Icklesham Joinery Ltd is a good example of a specialist joinery manufacturer that makes bespoke staircases, windows, doors, conservatories, restaurant counters and bars – in fact, anything that a customer requires.
Like most traditional joineries, in recent years it has faced increasing problems obtaining skilled labour and speeding up production in order to remain competitive.
The enterprising family-owned firm has its origins in a tiny two-man business in the village of Icklesham, East Sussex that Mick Horsman, who is soon to retire, acquired 23 years ago after running a joinery company in Hertfordshire. With the help of his two sons, Jim and Robert, the former sleepy joinery has been transformed into a thriving operation that employs a 24-strong workforce.
The third generation of Horsmans – Jim’s son Marc, 21 – joined the firm two years ago.
With a strong customer base in London and the Home Counties, around 70% of the company’s work comes from the commercial sector, in housing and office fit-outs and refurbishment. The remainder is private business, chiefly conservatories, windows and doors.
The firm has carried out some prestigious contracts. Among them was making the solid wood doors, windows and staircase for the replica 1940s house built for the Imperial War Museum in London. It has also supplied fire doors and frames to the Albert Hall in London, the BBC and the new Social Studies department at Oxford University, and regularly makes fitments for major railway stations. Its counters and bars can be found in several top London restaurants.
Recognising the problems it faced, the directors decided that the way forward was to move away from traditional methods of woodworking, which had served them well over the years, and go into CNC operation.
This has been achieved with the help of a Masterwood Centromac 4000 CNC machine centre, designed for machining solid wood components, including staircases, assembled doors and windows, as well as panels.
‘Obtaining qualified joiners is a big problem,’ said Jim Horsman. ‘We also needed a way to speed up both staircase and general joinery production and assembly. I had always thought that CNCs were suitable only for panel producers until I saw the Centromac on Masterwood’s stand at Woodmex in 1998.’
After spending nearly a year considering their next move, the decision to buy was made after the directors saw a Centromac working at a UK joinery and visited the Masterwood factory in Rimini, Italy.
‘I was convinced from the moment I saw the machine that it was suitable not just for mass production but for a specialist joinery like ours and I had developed a strong belief in Masterwood’s practical knowledge of the joinery business,’ said Jim Horsman.
The Centromac has a three-axis controlled routing head with a 9hp at 24,000rpm router, along with a mortising head, a 14-post carousel tool changer and a vacuum cup bed. The X-axis is controlled over a length of 3900mm, with the option of increasing this to 5000mm, and a Y-axis up to 1250mm. Tailor-made to Icklesham Joinery’s requirements and supplied with an additional drilling head and indexing head, it can carry out a wide range of operations such as mortising, tenoning, moulding and shaping, drilling and milling, index routing, sawing and the machining of fielded panels.
The Centromac has enabled Icklesham to dispense with traditional joinery machines like spindles and mortisers and has made the manufacturing operation far more efficient and productive. Practically anything can be machined on the CNC. It processes all the staircase components, does the door mortising and preparation of flush doors, carries out complex circular work and prepares the company’s MitreMaster range of window and door sashes for the locks. It has even been used to shape bowls for a local wood turner.
‘The time saving achieved with the Centromac is quite impressive, as is its perfect accuracy for every operation,’ said Jim Horsman. ‘Mortising a door has been cut from 10-15 minutes to around four minutes, and on average we save around 50% of the time it previously took to prepare staircase components. This is because there is no set-up time and we have cut out the need to make jigs for each job. It has also allowed us to do work we would have been struggling with before, such as machining oak components with a 50mm radius in the corner, which could not be done with traditional machinery.’
As it can be managed by just one person, the arrival of the Centromac has allowed staff to be moved to other jobs in the mill, solving what was a severe staffing shortage.
Most of the programming is carried out by Marc Horsman in the design office, where he uses the specialist MasterStair program for staircase work and the standard MasterSystem² program for general joinery and panel machining. Programming at the machine can also be done when necessary.
‘It’s a very impressive machine and we have found the programming fairly easy to master after the initial training provided by Masterwood,’ said Marc Horsman.
Jim Horsman stressed that the move to CNC had been positive and no-one wanted to return to the old manufacturing methods. ‘The lads don’t complain any more about doing what used to be unpopular jobs, like mortising doors or machining raised fielded panels, because the Masterwood has taken all the hard work out of it. All they have to do is ensure that the correct machining program is fed in.’
