Hi, I struggled to find a local CNC manufacturer but received an offer from Slovakia: 30 euros per board and 25 euros per cut/sheet. Is this expensive? Should I negotiate further? Though WikiHouse should ideally be local, a 500 km transport of boards from Finland or Brazil wouldn’t significantly affect the low carbon philosophy, in my view. Is this price reasonable?
Hi Michal,
I use the Wikihouse airtable as a baseline to estimate what things should cost:
It’s not 100% accurate (we pay more for boards here, but less for cut time), but you can use it as a decent starting point.
Hi @lachlan
that amazing, that you have a table with that! Many thanks for sharing. But I’m little bit lost in it. There are few terms which is unclear to me: Machining cost, Cost per unit etc…
And Manufacturing cost in this table is always higher than 25euro per 4x8’ plywood sheet, as @Michal_Kostovcik mentioned (I assume that is plywood, because price per sheet). Can you just confirm that is possible to get cutting per sheet cheaper, because that I would like to hear, too 
@Michal_Kostovcik is it price offer for OSB or plywood, and with what thickness. Many thanks for reply.
Breakdown:
Machining Cost - time to rent the CNC (usually an internal rate for the company, often includes cost to pay employee, tooling, spoilboard, machine maintenance, electricity, workshop rent)
Material Cost (Wood, Insulation, Brad Nails)
Building Cost - labour cost to build plywood boxes, this might be something you do instead of them.
Each Wikihouse block uses a certain number of sheets of Plywood/OSB, so that spreadsheet converts the number of sheets * sheets cut per hour * machining cost into a “cost per unit (machining)”.
I can’t speak to the cut times for your supplier, nor their internal machining costs. I bought my own CNC as the quotes I received in NZ were $110 Euro/hour and they expected to cut 2 sheets per hour. That price is significantly higher than we now cost internally, and we usually cut more than 6 sheets an hour.
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@kiskovce Pine plywood 2500x1250mm, 18mm thickness. Grade C+/C
I don’t do EUROs but USD That sounds like around $60 sheet for material and $50 a sheet for CNC cut time. That seems reasonable to me based on our trials. We are doing a build in the US and our engineer has specified structural OSB, that is 1/2 the cost of plywood.
ahoj Michal, napis mi prosim na Whatsapp +421949792315 dik