My $1,000,000 Gamble… Worth It? by John Malecki
Wood Shop Details, Business, and Tools.
Ten-thousand square foot metal buildings on a concrete foundation split in half. Both are serviced separately and both units have their own offices. The office is located in North Pittsburgh which is 25 – 30min away from the city. This building cost $950,000.
We divided the area as mentioned, one is the metal area and the other is the wood area. You all know that our business has multiple facets. We have a custom furniture company which is called Metal and Wood Custom Furniture wherein we are doing a profitable service for other business as well as for the needs of our business.
We do a lot of flattening for other people, CNC milling for ourselves, signage, and all kinds of stuff with our 16foot x 6-foot CNC.
We have other tools like the five-horse power industrial SawStop as the heart of the shop, a table saw, and a 10-inch spiral head jointer that is not a helical head, I regret getting rid of my helical head. We also have a spindle sander and edge sander all hard-lined against the wall.
More or less the workflow in the shop is to facilitate content first, so this is not probably the most efficient way to set up your shop if you are just looking to produce custom furniture. But for me, I try to make it look good for the content side of the business.
You might probably be familiar with the third arm of the business which is a sawmill, this is not only to facilitate the work that we do in the custom side of the business but also for the local community and for those who are looking to save their trees from being just firewood.
I think It’ll be a great opportunity to facilitate the local community because nobody in Pittsburgh has a 70-inch wide band sawmill so it gives me a little bit of leverage against the market.
Bottlenecks and Hiccups
One of the biggest challenges for us is to be able to produce custom work while making content. Obviously, working and building in the shop makes a lot of noise, so they can’t be working if I am here and trying to film and do content.
If you are building out a bigger shop, something you definitely want to consider in all ways is how you’re going to be moving your materials around. For us, everything we do in this shop emphasizes being able to roll carts or drive a forklift around, so we are not breaking our backs with these epoxy tables. Always keep in mind that wood is heavy and epoxy is heavy and if you put it together, you double the heaviness.
Metal Shop Details and Tools.
We have a 4×4 Torch Mate 440 which is awesome and makes it really nice, we can burn out parts really fast, and welding machines and welding table are set up for good and better workflow. Right now, we don’t have anything in the metal shop because it just all went to powder coating.
Plans
You want to have a plan when you get into something of this scale and I obviously have a very rough and loose plan but a plan nonetheless and for me my plan was to expand.
IG: @john_malecki