Pricing Edgebanding Work
There are several factors to consider if you want to know the full cost of applying edgebanding. July 28, 2012
Question
I am doing some cutting for a customer and some parts are edgebanded on one side. I find this fairly easy to cost in. I am going to be doing some four sided edgebanding on MDF doors. I hear other’s charging between $100 and $150 per hour on CNC machine time. Does anyone use a standard way of pricing large scale edgbandning? This is a half mil and the customer is providing the edgebaning and I am supplying the Glue. I have a Holze Her 1310-6 bander.
Forum Responses
(Business and Management Forum)
From contributor O:
What’s your hourly rate? What’s your payment on the machine? What’s the number of days you run your edgebander per week or per month? How many hours in those days? Divide the those hours into your payment, and add that number to your shop rate.
Example:
Payment on edgebander equals $1000.00.
Three days a week x four weeks equals 12 days per month.
12 days x three hours per day equals 36 hours.
$1000 divided by 36 hours equals $28.00 per hour.
Shop Rate equals $65 per hour.
Cost for edge banding should be no less than $93.00 per hour (for my example).
From contributor M:
I charge 40 cents per meter plus the cost of the banding. Most jobs are less than 200 meters. I am not in America so my costs are different, but electricity, glue, and rent are on par with the USA. Labor is a lot less here, but considering 200 meters only takes two hours or so I do not think it is a big factor.
From contributor C:
We charge .20 cents a foot plus edgebanding. We charge .40 cents for 3mm.
From contributor C:
To contributor C: Why do you charge twice as much for 3mm? Just curious. Is it for the radius profile?
From contributor C:
We've found it just takes more time. Even though setup is somewhat automatic there is still tweaking and the final product always needs a little touch up to look good.
From contributor U:
In my opinion charging by the foot is incorrect, depending on the gap between parts in the edgebander. If your bander has a very small gap, then it may not be an issue. For example, my edgebander requires a 2.6' (800mm) gap between parts. If banding 12" parts that makes the effective part length 3.6'. If banding 48" parts that makes the effective part length 6.6'. If I charge by the actual parts length, then I significantly under allocate labor and overhead for the 12" parts. Obviously the gap is irrelevant to the PVC cost. If only a running a few parts, then it's not significant. When we run orders for hundreds of pieces of several different sizes, it can be significant. I price parts by the piece, not by the foot.
From contributor L:
We charge the same for .5 to 3mm for putting it on plus the cost of the banding if it's ours (marked up 25%). We haven't been charging extra for corner rounding but probably should since it can take an extra five or ten minutes to get it tweaked in so no handwork is required. 3mm runs beautifully on our machine. Sequence: rough trim, 4 motor station for ends, top and bottom at 3mm radius, scrape at 3mm, buff, reheat if dark color. If it is a very small run we will charge a small setup fee. Since the machine has a straight station for solid wood or rough trimming and a bevel station for HPL, setup/changeover time is fairly short.
From contributor D:
We too charge more for 3mm banding. It seems like there is always more set up to get it right and extra tooling involved (scraper inserts and the buffers work harder). As for charging for banding I usually just look at the set up time, materials and how long it took for each job. The last one I did I was thinking around $200 but just told him to give me a check for what he thought it was worth. He wrote me a check for $280 and handed me another $30 cash and said it was well worth it. No one has ever complained about the price to edgeband that I have given them.
