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Shop went from drafting every cabinet by hand to CAD in 4 months, and I'm honestly torn
Four months back my uncle sold his shop in Grand Rapids and the new owner walked in with a laptop and a copy of Cabinet Vision. Before that we drafted everything on paper, scribbled on the back of cut lists, and honestly it worked fine for 30 years. Now every drawer box and face frame is drawn up before a board gets touched, and our scrap pile dropped by about a third in the first two months. Here's my split though: the young guys swear the software catches mistakes we used to eat, but my uncle says half the feel for how a joint actually closes up is gone when it's just lines on a screen. Is the speed and less waste worth losing that hands-on figuring out, or is there a middle ground you all have landed on?
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burns.brooke23h ago
Question whether the real loss is the software or the gap it filled. Your uncle learned joints by cutting them wrong and fixing the mess, and no screen gives that back, but the young guys were never going to learn it from paper either if nobody slowed down to teach them. The middle ground might be making them hand-build one cabinet start to finish each month, no drawings, so the feel stays alive while the machine keeps the scrap down.
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