Re: Question on work times
Sgian Dubh
>Alan, I'm not sure what your question is really. Except that maybe you were illustrating that you could make a three drawer chest in a very short time, and how could you do that?
I too can work like that and knock out stuff in double quick order if need be. I must admit that I'm not much of a handtool only buff being a working furniture maker, but it's often forgotten by working furniture makers, let alone amateurs how much time is simply lost to other necessary functions.
No worker works at 100% efficiency- only machines that never break down do that, and most machines break down too, so even they aren't 100% efficient. Most workers are only about 65% efficient, meaning 35% of their time is spent doing things like picking fluff out of their navel, and other non productive functions.
The estimating system I touched upon has built into it the natural inefficiencies of production. As an illustration it's typical to assign to a working furniture making business owner with no staff a working week of about 25 hours, on the assumption that 40 hours is a normal working week-- which may, or may not be the case.
A typical one man band furniture design and make business that has all the duties of running a business will typically spend fifteen hours a week out of a forty hour week on non-billable functions. These are things like workshop and machinery/tool maintenance, office work, promotional activities, pricing, design work (sometimes) etc..
Essentially the billable hours must pay for the non-billable hours, plus money required for daft things like holidays, weekends, illness, pension provision, savings, hobbies-- e.g., playing and watching rugby at the weekend- investment in new tools and equipment, salary for the proprietor, and perhaps shockingly for some--- the dirty word, profit.
So the two hours billing for an M&T covers more than just the actual time spent on excavating a mortice and cutting a tenon. All things being equal, and with nothing else to think about I can whack out a simple M&T in fifteen-twenty minutes, and that's with hand tools only.
Hand tool woodworking is the rock upon which my woodworking ability is built and I've moved on a long, long way from those basics. But it has to be remembered when pricing a job that peak efficiency is never attainable over an average working week.
My challenge to you would be to make two of those chests you put up as illustration not just once, but two every week-- and continue to do so for the next year, day after day, week after week and month after month. What would you do with them all, and how would you fund the making of each successive chest? These are the sort of problems a business faces, and estimating is just a small part of the whole.
You'd need to find a buyer for each chest, because without buyers how would you buy the wood required to make the next one, and if you're having to deal with those problems, perhaps you might need to run a set of accounts which might be computerised, and computers cost money, and so do programmes like QuickBoooks Pro, plus you need to spend time learning how to use the programme, and so on, and so on.
All I'm saying is that it is possible to cut some M&T joints faster than the two hour allowance I gave, but there are many things in a working workshop that are in a sense incidental to the job and must be accounted for in the overall pricing methodology.
There is not a cat in Hells chance that I would be suckered into quoting 22 hours only to make the chest you illustrated-- and a quote it has to be borne in mind is not necessarily only the time it takes to execute a piece of furniture. Slainte.