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's be clear right off the bat: this is not a production machine, and probably won'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' x 24' bed. Cabinet shops that make a lot of drawers but aren't invested in CNC get a lot of mileage out of router jigs that cut pretty much foolproof dovetails once they'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'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't buy skill. And if you're pursuing woodworking as a semi-serious hobby, surely you'd like to actually learn something along the way? The secret to good dovetails isn't a different saw, or a different dovetail guide, or the perfect chisel, or some other doodad you buy. It's practice. Ditto every other joint that this machine can cut, with the exception of a box joint [0]. Maybe I'm grossly misunderstanding the point of a hobby for most people, but I pursue mine to get better at something I'm not already doing, not to be a drone feeding a machine I don't understand. Raney Nelson put it thusly: "If you cannot already do the machine’s job by hand, the machine will outwit you" [1].<p>I won't start my own shop once I finish school. Just like software, there's things you learn in school, and things you learn doing the trade for money. I'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's an inevitability that I'll need to take jobs that don't pay enough to do all hand work. And I'll own a Leigh [2] dovetail jig, like most everybody else. And I'll probably own a Festool Domino [3] for loose tenon joinery, because that'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'll own a couple sets of cope and stick router bits and a panel-raising bit for the doors. But I don'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'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're going to take this commercial, is their target addressable market big enough to cover their R&D costs and the cost of actually building a production run?<p>As a courtesy to anybody who replies: I'm heading to sleep (East Coast), but I'll check back tomorrow. And if you're curious what I do: I'm on instagram [5] and I've uploaded some higher-res (but still crummy) pictures to Google Drive [6]<p>[0] I don't think anybody who wasn'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't making box joints by the thousands, they're basically made to be cut on a tablesaw.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.daedtoolworks.com/lounge-against-the-machine-daedlab-commandments-1-and-2/" rel="nofollow">http://www.daedtoolworks.com/lounge-against-the-machine-daed...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.leighjigs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.leighjigs.com/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYW_9MgSp6Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYW_9MgSp6Q</a><p>[4] I'm curious how Leigh feels about this development. I'm willing to bet they aren't thrilled; they make mortise and tenon jigs too.<p>[5] <a href="https://instagram.com/teaandsawdust" rel="nofollow">https://instagram.com/teaandsawdust</a><p>[6] <a href="https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wQKGxaqWfRzNoc-vevIhd3BkgnHpkgbb" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wQKGxaqWfRzNoc-vevIh...</a>