Architectural woodworkers are a special breed. They work to paper-thin tolerances on the biggest, smartest machines ever built for machining lumber. They produce work with such exacting precision and beauty that it will make your best trim guy wince with envy. And the mega tools they use to do it are so surgically precise, wildly expensive, and starkly beautiful that you'd buy tickets to use them. There's only one way to describe work of this caliber and complexity: Perfect. The same goes for the tools.

Woodworkers Mark Richey and Greg Porfido of Mark Richey Woodworking in Essex, Mass., engineer and build some of the most exciting custom interiors you're likely to see in any restaurant, courthouse, or office. We toured their shop (by "shop" picture an 85,000-square-foot building) and the heavy iron they use to dial-in furniture-grade finishes that make you think anything is possible.

The mega-tool woodworking world splits roughly into two main categories: sheet-good processors and solid-sawn stock processors. While there are large woodworking shops nationwide–production outfits that build the interiors of your favorite coffee shop franchise, for instance, or cabinet factories that crank out truckloads of kitchen, bath, and built-in parts you find at your cabinet supplier–companies at the apex of this field are building architectural millwork packages that are hard to describe. These firms work both solid and sheet stock, and, like highly skilled custom builders or niche tradesmen, these shops produce one-off work with production speed. And jaw-dropping precision.

Layout

Design and Engineering. State-of-the-art CAD programs begin the process of turning an architect's dreamy vision into a buildable reality. Richey's shop uses Autodesk Inventor, a cutting-edge design software that creates a precise 3-D view of 2-D drawings. It can then explode the "drawing" to show every detail and dado illustrating how all large and small parts fit together. For example, for the lecture hall Richey is designing, the software shows the engineers how each section of vertical wall paneling intersects with the stair risers. The software can then accept design alterations–which requires talent on the engineer's part to lay out proportionally–so the panels break where they look best.

Engineers also can flip the drawing around on screen and can freeze it in any position to check a connection detail or view how shelf pins look in a bookcase. Autodesk Inventor even counts and sizes the screws required for each assembly. The result: Richey's team does more work in less time–and with greater accuracy–than ever before. It makes them nearly fearless, too, and they work knowing they can tackle almost anything, says Porfido.

Prints. Autodesk's capabilities extend far beyond the engineer's office. While it takes the art and science of planning to new levels of sophistication, its impact also has greatly influenced work flow and quality on the shop floor.

Next time you're snapping lines on a deck, imagine being able to take a full scale print of the floor plan and roll it out like housewrap on the sub-floor. Line up the corners of the paper to the deck edge and layout is done. No chalk, no transferring measurements from paper to plywood, just good-to-go layout. Those are the kinds of plans Richey's woodworkers get: 3-foot-wide rolls of paper where 1 inch equals 1 inch. In fact, to help eliminate problems in the field, Richey's engineers do a full-size framing plan to help the framer lay out the walls–months before his craftspeople show up to install the interior.

Tool Steel

There's a fork in the road when a load of lumber shows up at Richey's shop. Generally speaking, the solid-sawn stock goes in one direction through a series of machines that most woodworkers might recognize and the sheet goods go in another. The sheet goods typically get processed by the T-rexes of mega tools: computer-driven monsters that are bigger, heavier, and way more expensive than your pickup truck. But on Richey's football field–sized shop floor where machinery is planted shoulder-to-shoulder, there are some units that do double duty.

Sheet Goods

Beam Saw. You can cut plywood or Melamine accurately on a table saw, but when there are hundreds or even thousands of pieces in a project, say an office suite or a chain of retail stores, your crew needs something bigger or they won't get much sleep. Richey's shop has a Schelling FMH beam saw. This $150,000 machine does what it would take an army of skilled woodworkers to do, but with computer-controlled accuracy and in a fraction of the time.

The Schelling not only cuts stock, but also, when the operator enters a cut list from the design software, the machine's computer calculates the optimum way to cut each sheet, reducing waste, and (if it has one) determines which way the grain should run. The operator enters cut list information and, when prompted by the computer, loads material and positions it for cross-cuts or rips.

Inside the machine, grippers grab the material and index it along a fence automatically. Then, the blade, which rides on a carriage, makes the cuts before ejecting the material. The blade has a 4-3/4-inch projection above the table inside the saw, which means it can cut a 4-piece stack of 3/4-inch sheets–to the exact same dimension. The 18,000-pound Schelling FMH is dead-on accurate, too, at 2/1,000 to 3/1,000 of an inch.

Drilling and Routing. With every step deeper into Richey's shop, you feel farther away from old-fashioned woodworking tools like chisels, hand saws, and smoothing planes. Nowhere is this more noticeable than when you find yourself toe-to-toe with the Busellato Jet 6000 Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) machine center. Its opaque dust collection tubes and vacuum pods make it look more sci-fi than woodshop.

The $180,000 Italian-made woodworking titan has two router heads, a 19-spindle drill head, and a bed of vacuum pods that secure the work. The Jet 6000 drills and routs at any angle and is the ideal machine for raising MDF panels, drilling shelf pins, or doweling. It accepts and uses at least three kinds of cutters depending on the material: carbide, high-speed steel, and diamond. All cutterhead speeds are programmable up to 18,000 rpm.

