Northfield Woodworking Machinery Tour

[rjdankert]

Apologies if this has been posted before. I hadn't seen it,

Published on Jun 25, 2015
Northfield Woodworking is one of the last remaining machinery manufacturers who's machines are entirely built in the US. They have been in business since 1920 and have operated out of the same facility in Northfield Minnesota since.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z59Kp8SbbfM

[Stanley McMahan]

Thanks,

I enjoyed that tour!

[Arlin Eastman]

I am looking forward to seeing this at the library.

[fredhargis]

I would love to have a shop full of Northfield tools, but if the 8" jointers are $9K, it's probably not gonna happen. It's a very interesting tour in any case.

[jteneyck]

Thanks for posting that. Looking at the factory it's hard to imagine they will still be in business in another 50 years, or even 25. Tried and true is good, but only to a point. It would be good to see Felder's or one of the other European machine maker's plant for comparison. I bet it would be like night and day.

John

[AZ Engineer]

jteneyck said:

---

Thanks for posting that. Looking at the factory it's hard to imagine they will still be in business in another 50 years, or even 25. Tried and true is good, but only to a point. It would be good to see Felder's or one of the other European machine maker's plant for comparison. I bet it would be like night and day.

John

---

I was lucky enough to get a private Felder factory tour in Triol Austria. Sadly no pictures were allowed. It is night and day. The Felder plant was shockingly larger. I believe there were 700 workers there and they out sourced all casting work to another Austrian company. Everything Felder is designed in CAD. All parts are CNC laser or shear cut. The individual parts are all designed to fit together with alignment tabs and then they are placed into alignment jigs and tack welded by workers. They then do the complete welding with Robots. The big 900 series saw base has 1.5 hours of robotic welding per base for example. Super amazing. Lastly, they had maybe 1000 machines in production and every single one was a custom order and pre-sold.

[Wizard of Oz]

I love the "old school machining". Reminds me when I worked for a company making paper mills, with very large machines.

[Sassafrasman]

Very interesting. Looks like a great candidate for some organization and continuous improvement.
I'm lucky enough to have a Northfield 16HD jointer and hope to add a big planer to my shop in the near future.

[AgGEM]

VERY
Thanks for posting!
Ag

[Anthony W]

What the heck do they use that ginormous lathe for?