Custom Woodworking Business

"Stairbuilder Routes a New Path to Higher Profits and Productivity"

When houses cost in the millions of dollars, a central interior focus is often the staircase that frequently sets the tone for the exclusivity of the residence. With this in mind, custom staircases for these homes can easily cost thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To build these exclusive staircases with precision and beauty has always been the challenge for Rock Woodworks (Lake Worth, FL). But with the help of CAM software and new wood cutting equipment, President Roger Rock is able to deliver staircases with style and beauty along with precision fit.

Starting out as a general building contractor about 25 years ago in the northern Palm Beach County, Florida area, Rock was somewhat forced into building staircases when his customers couldn’t find anyone to do it. Though he was reluctant to build them, he gave his customer a price with a generous profit built in, and they accepted it. “Then people just kept coming and asking me to build stairs for them, so I figured I’d do it for a living,” he says.

Currently, the company builds stair casements, railing systems, circular and spiral staircases using wood or metal in traditional or contemporary styles along with ornamental wrought iron, brass, and stainless-steel, custom wood railings, hand-scrolled balusters and custom entry doors all of which are usually done in-house.

Rock says that he targets high-end houses, because they aren’t as affected by economy swings as lower priced ones. What’s more, in the Palm Beach County area there seems to be no end of expensive houses where multi-million dollar canal homes sit alongside moored seven figure yachts.

Rock runs his company in a 10,000 sq. ft. building and has 14 employees. He also uses two Techno CNC routers that have made all the difference in his being able to produce precision wood components with fast turnaround that also fit together like a glove on a hand. But to get this precision and short lead times, he also uses Mastercam CAD/CAM software (CNC Software, Inc., Tolland, CT) to design his wood components and interface with his CNC router.

Rock says, “I got on the internet and started looking into CNC routers and was attracted to Techno because of the price. Never having been involved with CNC routers before, it was a little scary, but I went ahead with them. When it came time for software, I was told by the distributor that Mastercam is better software, worth its price, and it would be money well spent. So I took him at his word, and it’s been great.”

Rock found that at a price of roughly $35,000 each, few staircase makers could afford a CNC router, let alone two routers, giving him a competitive advantage for building custom staircases in his area. Each router has a 4’ x 8’ table, and 3 HP motor along with a tool changer for up to nine tools. They use servo motors with ball-screw drives for precision cutting. “I’ve had them almost a year now, and if we didn’t have them, we would close our doors. I would quit,” he adds.

“We do a lot of components with the routers and Mastercam such as stair treads, railings, and newel posts. It just kind of goes on and on,” Rock mentions.

As to what he likes about Mastercam, he says, “The on-screen photos help illustrate the program, and it speeds up the learning curve. The fact that you can type in fractions if you don’t happen to know the decimal equivalent and it automatically converts a fraction to a decimal are things that come to mind that I like about it."

“We use it a lot for layout and renderings. Whatever we draw in AutoCAD, we simply send it out to Mastercam and then to the router. We put in a point bit in the router’s spindle and scratch out a stairway system (in wood???) for a customer. We do a full-scale rendering of the whole rail system this way. Then we can take it to the job site, stand it up and it goes together precisely. This allows the customer, who is spending maybe $50,000 to $70,000 on a railing system, to see what it looks like in the house. There isn’t a week that goes by that we don’t think of another thing for Mastercam to do.”

Rock’s average stair and railing contract runs around $70,000 per house for a single system. But there have been other projects that easily escalated this figure, such as one job he did that had $800,000 worth of stairs and railings in a 37,000 sq. ft. house.
Rock and four of his employees are trained on Mastercam. As to its simplicity he says that when they first purchased it, “We just got on the program and started working with it. We called the sales rep (James Gamble of CamTech) a few times, asked him questions, and we were on our way. However, I’m sure we’re only scratching the surface of what the program can do. But anytime we need it to do something, we either figure it out or call our sales rep, and he really knows the program. He doesn’t even have to do any research; he just knows off the top of his head what it will do.”

With his CNC router and Mastercam, Rock will be starting a new niche for his business by building circular stair kits and marketing them across the country. “We’re building these kits and putting them together, and they work perfectly. They’re very easy to build, and just about anybody can put them together. Normally what somebody might have to pay $10,000 for a staircase, we’re able to get it to their doorway and with their labor to install it they can have one for $5,000. We’re selling them around our area to homeowners and builders, because that’s primarily who we deal with. The money they save on the stairs, they’re putting into custom top railings. That’s where the eye appeal is.”

Rock Woodworks is growing, and with the help of CNC routers and Mastercam, they are stepping up to new opportunities.