This is a can of worms, but it’s one that every woodworker has. I don’t know if I have ever talked to anyone who’s product requires finishing where they didn’t say, “Finishing is our bottleneck.”

WHY IS THIS? And more importantly why hasn’t anyone fixed it? — well, until now. 

If you have been following along with the Ultimate Finishing Challenge, Man vs. Machine that I did, you may have a bit of a head start on this article. If you haven’t, I believe this is a must-see webinar I did in conjunction with Woodworking Network & Guffey Systems (woodworkingnetwork.com/events-contests/webinars). 

A psychological problem
I will open with a bold statement: I believe all finishing bottlenecks are a psychological problem, not a process problem, if and only if we break free of what our brain is telling us and go with what the mathematics tell us, you will remain a prisoner of your finish room forever. 

Let me explain. One of my biggest challenges as someone who owns a consulting company (Quantum Lean), manufacturing company (My Door Factory) and a machinery company (Stolbek) is since the addition of the machine company, people are more hesitant to believe me. I get the “You’re just trying to sell me a machine.”

Not only is that statement the farthest thing from the truth, I believe I’m the only machine manufacturer in history to refuse a sale because also as a lean practitioner, I’m trained to seek and destroy bottlenecks. If our machine doesn’t affect the bottleneck, we won’t sell it to you. Sorry. I’m sharing this challenge because there is a silver lining. It’s forcing me to be totally thorough and transparent with the experiments we are running. And the latest one in the finishing room was nothing short of staggering. As a matter of fact, I bet that most people reading this won’t believe my findings.

Here is what I think the major problem is: When we think of finishing, we picture someone or a fancy machine spraying. So when someone says, “We need to speed up our finishing department,” we all just picture spraying faster. Wow… WRONG. 

It’s the sanding
To get a finish on something there is typically a raw sanding, then a prime or sealer, then sanding again, then another prime or seal, then sanding again, then the top coat. The sanding effort is almost 20 times the spraying effort. So, I believe when we picture “Finishing,” we should see someone grinding away at a sanding bench.

We have a significant amount of data now from surveying the companies that call us for sanding robots. One of our first questions is: “How long does it take you to sand a door by hand?” It’s almost like it’s a universal answer we were taught in school, hands down, everyone says “2 minutes.” 

If this number is ingrained in our minds as a fact, then most everyone setting up a finishing room is vastly underestimating the amount of labor it’s going to take. But it gets worse, a lot worse. What happens next, is the boss goes out on the shop floor to see for themself what the problem is. They go to the sanding bench and ask someone to sand a panel, pull out their stop watch and say, “GO.” 

Naturally, the operator is hyper focused and works faster than usual, likely sanding a panel (on average) in about 3-1/2 minutes. The boss says thanks, and heads over to the booth. Of course you can spray the same panel in 30 seconds, so that’s not the problem. Armed with the new sanding time, they determine the 2 minutes was optimistic and they just need one more person in the sanding area. Problem solved, right? Wrong again. Here is what happens in reality — argue if you want, but we have a lot of data to back this up.

• Ask the operator how long it takes to sand a panel/door, answer — 2 minutes each
• Watch the operator sand a panel or door, time elapsed — 3-5 minutes 
• Give them 20 doors to sand, walk away, monitor when they get done, time elapsed — 5-8 minutes each
• Monitor an entire day’s worth of sanding, time elapsed — 8-12 minutes per door (maybe more) 

Sanding sucks
So, we have an entire industry dramatically underpowering their finishing operations, and they can’t figure out why. We forget the simple fact that sanding sucks. It’s boring, not rewarding, monotonous, dusty and physically straining. Ironically, it’s also the most important job in the shop. But I digress. 

As the day progresses, a person is naturally going to have their mind wandering, looking for any reason to stop sanding, have a quick chat with their co-worker or take a few extra restroom breaks. All this time gets added to the cost of our operations.  
How do we fix this industry-wide problem? 

Here are the findings of many experiments. Keep in mind this is on average. Start here, and you will be safe when setting up your finishing operations. 

Step 1: You need to know your measurements. How many panels per day do you need to finish? This is critical to getting the right set up. The wrong equipment can triple your cost per door. Even though it seems like it would be faster, one fast machine isn’t faster; balancing production and connecting processes is faster. 

Step 2: When you know your requirements, apply this math to calculate your labor requirements. Each person, with no automation can only sand 23 finished doors per day. WIth some automated help, it can be 50. 

Step 3: If you are considering a spray line, there are many wonderful reasons to get this kind of machine, quality and consistency can’t be beat. Just make sure you are aware of how they like to run. They are really fast, forcing you into batch production, which will force you into looking for a drying solution as well. This is a wonderful yet costly solution; if you’re doing less than 150 finished doors per day, it will really increase your cost per door. I’m not saying don’t get one, just be aware of why you’re doing it. It won’t save you any money until about 200 finished doors per day. 

Step 4: Link sanding to your spraying process as demonstrated in the Ultimate Finishing Challenge, and cut your costs in half. 
I hope this helps some struggling shops better equip their finishing areas, slaughter some sacred cows, take on the challenge of single-piece flow and connected process, and when all that hard work is done, reap the rewards. 

I seem to be glued to the finishing room experiments these days, and our next one is “How to run your spray line in single piece flow effectively.” Stay tuned for that, it’s going to be another breakthrough.