Estimating joinery time

I'm suprised I haven't found anything on this in the archives:

I'm curious to hear how others are estimating their joinery time. I'm frustrated by how long it takes some of my seemingly experienced employees to cut joinery. I don't know if I'm expecting too much or not because I don't have enough background on anyone but, well, mainly myself to guage by. Has anyone published estimating time tables based on historic data? Is there already a thread on this I haven't found? If there is no such thing in existance, well, here is our chance to be first at something...

Now before this turns into a bragging session, I'm talking about honest estimates, you PR for one joint is of no interest to anyone. We'll, maybe that can be a whole 'nother thread... I'm looking for your daily pace knowing you have to get up and do it all over again tomorrow: nice work done with efficiency and safety in mind. If we're doing this for a living we're in one of two groups: trying to make ourselves money, or trying to make our boss money, and we're all trying to produce quality work.

We all have varying techniques and are working in different situations and with different species and styles or timber, which can easily cloud the question.

So to standardize this as much as possible, lets assume a fresh cut pine timber is sitting in front of you, on horses in a level-floored shop and your tools are all at hand, layout has already been done and all you have to do is cut.

How long does it take you to produce a nicely finished:

2"x8"x8" long tenon
2"x8"x4 deep unhoused mortise
a 2' long halved and bladed scarf (2 8x8s)
make typical brace tenons (one in each end of a 3x5 brace)

all complete with peg holes and ready for assembly.


I'll get things started with what I use for estimating time on each of the above: 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours and 30 minutes. Of course, when I do a real estimate I account for set-up, layout, coffer break, screw-ups etc... but let's keep this simple.

I look forward to your responses and thanks for sharing.

Shaun

Power tools? Hand only?

not at all. can be quite nice to work if you have a good sawyer.

Now if that had been a fresh cut, waney, sappy, pine, where you had to use turpentine for clean up, that could be daunting. What was your time?

In all seriousness, I think this is one of the taboo topics, and is why it is not spoken of much, we tip toe around the edges. Another taboo is the sizing of timber. With modern computer technology why is there not a program for sizing timber for the species and length? Job security, perhaps.

Shaun, your number are within my ballpark. I may cut the 2.5 hrs on the scarf to 0 due to the long 56' plate with no scarf. And you did not give a time for the braces. With a skill saw put another 30 minutes on the whole brace, both ends to your completed specs, you may be able to treat them in a mass production and cut that to 15min., though. There are a lot of variables, and I find it all comes down to the individual and how that one person works, this applies to every thing in life. There is a fine line between the proper detail needed to construct the joinery needed and that which is executed to the .001 of an inch, may I say annal retention.

On to the power tool and hand too aspect of this. It is my experience that power tool are faster but less accurate. Now before I get stepped all over, let me say, this is from a perspective in favor of hand tools, keep that in mind. I will put it like this, a power tool cuts too fast and an over cut is likely. So to cut a joint accurately you must stay shy of the line, meaning it now needs to be cut by hand, requiring two steps. Hand tools allow the steps to happen in one process without the possibility of the over cut, in turn, saving time and achieving the accuracy needed.

bmike, what does a good sawyer have to do with sappy pine, does your sawyer have a trick worth sharing? Inquiring minds want to know. We are now working some sticky pine, at least the square stays put.

Tim

anything but mortisers; the only power tools we use for such work are circular saws and 1/2" drills for the main cuts and borings, then its all chisels, handsaws and axes.

and wood type really, it doesn't have much impact on time so choose any species you wish. We work mostly vintage timber of varying species and new white oak.

i don't know tim, maybe i've just been lucky.

when i've done mixed log and square work from pine the log parts were always sticky, usually just under the bark (cambium?). on the last barn i cut i had 1 timber out of 151 that was 'sticky' and sappy. lots of 8x10 and 8x8.

and in working with pine at the last 'job' i think i could count on 1 hand the number of 'sticky' pieces i've dealt with over 4 years.


perhaps its more of a supplier issue - perhaps the timber i received had been in the yard in log form for quite awhile... or perhaps i've gotten lucky.

not sure.

The Tamarack I was working recently was full of bleeding pitch pockets. Pine I’ve worked in the south where there is not really any such thing as wintercut tends to weep, but if the sawyer is doing as asked, and sawing from the piles of wintercut in the logyard, it is usually easy to tell, for this very reason.

Shaun – The times you mention are on par with what I see as norms...

Though in my experience, species and state (dry/green) does heavily influence, both the time needed, and which tools to reach for – Recycled and White Oak are both on the time consuming to cut and the reach for the recoil or electron hose, end of the spectrum.

Where are you getting White Oak sticks in the Berkshires ?

