We didn't have dial phones until I was in what is now called middle school. Of course, we only had two paved streets in town (highway was the main street) still some board sidewalks on the main drag, and, believe it or not we are the State Capitol! 
I never had a key to my own front door until I was in my mid-twenties.

Paul Shuttleworth was in furniture manufacturing before starting CPA and no doubt bought machinery from factories closing. My opinion furniture manufactured years ago was much better than the CNC junk made in China we see today. Considering CPA annual output buying new high tech machinery would not make sense. CNC’s advantage is high volume duplication. It’s not likely to turn out a better product. None of the vintage custom single shots we admire were built with CNC machinery.

Boats 

I've built a run several furniture shops from small two man to 12-15 operators and most of my machinery was bought at big company auctions in NC, VA, MA and NY. It was the only economic way I could get the machines to do any sort of production work. All were operator run so manpower was an absolute necessity. In the beginning the furniture industry in this country was centered in Grand Rapids ( also home of lots of top tier machinery ), in Indiana and upstate NY and chair makers of MA.  Organized union labor pushed these big firms South to NC and VA where cheaper labor kept them thriving for decades. As markets grew and designing struggled to keep up more specialized machines were needed, many from Italy and Germany but each machine required a well trained competent operator (s). Labor payrolls exploded and the bigger factories had parking lots for hundreds of cars and towns grew proportionate to factory needs. 

In the 90's the bigger factories started to move offshore and soon it became a mass exodus. China, Vietnam, etc but they never got the hang of building American design furnishing. They lacked the valued domestic timber, they almost never figured out staining and finishing and as small oriental types they didn't have the intuition for sizing our homes and color schemes. Eventually the companies started shipping the raw pieces or components back to the states for assembly and finishing. Honestly knock down furniture is the only sensible way to ship containers full of furniture. Less damage and more concentrated loads. 

So now many of the still solvent companies are coming back or are back but not with giant manpower payrolls. It's all robotics and CNC and it works well. You won't see 20' long double-end tenoners, lines of shapers and profilers or dovetailers like you used to. A master carver working 8 to 12 hours making ball and claw period feet on cabriole legs is a thing of the past. And surprisingly there is good quality older CNC machines on the used market at very affordable prices. Not for every shop but it's there. And the small custom shops can still make it finding products and holes in the big shop production lines 

Rick

Here are the photos of the Martini stock above after about 30 minutes of sanding with 50 and 80 grit sandpaper.
Otto

Chipmaker, I don't know the first thing about fitting stocks, but unless I'm seeing it wrong, in your picture it looks like a huge hole in that second stock.  How do you deal with that?

thanks,

Chris.

That's kind of neat! Isn't it not that uncommon to run into a hole after cutting into nice wood?

Had a few problems with the wood as well.

I have it on excellent authority (my son works for Shiloh), Shiloh still uses a wood duplicator and then hand finishes the inletting.
Tom W.


.