Buying with confidence

For the owners of Bower Joinery having confidence in the expertise and product knowledge of the people they were purchasing from was a big factor in selecting a Biesse Rover KFT 1236 CNC when they made the decision to upgrade their company’s manufacturing process. JOINERS magazine follows up two years later.

A bespoke kitchen design and wooden joinery company that has operated in Christchurch for over 38 years, Bower Joinery is currently owned by John Mudgway a qualified builder and master joiner and his wife Gina an experienced kitchen designer. It offers full service from design to manufacture to install, for kitchens, stairs and house lots.

A couple of years ago, not long after purchasing the company, John and Gina decide they needed to shift the manufacturing focus from largely ‘by-hand’ to machinery based and purchased a Rover KFT 1236 CNC from the Biesse Group to achieve this.

“We were in the situation when we purchased the business that we had a lot of older and experienced staff who have since retired which left us short of experience at a high skill level,” says John.

“The Rover CNC has replaced that experience and allows us to continue to deliver the accuracy and quality that was previously being achieved from that skill level. It has also meant that we have been able to reduce staff numbers through that period. We were running with nine guys on the floor prior to installing the Rover we now operate with six staff at a similar level of output.

“We still do some solid wood joinery and bespoke stair work by hand but the CNC does the bulk of the cabinet work and all the repetitive work with our stair manufacture. It is easy to switch from kitchen work to stair work simply requiring a change of program.

“Dealings with Biesse have been very good, I have known their local rep Warrick Small for 25 plus years and he is brilliant to work with. Basically I can say to him ‘this is what I want to do’ and I can trust his advice to help me get there.

We are very busy, but not using the machine to anywhere near its capacity, we don’t need to, you would need 30 staff to push this machine to capacity, it will last us for a long time yet.

“We have continued to use Biesse expertise on special projects, especially for our stair work where they set up a parametric program which enables us to alter any one measurement, in say the treads or rises, and it automatically makes the required changes across the job. This makes repetitive work very easy to adjust and alter from staircase to staircase.

“Biesse service has been good throughout, I have no complaints at all and it speaks for itself in that I am signing up to purchase a new edge bander off them this morning.

Advice on purchasing a CNC? Buy as good as you can afford, from a company that understands your business and can provide local support when you need it. In my opinion and experience Biesse is not matched by many, if any in this area,” says John.