Wooden Door Manufacturing: Joiners to ABB Robots

Wooden door manufacturing from joiners and sash and door mills to flush doors, and how ABB robots stack, paint and sand door leaves in factories today.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/24/20265 min read

A wooden door is a slab of timber with a hinge side and a handle side, yet wooden door manufacturing involves a long chain of steps in the plant. Leaves are cut, glued and pressed, then sanded, painted and stacked, and almost all of that once needed a joiner's hands. This post follows the chain from the joiner's bench and the nineteenth century sash and door mills to the flush door. It then looks at what door factories are doing in 2026 and where ABB robots fit in handling heavy door leaves and finishing them. Door hardware and garage doors are left for other posts.

Outdoor carpentry yard with unfinished wooden panel doors leaning on trees and workbenches

Carpenters build wooden doors and frames at open air benches under trees in Zambia, 2016. Photo: Thatlowdownwoman / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How joiners and sash and door mills made the first doors

For centuries a good wooden door was a joiner's job. The classic panel door is a frame of stiles and rails held together with mortise and tenon joints, with thinner panels floating in grooves so the wood can swell and shrink without splitting. Each joint was marked, sawn and chiselled by hand. The joiner then planed the door flat, fitted it to its opening and painted it with a brush. A skilled hand could repeat the same design many times, but each door still took days, and every house needed several of them.

Man in a checked shirt cutting a plank with a handheld circular saw beside stacked timber

A carpenter cuts timber for a door frame with a circular saw, 2024. Photo: Rwebogora / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Steam power changed the trade in the nineteenth century. Lumber towns in North America built sash and door factories next to their sawmills, where powered saws, planers, tenoners and moulders turned out standard doors and windows by the thousand. The Rathbun Company ran one in Deseronto, Ontario. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the Paine Lumber Company became one of the best known makers of sash and doors, and its workers struck in 1898 over pay and child labour. When the union leader Thomas Kidd was tried for conspiracy afterwards, Clarence Darrow defended him.

Sepia photo of a long low factory building with chimneys beside a wide unpaved yard

The Rathbun Company's sash and door factory on Mill Street, Deseronto, Ontario, around 1890. Photo: Deseronto Archives via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

New kinds of door followed in the twentieth century. William Mason patented his hardboard process in Laurel, Mississippi, in 1924, and Masonite was being used for doors by the 1930s. Flush doors, a plain skin glued over a light frame and core, suited mass production far better than panel doors, and the Masonite Corporation began supplying door facings in 1972. Painting robots reached wood finishing from Norway, where Trallfa built a spray painting robot in the late 1960s. ASEA, one of the two companies that merged into ABB in 1988, bought Trallfa in 1985, and ABB's paint robot business grew out of that purchase.

A green industrial robot arm next to its tall green control cabinet in a museum display

An early Trallfa industrial robot on display at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo. Photo: Bjoertvedt / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots in door factories in 2026

The big door makers are still reshaping their plants. JELD-WEN, which makes interior and exterior doors and door sets in wood and steel, opened its new Bessemer Park factory in Sheffield in October 2026, a move The Star put at £20 million. The company is also restructuring its debt; in late September it reached a deal with noteholders to extend maturities and raise $135 million. A new building gives a door maker the chance to rethink handling and finishing, since conveyors and cells can be laid out from scratch instead of squeezed into an old hall.

Factory gate with a Duradoor sign and a long low plant building behind a white wall

The entrance to NCL Industries' Duradoor door plant in India, 2019. Photo: Md Khaja Pasha / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots usually start with handling. A solid timber door leaf is heavy, and lifting hundreds of them in a shift wears out backs. ABB's wood industries brochure lists the handling and packing of doors and door frames among its applications and shows robots stacking wooden panels straight off conveyors. Large arms such as the IRB 6700 and the IRB 660 palletizer can lift a leaf with a vacuum gripper and set it on a pallet, and conveyor tracking lets a robot pick leaves from a line that keeps moving.

Orange ABB robot arm placing a tall stack of wooden boards beside a roller conveyor

An ABB robot with a clamp gripper stacks wooden panels at the end of a conveyor. Photo: ABB

Finishing comes next. Spraying lacquer by hand leaves an uneven film and exposes painters to solvent mist, while ABB paint robots such as the IRB 5500 work in sealed booths and follow the same path on every coat. Sanding between coats is harder, because the tool has to press evenly on the flat face and around the edges. ABB's GoFa CRB 15000 cobot can carry an orbital sander under force control. The integrator Cobot Intel sells a cabinet door sanding cell built on a GoFa that measures each door with a laser profiler and plans its own sanding path.

Paint robot wrapped in a blue protective suit beside a stack of veneered panels on rollers

An ABB paint robot in a protective cover next to a stack of wood panels on a finishing line. Photo: ABB

What comes next for door plants

I expect the next gains to come from batch size one. Customers order doors in many sizes, colours and glass cut outs, and a line built for one standard leaf loses money on every special. Robots that measure each door with a camera or laser and generate their own sanding and painting paths take most of the setup time out of those orders. Planners can build and check such a cell in RobotStudio before any steel is bolted to the floor.

White ABB GoFa cobot holding an orbital sander against a curved wooden panel

A GoFa cobot sands a curved wooden panel with a Mirka sander inside ABB's OmniVance finishing cell. Photo: ABB

Home buyers will mostly notice price and lead time. A made to measure door from a plant with automated finishing does not have to wait for a free slot in the paint shop, so it can arrive sooner. The same tools are also reaching small workshops. A cobot with a sander can work beside a joiner at the bench, and ABB's no code programming tools such as Wizard let people who have never written code teach it a task.

Orange ABB robot arm with a vacuum gripper lifting a board in front of stacked cartons

An ABB robot lifts a thin wooden panel with a vacuum gripper from a stack. Photo: ABB

Cost and skills are still the open problems. A painting line with robots, booths and drying ovens is a large investment for a regional joinery. Wood adds its own trouble, because knots, grain tear out and moisture all change how a board sands and takes paint. Plants will also need people who can tune force control, change grippers and keep the robots running, and joiners who already understand timber are good candidates to learn that work.

Dark red timber clad workshop with red doors and a sign for joiners and decorators

D.S. & O. Carr & Son, a family firm of joiners and decorators, in its timber workshop building, 2017. Photo: Bob Harvey / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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