Tim - maybe I've just been lucky. Last frame I hand cut (power and push pull) 151 pieces, I had 1 that was 'sticky'.

Maybe its more of a supplier issue than a sawyer issue - perhaps the logs were in the yard for quite a while before being milled?

Last time (6 years ago?) I worked on round and square - the rounds were miserable to work with - layer just under bark (cambium?) was a mess. Wasn't until you got into the core that things were pleasant.

It would be interesting to track your shop for a month to see what you actually do. I'm cutting my own frame, and I'm not in the business. My times to be more like
45 minutes on the large tenon, 15 minutes on the unhoused mortise (I have a chain mortiser), and 30 minutes for a brace tenon, and I've not yet done a scarf joint. If I can do it in these times, anyone can. I did a short apprenticeship in a shop a few years ago. The joiners were all good. Some were very fast (too) and some were slower and more particular. But what I observed was a lot of down time. Talking about girls, talking about cars, puzzling over the strength of a timber, looking a plans to try to figure things out, waiting on timbers, moving timbers, etc. These guys weren't lazy by any means. They were just typical employees like most businesses have. Some spend time at the water cooler, and a lot of office employees these days spend a lot of time surfing the internet. It's rare in any business to find employees who keep their nose to the grindstone like the business's owners do. I guess what I'm saying is that you probably need to take your ideal day (16 joints a day on average) and multiply it by a factor (60%?) to get an accurate frame estimate.

Shaun,

Half hour on the through tenon is about right.

For us the average time on a 2x4 mortise 8" long would be closer to 15 min. (mortiser).

I would hope to layout and cut the braces all at once and get it to around 20 min. per brace (including layout with a template).

that's probably a good number for both halves of the scarf.

That would not include set up, layout, sharpening, material handling, supervision, project management, sanding, oiling, waxing, etc (as you noted).

I think we don't talk about this too much because we are afraid that some people who are watching might be the ones we gave a quote to last week and they might crunch some numbers and think we are trying to charge too much if they think they know how long it takes us to cut a joint. In reality anyone that would try to do that based on such incomplete information is probably not a likely prospect anyway, so I'm not too worried about it.


As for thinking your guys are taking too long -- some people are good at cutting joinery fast and others never will be. We've had guys that were really slow, but did neat work. We tried to keep them busy doing fussy stuff and keep the other guys doing the bulk of the production. That doesn't always work out, though.

What we found is that a carpenter who can lay out and cut timbers fast and cleanly without supervision or whip cracking and who can track from task to task without bogging down is an extremely valuable asset for a company our size and not easy to find (at least around here).


At the end of the day, your numbers are yours and mine are mine and they don't translate too well. Thorough record keeping is the only way to dial in the accuracy of your estimating. Different tooling, different conditions, different wages and different costs make estimating and pricing a pretty individualized thing.

not enough White Oak to bother looking for in the Berkshires, unfortunitely. We get ours in nearby NY. Meltz Lumber in Ghent. Nice folks, you need be specific about the quality you require and not be affraid to reject bad sticks, but they cut a ton of it daily.

Shaun

I kept track of joinery time on a fairly big frame last year, maybe this topic will inspire me to organize it and put it all together.
For now though I'll second Gabel's post. I think those times are good, and if you're worried about time get a chain mortiser.

I have often thought piece meal could work for pay compensation on the shop floor. You get paid for the volume of wood removed, this of course would be applied to a fairly well cut joint, accurate. A, 2"x8"x4" mortice and it's 1"x8"x9" housing equals .944 board feet, time(x) three (three bents) equals 2.832 board feet of wood removed. In case you are wondering these are the pockets for post on a top plate. To layout and cut these it takes 30 minutes each, 1.5 hours total. Here is the variable, what do you pay per hour? Is this being paid to the new kid with not a care in the world, or the new kid with a wife and 2 kids, or to the older fellow, single and no other obligations? Do you consider these factors in the pay for work completed? Let me stretch this out a bit further, is this home for a school teacher or a AIG CEO who works for a buck/year and receives $millions in bonuses for that year, or a farmer that needs a place for his hay and animals? Just thought I would through this in as another glitch in the pricing dilemma.

I am going to plead the 5th on how I address that issue.

Tim

I've considered your approach, Tim. Thanks. Plenty of industries work that way and it is an easy way to turn a costly employee into a profitable one. I will give it more thought, now that you've brought it to my attention again.

re: the taboo of this question: why? if any of you think you have knowledge that is too good to share then why haven't I seen your picture on the cover of fortune magazine? I don't consider these to be industry secrets, rather estimating 101. I make money on my work so I know I'm not doing anything wrong. My simple problem is I have one employee who costs me money while the rest make me money. I'm looking for a knowledge base to lean on when I confront the issue in the near future.

