CNC Routing & Custom Parts
Kilrea

Kilrea sits on the west bank of the Bann north of Maghera and is reached on the roads up the valley. It is comfortably inside the everyday delivery radius, and its position means a Kilrea drop can be combined with a Garvagh, Coleraine or Portglenone run rather than needing its own journey. The one thing worth flagging is that Kilrea is the point where the workshop area shades into Causeway Coast and Glens territory, so a job here sits with a different council to a job in Maghera a few miles south, which occasionally surprises people on a project that crosses the boundary. On routed furniture parts it matters most at the prototype stage, when a first-off part needs checking before the balance of a run is committed to material.

The work itself follows the town. Kilrea has a rural and small town trade base of joiners, agricultural engineering firms and building contractors, with holiday and second home renovation work adding to it as you go north, so an order arriving from here is more often a one-off or a short run than a rolling production schedule. Routing work rewards a repeat schedule, so a town with production furniture makers in it generates a different pattern of orders to one without.

Building stock is the other thing worth raising early. Around the Diamond, Maghera Street you are mostly looking at the planned Diamond and the older street frontages radiating from it. Further out there is modern housing built out from the old centre and agricultural and light industrial buildings in the surrounding country. Work of this kind out there is normally a straightforward measure and machine job. The Diamond and the streets around it form a planned core with real age to it, so a frontage alteration there is a conversation with Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council rather than an assumption. For routed furniture the building matters less than the brief does, though a period property with uneven walls will change how much tolerance a fitted run needs designed into it.

None of this changes the price of a cut. MDF, birch plywood, poplar plywood, Valchromat, acrylic, HDPE, PVC and decorative furniture board all come through the same regional suppliers whichever town the parts are going to, so lead time is driven by board availability and machine time rather than by which road the delivery takes. Material choice affects feed speed and edge quality on a router more than it does on a straight cut, so it is worth agreeing before the order rather than midway through it.