Adding the 180,000-sq-ft Salinas facility will boost the output to a potential 20,000 doors a day, says Jeff Nobil, vice president of sales and marketing.

TigerStop Earns Its Weight
Although California Door is set up to work with all materials, wood doors are the company's mainstay, with oak, cherry and maple being the most popular. RTF doors account for 15 percent of sales.

The tight focus on quality is aided by automation that keeps the plant running efficiently and meeting production goals. One upgrade that's proved its worth enough to be included in plans for the new shop is Precision Automation Inc.'s TigerStop automated cutoff stop and programmable pusher. "It's a pretty small investment for what it saves us," Nobil says.

The Gilroy facility now runs all 12 cutting lines with the digital stop system linked to industrial woodworking pop-up saws. The company recently modified a Hendrick Manufacturing SZIII vertical panel saw to operate with a TigerStop unit. The Salinas facility will have digital stops on 25 cutting lines and on two Hendrick saws.

Efficiency and yield have improved since adding TigerStop, Nobil says. "Now we can make our product dead to size." Stiles and rails show straighter edges, Nobil reports. Employees running machines equipped with the linear positioners make more accurate cuts and squeeze more cabinet parts out of a piece of wood.

Dead-On Accuracy
A shop with more than one cutting line can run into slight inconsistencies that build up from variations in how workers take their measurements. "When you have 15 different guys moving vise grips, every one of them has a different definition of what five-eighths (of an inch) is," says Kirk Hurst, production supervisor of California Door's parts department. Hurst calibrates the workstations every morning. "Now it's what I say is five-eighths."

Before acquiring the units, parts never matched up with the accuracy the company was striving for, Hurst says. Using TigerStop brings accuracy to within one-hundredth or one-thousandth of an inch. That type of reliability and consistency cements business relationships. Nobil cites Schrock Cabinet Co., Arthur, IL, as an example. "We ship (orders) to them 100 percent complete, 100 percent of the time."

User-Friendly Technology
California Door currently employs 200 workers. Industry growth forecasts a shortage of workers with five to ten years of furniture or woodworking experience, says Chris Fajardo, president of California Door. Automated equipment allows the company to employ workers with less training and to maximize their knowledge. After a year in the shop, employees are considered ready for the TigerStop cutting lines.

The stop-and-pusher system is a time-saving tool that's also user-friendly, requiring only a 30-minute training session. The new facility will incorporate even more improvements, with the TigerStop units getting a complete workout. With software upgrades, cut lists can be downloaded directly to the workstations to bypass manual data entry. The unit then sorts the cutting order in various ways, optimizing yield. Another option prints labels for cut pieces.

The Gilroy plant capability has never been tapped, but all the stop systems in Salinas will be wired for direct downloads, Nobil says. "That will tremendously help our business."