MatchSticks: Portable CNC System for Automating Wood-Working Joinery
As it happens, I left software a year and a half ago to pursue and education (and hopefully soon a career) in woodworking. My feelings on this are mixed.<p>Let&#x27;s be clear right off the bat: this is not a production machine, and probably won&#x27;t get any significant traction in the professional market. I checked out a local architectural millwork shop last year that does high end doors and windows. Once their rough lumber is milled 4-square, everything, and I mean <i>everything</i> gets cut on their 5 axis CNC router. Which has a roughly 8&#x27; x 24&#x27; bed. Cabinet shops that make a lot of drawers but aren&#x27;t invested in CNC get a lot of mileage out of router jigs that cut pretty much foolproof dovetails once they&#x27;re set the first time.<p>So that leaves the hobbyists and truly custom folks. The truly custom folks are probably already jigged up to cut their joinery with a router, a Festool Domino, or other dedicated machines (mortisers, tenoners, cope and stick set-ups for a router or shaper, etc).<p>At the very high end, or for one-offs, hand-cut joinery is either expected by the client, or still competitive with building jigs to cut the joinery by machine.<p>Which leaves the hobbyists.<p>If you&#x27;re just doing woodworking to build stuff, I guess I can see the point of this. It (presumably) gets results fast.<p>But, when you get right down to it, money can&#x27;t buy skill. And if you&#x27;re pursuing woodworking as a semi-serious hobby, surely you&#x27;d like to actually learn something along the way? The secret to good dovetails isn&#x27;t a different saw, or a different dovetail guide, or the perfect chisel, or some other doodad you buy. It&#x27;s practice. Ditto every other joint that this machine can cut, with the exception of a box joint [0]. Maybe I&#x27;m grossly misunderstanding the point of a hobby for most people, but I pursue mine to get better at something I&#x27;m not already doing, not to be a drone feeding a machine I don&#x27;t understand. Raney Nelson put it thusly: &quot;If you cannot already do the machine’s job by hand, the machine will outwit you&quot; [1].<p>I won&#x27;t start my own shop once I finish school. Just like software, there&#x27;s things you learn in school, and things you learn doing the trade for money. I&#x27;d like to learn the things you learn doing it for money in an established shop.<p>Eventually, I would like to have my own shop. At that point, I think it&#x27;s an inevitability that I&#x27;ll need to take jobs that don&#x27;t pay enough to do all hand work. And I&#x27;ll own a Leigh [2] dovetail jig, like most everybody else. And I&#x27;ll probably own a Festool Domino [3] for loose tenon joinery, because that&#x27;s basically the direction mortise and tenon joinery is headed at the middle of the market on down [4]. And god-of-your-choice help me, if I end up taking more than a handful of cabinet jobs, I&#x27;ll own a couple sets of cope and stick router bits and a panel-raising bit for the doors. But I don&#x27;t see owning a MatchSticks machine. Existing tools are faster.<p>So as near as I can tell, the target market is hobbyists who aren&#x27;t actually that serious about learning their hobby? Which I concede is perilously close to a no-true-Scotsman fallacy. At the end of the day, if they&#x27;re going to take this commercial, is their target addressable market big enough to cover their R&amp;D costs and the cost of actually building a production run?<p>As a courtesy to anybody who replies: I&#x27;m heading to sleep (East Coast), but I&#x27;ll check back tomorrow. And if you&#x27;re curious what I do: I&#x27;m on instagram [5] and I&#x27;ve uploaded some higher-res (but still crummy) pictures to Google Drive [6]<p>[0] I don&#x27;t think anybody who wasn&#x27;t selling something would seriously suggest cutting a box joint with anything other than a box-joint set on a tablesaw. Yes, you <i>could</i> do it with a router and Leigh sells a jig to do so [1], but a tablesaw is better in basically every way. And technically, you could do it by hand, but there would be a lot more fitting than for an equivalent dovetail joint with no actual benefit. If you aren&#x27;t making box joints by the thousands, they&#x27;re basically made to be cut on a tablesaw.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.daedtoolworks.com&#x2F;lounge-against-the-machine-daedlab-commandments-1-and-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.daedtoolworks.com&#x2F;lounge-against-the-machine-daed...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.leighjigs.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.leighjigs.com&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GYW_9MgSp6Q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GYW_9MgSp6Q</a><p>[4] I&#x27;m curious how Leigh feels about this development. I&#x27;m willing to bet they aren&#x27;t thrilled; they make mortise and tenon jigs too.<p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;instagram.com&#x2F;teaandsawdust" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;instagram.com&#x2F;teaandsawdust</a><p>[6] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drive.google.com&#x2F;drive&#x2F;folders&#x2F;1wQKGxaqWfRzNoc-vevIhd3BkgnHpkgbb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drive.google.com&#x2F;drive&#x2F;folders&#x2F;1wQKGxaqWfRzNoc-vevIh...</a>