When my husband, the ultimate DIY guy and a finish carpenter who
mostly uses hand tools for woodworking, recently discovered what the ShopBot,
an example of a home CNC wood router, could do, a pained look crossed his face.
"I'm obsolete," he said somberly.
CNC routers are "computer numerical controlled"
machines that take the fine work of measuring, sawing, wood carving, planing,
drilling, cutting mortises and tennons, and even collecting dust out of the
hands of the carpenter and put it into the processors, planers, drill bits, and
other fiddly bits of the computer and router machine. What can be achieved in
terms of project design, time savings, and labor savings with a CNC wood router
is nothing short of stunning. But even more stunning is that these computer /
router machines are now affordable for use in the home shop.
CNC
Router Invades the Home...at a Whittler's Pace
Currently, most CNC routers are used commercially. A few
forward-thinking wood hobbyists have tried out the smaller home versions. But
the CNC router's primary existing market consists of professional wood shops,
furniture manufacturers, and other commercial enterprises. The CNC wood
router's ability to do fast, repetitive precision work automatically by working
from digital project plans has meant enormous savings for these enterprises,
even given its initially hefty costs. But now you can get a ShopBot, a popular
computer controlled router brand, for under $10,000. And given how much a
wood hobbyist spends on tools and machine equipment in the name of his or her
hobby, this seems barely cause to blink.
Obstacles
to the ShopBot Revolution
But what about the emotional component of woodworking? Is it
simply to be discarded? As with most skilled crafts, the manual labor is half
the fun for many carpenters and woodworkers. True, the time-consuming nature of
many woodworking tasks can be considered nothing but tedium. But what about the
psychological satisfaction a craftsman or craftswoman gets in meticulously hand
carving designs into wood? What about the triumphs of achieving, with an
old-fashioned chisel, a well-cut dovetail after the frustration of multiple
trial-and-error efforts to get there? There's some virtue in this.
And what about the skill component? Will creative thinking,
design savvy, spatial awareness, gross and fine motor skills, and other
abilities cultivated by the woodworker go out of style? The complaints of older
generations that "It's all automated! They don't know how to make XYZ the
right way anymore!" seem to echo in our ears when we look at what a CNC
router can do and what human carpenters no longer have to do. Devotees like my
husband, who actually want to work with their hands and who appreciate the
challenge of a difficult project - and, more poignantly, who want to teach
these skills to the younger generations that follow them - are indeed becoming
dinosaurs.
Because, as my husband carpenter has pointed out to me, it will
not be very long before people begin to realize en masse the vast potential of
affordable CNC machines. Imagine a world where everyone owns a CNC router
machine in their home. Where buying a bed is as simple as downloading the
router plans and feeding it to the machine. Where designing your own bed is as
simple as downloading generic plans, altering them a bit, and feeding it to the
machine. We're far from that world in terms of legal and logistical
infrastructure, but we're not very far from that world in terms of technology.
When that world comes to be, far more than professional carpenters will become
obsolete.
CNC
Router Remains Just a Tool for Now. But the Signs are Ominous. Woodworking is
Changing.
For now, though, it's not true that the professional or amateur
woodworker is obsolete. If you buy a ShopBot or other premade CNC router, or
even build your own homemade wood router using a computer and software, they
won't do you any good if you're a rank novice at the craft. You still need to
have a carpentry clue. You need to set up the woodworking project and provide
the finishing touch, and this takes some carpentry know-how. And conversely, if
you're a pro or you know the woodworking hobby like the back of your hand, but
that's all you know, and you live in terror of
computers, you'll need to get up to speed.
But the labor, time, and creativity demands have been cut
drastically. In one day, on a whim, you can create a beautiful, ornate
woodcarving out of a digital photograph, while the human labor component is
reduced to a fraction of what it was, consisting, as my spouse puts it, of
setting up the machine, then wandering over to the fridge, pulling out a Coke,
grabbing some chips, and sitting down to watch football for eight hours.
The existence of small and mini CNC router machines, table top
CNC machines, and low cost CNC routers for the home is a signal that a new
order of carpentry is encroaching, in the same way the art world was
revolutionized by the technology of computerized graphic art, but perhaps even
more comparable to the intrusion of the affordable computer. With cheap CNC
routers comes the accessibility of an almost futuristic way to work wood and
other materials.
When it comes to building wood furniture, wooden carvings,
musical instruments, wood parts, and almost anything out of wood - and I've
neglected to mention that most CNC routers also work with foam, plastic and
even aluminum - automation on a whole new scale is on its way in.
So if you have plans to become an old-fashioned carpenter, you
might want to stem those plans and aspire instead to become a new-fangled
"carpentry engineer," "material-based designer,"
"plastic master," or whatever fancy title the user of CNC router
machines will own.
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