Pretty cool. It immediately becomes apparent when looking at the build steps that the best way to make cutting boards is en masse. Building one is not significantly less work than building 10.
I am assuming you are not a woodworker? There are physical constraints that make it really hard to scale like that. Whether it's clamps, glue drying time, planer capacity, shop space etc. You also don't get the same economies of scale when you start to get to the end of the process, eg sanding, routing edges/ blood groves/handles, applying finish, etc.
Making large batches of the same board is absolutely faster; I'm having a hard time thinking of a single counterexample. I estimate each additional board I make is only 10% more work than the time to make a single.
Best example I've got is an 3D cubes design. Took me a week to make one of them, took me a week and a half to make 12, with less wastage due to division remainders.
Sanding, edge routing, handles - all goes so much faster when I only have to set up the drum sander once, the CNC once, each grit on the the palm sander once...
As for clamps, those certainly are not the limiting factor. Harbor Freight clamps are less than $10, can be exchanged no questions asked if (when) they break, and you can never have enough of them anyways.
Of course it's way easier. You can fit ten cutting boards on one set of bar clamps. Adjusting the planer takes longer than sending one board through. You only have to change sanding paper 3 times instead of 3N. You only have to change your router bits twice instead of 2N. You only use one rag per finish pass.
The number of clamps you need for the first (long grain) glue ups depends on the number of lineal feet you are gluing up. How are you using the same set of clamps for the ten boards that would suffice for one board? All of the examples I saw are end grain cutting boards. So for the final glue up you need one complete set of clamps for each board. So you are either taking ten times as long to do that glue up or you need 10x clamps.
Side note: what planer are you using that sending work through is quicker than adjusting the height? Every planer I have ever used takes less than 5 seconds to adjust the height.
You both have a point. Commercially, make ten boards because efficiency equals money. For pleasure, do it one at a time because that’s more fun than an assembly line.
I’m not a woodworker most of the time, but I am building a 35 foot privacy fence at my house from rough redwood that I have to prepare myself (flattening, ripping, etc), and I would rather die than prepare the wood for more than one section of the fence at a time. I like doing it the hard way where I just do a bit at a time because it’s more enjoyable. If this were a job, I would certainly plane everything then cut everything then oil everything then drill all the holes then cut down the boards then I would bring that onsite to assemble it in a few days. Instead it’s going to take three months.
Wow, you have a 32 inch planer? That's awesome. That has to be an industrial planer? The brands I am familiar with, Powermatic/Laguna/etc, do not even make one that big.
If your 32 inch planer processes 5 feet in 4 seconds? That's 75 feet per minute! What kind of dust collection do you have?
He didn't say he had a 32 inch planer. You can glue two separate 16 inch sets of boards side by side in one set of clamps. You don't have to glue them together!
> Building one is not significantly less work than building 10.
One of the more disappointing things about being a programmer-woodworker is that as a programmer, as soon as I've got something that works right once it's no effort at all to chuck a loop around it to repeat it a bunch of times.
In woodworking, on the other hand? Putting in 20 screws takes almost twice as long as putting in 10.
