is the fi rst one that I saw that economically provided the accuracy and durability we needed, Arthur said. The machine was designed with just the right mix of features for the small to medium sized custom furniture manufacturer. For example, it has ball screws on all three axes and a closed-loop servo control system. These are the kind of features that are required for the accuracy that our customers demand. Yet the machine with a 50 by 96 inch travel complete with all required software costs under $20,000. When I saw the Techno, I realized that this was a machine that could pay for itself very quickly with the volume of work that I had to put through it. Styles and tastes change so quickly in the furniture business that any company that builds up a substantial inventory risks having to unload it at a substantial loss if customer buying patterns change. Cherry Tree Custom Woodworks, Orange Park, Florida, helps small furniture retailers overcome this problem by providing such a fast response time that most of its customers dont need to give the go-ahead to produce a product until they have an order in hand from their customer. The critical issue then becomes producing the piece as quickly as possible in order to keep the customer happy. Cherry Tree has dramatically reduced delivery time by producing most items on a Techno low-cost computer numerical control (CNC) router that produces highly accurate work from a CAD program, eliminating the need for what used to be a very time-consuming and skill-intensive manual task. The time required to produce a typical piece has been cut from 27 to 10 hours, so fast that in most cases customers assume that their furniture is simply being delivered from stock.Cherry Tree Custom Woodworks produces beds, entertainment centers, drawers, mirrors, and just about anything else that you can imagine in the area of custom furniture. The company serves as the manufacturing arm for a number of small and highly creative furniture designers and marketers. These companies typically sell their wares over the Internet or through retail outlets. Many of these companies are relatively small operations whose sales volume can fluctuate drastically from month to month. Building up an inventory of products would leave the company open to a major financial hit if customer demand did not match