Before I decided to start my business 5 years ago, I spent 10 years working as a project manager in an engineering department for a paper company. I'm not green to the ways of managing people or projects. None of us are above seeking helpful advice from colleagues.

Establishing a baseline for comparing a joiner's worth should be considered valuable knowledge to all of us.

You have that right there in your shop.
You have the rest that make you money, to use as a baseline for the one that doesn't and show him that they do, and that he doesn't.
See if this will motivate him to try harder and pull his weight.
Have them teach him what they do that's right and how it makes them faster.

Or have them show you what they do so that you can show him, maybe he'll take it better coming from you, then from them.

Jim Rogers

sound like Gabel and Jim just about covered it. I know in most cases the group usually sets the standard for how fast and quality which one can produce. If one is not at that level, he should at least be trying really hard to get there, if not there is probably a problem.
It seems that some work at a faster pace, but as long as an employee has work ethic they will be potentially efficient enough to employ. Unfortunately, I find these people with self contained work ethic realy rare and the rest often will try to get away with what they can. It is the person that feels wrong for being paid, while not producing the work he/she is being paid to do, that I always look for when hiring an employee.
I do know repetition , templates, chain mortisers, are all really helpful to attaining more speed and efficiency.
Also when it is affordable to hire a helper to sharpen,care for the tools, help with all those odds and ends does really speed up the cutting. Usually this helper can be paid much less. In the restaurant business we call them dishwashers, though they often end up doing a lot more than washing dishes. tb

Some solid advise and insight, thanks. It is a tough call for sure. We aren't a cut shop and I don't have anyone whos spends all day every day cutting joints and we're rarely joining two new pices of wood together or even doing more than 2 or 3 of the same joint in an entire job. Our work is quite unique and tough to gauge by others I guess.

The hardest part is this guy goes all day, non stop. He looks like he's working hard, he thinks he's working hard and he means well, but at the end of the day not much is accomplished... It it weren't my payroll I'd think it rather comical.

My cross to bear I guess.

I think there are so many variables that it's hard to come up with measurements this precise. Probably the best you can do is to look at how long it took to do a particular frame and then divide by the number of joints (if that's the metric you want to use). If I had to choose only one trade secret that I would be reluctant to share with my competitors, it would be my estimating formulas. Because the truth is that I do bid against other timber framers. And while I often win even if I'm not the guy with the lowest price, I still don't want my competitors knowing what my number is going to be.

As far as keeping my shop floor running efficiently, I make sure I hire joiners that are enthusiastic about the work. I try to give them input into decisions we make so they feel they have a stake in our results, and care about the quality. If they care, they won't mind when you show them how to do it better (both speed and accuracy). I never take a stopwatch to them. If you spend any time on the shop floor, you can tell who's slacking off, and who doesn't care about the quality of their work. You don't need a number to tell you that. CB.

The art of estimating is not just the time it takes to cut a mortise and tenon. It is timber movement, efficiency, bathroom breaks etc. I have found that the more people working on a project the more man hours get billed to a project. It is not that any one person is not holding his weight. I think it's more starting and stopping to shuffle materials as work is completed. A one man shop will cut a frame with about one third less man hours.

Kevin

Interesting point, Kevin. This may be true, in some regards. Things seem to really fly with four guys in the shop, though. It could be the banter exchanged with others, when present. This doesn't happen when alone, most of the time.

Tim

In regard to my previous post on volume of wood removed, I was cutting some large through tenons yesterday and that would be some gravy working piece meal, so I was thinking mortices could have a different rate than tenons, or not, think of it as a bonus. Hopefully some Attorney General won't take it back after the fact.

Tim

An interesting side note to this is that with the dynamic components in SketchUp 7 you can assign variables of all sorts to your joinery (and timbers, pretty much anything). When you use the 'report' feature you can break out the joinery from the timber (and sips, trim, floors, etc.) If you were crafty enough you could write statements into your joints - so a tenon of a certain size would be equal to X $$$ and a tenon of a different size would be equal to $$ (this would have to include the mortise and housing + the tenon).

Of course, this is probably overkill for the first 5 frames or so - but once you build it, anytime you pull a joint from your library - that data is embedded in it (or to simplify, you could just assign a value - like 'J2' for medium difficulty, and 'J3' for harder, etc. or by type... - then do a 'gut' check on your output and throw a number at it).


But, its all theory until you understand what you can cut in an hour, per man, then figure out your shop rate, per man, per hour. And break it down from there. And don't forget to add your burdens to it - rent, profit margin, benefits, taxes, rainy day fund, donut fund, medical, etc. etc.

Spreadsheets. Mmmm.