Start-up business CAD Stairs Ltd has picked a Masterwood Project CNC machining centre as the mainstay of its new staircase manufacturing operation.
Housed in an arch beneath a railway line in Shoreditch, east London, CAD Stairs produces high quality staircases for trade customers and the public throughout London and the south-east. A fitting service is provided if required and balustrades can be supplied to match existing internal décor.
Loft conversion companies currently account for 75% of the company’s output, with a five-day delivery promised for standard loft conversion stairs. It also supplies a chain of builders merchants and makes stairs for shops, offices and warehouses.
Russell Bradley and Heath Harrington set up the business after identifying an opportunity to use a CNC machining centre to simplify and speed up the production of staircases.
Mr Bradley had been working for Lawsons, a large independent timber yard and builders merchant, while Mr Harrington was a self-employed carpenter with considerable experience of making staircases by hand.
They had seen a Masterwood machine making stairs at a builders merchant and decided to base their new venture around one. When they visited the Masterwood factory in Italy they were impressed with the quality of the components it produced and the simplicity of the software. They placed their order then and there.
Design process
Mr Harrington designs staircases on site on his laptop, using MasterStair’s CAD program. A 3D CAD drawing that gives the full specifications of the staircase, including the necessary Building Regulation requirements, accompanies every customer quote.
His design is put onto a USB stick and given to Mr Bradley who prepares the machining program. This is saved to the USB stick, which is given to the machine’s operator, Dean O’Neill, who is also a trained carpenter.
The Project 415, supplied with Masterwood’s purpose-designed MasterStair CAD/CAM software, featuring a cut string capability, is producing four bespoke staircases a day. It processes all the MDF treads and risers as well as the strings and posts made of solid pine or oak.
“When I made a staircase by hand it took a full day, and I consider myself a very fast worker,” said Mr Harrington. “The speed of the Project plus its constant accuracy has to be seen to be believed.”
Designed for timber processing, the Project 415 comes with a pod tubeless system or a 3600x1250mm matrix bed for nesting. The useable routing stroke in the X-axis is 3450mm, the maximum material thickness that can be machined through in the Z-axis is 110mm and it has a Y stroke of 1350mm.
It features an eight-post and six-post tool changer on the head with the option of fitting a second tool changer on the carriage side that can hold an additional eight or 14 tools.
MasterStair is a Windows-based program designed to speed up the production of straight and conventional winder flights.
The Project was also supplied with an optional horizontal router to give CAD Stairs the flexibility to produce kitchen and other doors, together with Level 1 of Masterwood’s new MasterCabinet software.
Ease of use
Only Mr Bradley had used a computer before, but all three found the Masterwood CAD/CAM software easy to understand and use.
“We could never have set up the business without the Project,” said Mr Bradley. “Our success is largely due to the quality of the work it produces and its accuracy. This makes fitting the staircases on site so simple, however complicated the location. Often when customers have fitted them themselves, they have phoned to say how well they slot in first time.
“It was convenient to get both the machine and the software from one source, because if anything goes wrong you know you are not going to sent from pillar to post to get things sorted out.”
He added that the actual staircase they were trained on by the Masterwood engineer was good enough to go out to a customer.
The speed and accuracy of the Project and its specialist software has enabled CAD Stairs to guarantee a lead-time from order to delivery of between five and seven days – a key factor in the company’s success.
“We sell on quality and the speed at which we can turn round orders,” said Mr Bradley. “Thanks to the the Project we’re receiving a lot of repeat orders and the business is growing far faster than we’d originally planned.”