And talk about fast! The complex of cutterheads moves like lightning across the room–about 100 meters per minute–while indexing itself to machine a piece. For a single MDF raised-panel cabinet door, it takes about five minutes to program and set up the machine. Running each door then takes three minutes.

Busellato's machine center can also work complex shapes in both sheet material and solid wood. It's Richey's go-to unit for routing a conference table (solid stock or sheet good) or making a corbel from solid 6-by.

Maybe the best thing about the 12,000-pound Jet 6000 is what Busellato calls the Pendulum Process. Because the machine is so large (12 by 20 feet), there are two work zones. These dual zones allow the machine's operator to load Zone 2 while the machine works in Zone 1. Once the unit completes Zone 1, it automatically moves to Zone 2 while the operator "swings" back to Zone 1 like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. This creates 100 percent "effective time," according to Busellato. There is no time when the machine is not working.

Gluing. Woodworkers frustrated by gluing up stock with umpteen pipe clamps, cinch straps, and whatever else they can rig up long for Richey's $1,400 Industrial HiFlow VacuPress system built in the United States by Vacuum Pressing Systems. If they do any curved work, veneering, or countertops, they really want it.

The VacuPress gluing system uses vacuum pressure to secure the work to the glue surface. Essentially, it's vacuum packed like frozen food. The benefit of the VacuPress method is uniform pressure over the entire work surface. The "bag" used to envelope the work piece is 30-mil polyurethane, which equates to 1/32 inch. The poly has the best combination of flexibility (it forms to almost any shape) and toughness; it exerts 1 ton per square foot on the work and you couldn't jam a pen through it if you tried.

Crossover Machine. If you've ever felt that vein in your neck pulsing while you wrestle a sheet of MDF onto your table saw and then against the fence, you'll appreciate the ease and accuracy of processing sheet stock–from melamine and veneers to 3/4 stock–with Richey's Striebig panel saw. At 1,760 pounds, it looms over the panel saw at your lumberyard and makes its accuracy look medieval by comparison. With a four-sheet cut capacity, 12-inch blade, and rollers to move stock in and out of the unit, it's a production machine with mind-blowing accuracy.

The 5,400-rpm saw rides on three rails and is accurate to within 2/1,000 of an inch cutting either vertically or horizontally, according to Colonial Saw, Striebig's U.S. distributor. Like the rest of Richey's equipment, you don't just plop this one in the corner, unless you live in a football stadium. Striebig's panel saw is 18 feet long, 5 feet deep, and about 8 feet tall. With its 14-foot-long cut capacity, the $25,900 unit is also capable of delivering a glue-ready joint on solid-sawn stock as well as shorter sheet goods.

Solid-Sawn Stock

The tools used to machine solid-sawn stock in Richey's shop are more familiar to most woodworkers. The differences lie largely in sheer tonnage, precision accuracy, and raw power. For instance, if you tried to put Richey's rip saw in the back of your truck, you wouldn't get very far.

Ripping. For sizing solid stock, the Diehl SL52 rip saw combines accuracy with major league power. Depending on thickness and species, the American-made SL52's power-feed system can move wood from 10 feet per minute to 150 feet per minute along its 14-inch-diameter blade. The $35,000 heavyweight comes in at 5,500 pounds, and when the lumber exits the machine, the cut edge is glue-joint ready.

Truing Stock. The Wadkins molder is the only piece of machinery in woodworking in which you can put a rough board in one end and get a finished board out the other, according to its New England distributor, Akins Machinery. The Wadkins five-headed molder Richey runs brings lumber into truly S4S. At speeds from 30 feet per minute up to 200 feet per minute, the 8,000-pound, $39,000 machine produces boards so true and smooth that a sheet of 220-grit would wonder what to do with itself.

Sanding. Cover your belt sander's ears; it's going to have an inferiority complex after this. About the size of four Sub-Zero refrigerators, Richey's $90,000 DMC wide-belt sander is so precise that Porfido says it can sand the ink off of a thousand dollar bill. Designed for sanding veneers–shelves, table tops, wall panels–the machine allows the operator to choose how much material he wants to remove from the work. For instance, if he wants to take 1/1,000 of an inch off an entire 53-inch-wide conference table, the DMC is sensitive enough to do that. The work feeds into the 10,000-pound machine on a variable-speed conveyor belt where an electronic sensor reads the thickness of the stock and adjusts the belt height.

Miter Cuts. The red chop saw set up with shop-built in-feed and out-feed tables is the machine in Richey's shop that comes the closest to anything we might find in ours. At least at first glance. At 222 pounds, Omga's $2,500 miter saw arrives perfectly–perfectly–tuned. Miter saws you buy at the supply house can be out as much as 1/64 inch, according to Akins Machinery. And, not only does the Omga show up perfect, it stays that way. In fact, Akins says they have yet to receive a call to tune one. In Richey's and Porfido's world, where words like "museum quality" and "furniture grade" are status quo, 1/64 inch might as well be a mile.

–Mark Clement is executive editor of Tools of the Trade.