I am a director of Heritage Railway Trust, and one of our main activities is the restoration of wooden-bodied heritage carriages. Each carriage restoration is a huge undertaking, processing literally tonnes of timber (Iroko), to create hundreds of components, some quite complex in nature. Our current practices use standard joinery machine tools meaning that the typical manufacture time of a carriage body is measured in years - at our current rate probably about 4 years and then add to that all the other stuff we have to do. We want to reduce this 4 years for the joinery part down to 6-9months.

To dramatically speed up the manufacture time, I want to pursue the idea of using a cnc router.

We have created a 3d model of the carriage and from this generate drawings that the team uses in the workshop. From this design we can also generate toolpaths for a cnc machine. This approach will be continued with all other aspects of the carriage body structure including the internal joinery. This approach I think is a key enabler to our path forward.

Also, by way of helping you understand our situation a little better, I've added a link to a youtube video that (GWR Toplight door post) describes one of the more complex components - a door post - of which there are 32 in a carriage. I have also added links to some content on a google drive that gives an idea of the scale of what we are doing.

The other link below is of a Fusion 360 toolpath simulation for the door post. This has been created in a way that only requires machining on two opposing faces, and for the purposes of the simulation I have assumed a single 8mm upcut tool is used at a feed rate of 6m/min.

So that's our situation and we are now exploring what type of machine is appropriate and capable of doing what we need.

Best regards

John
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15-t...gMh37pWoJ/view

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g4KsXtUTpk

https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...UW?usp=sharing

https://youtu.be/vEDhQVZzSoo