CNC cutting in Kottayam

The machines are here, on Kuttickal Road at Thottakkadu, about twenty minutes from Changanacherry and inside Kottayam district. That matters more than it sounds. A good deal of what gets sold as CNC work in this part of Kerala is brokered - the man you talk to sends your file to somebody else's router, and when the cut comes back wrong there is a third person to blame. We cut our own work. If a panel is wrong it is our machine, our operator and our timber, and we cut it again.

A router is only half of it, which is the part most quotations leave out. A machine gets a pattern to within a fraction of a millimetre and leaves you a crisp shape with a slightly fuzzy edge and a flat, even face. What makes a jaali look expensive instead of cheap is what happens after that: the edges cleaned by hand, the undercuts taken back, the face sanded through the grits and finished. Every price we give includes that, because a machine-finished panel put straight on a wall is how you can tell a job was done by the hour.

The work below was all cut on these machines. The screens and the batches of moulding are the honest test of a router - a pierced panel is read against the light behind it, so any wander in the cut shows, and a run of forty identical mouldings shows any drift between the first and the fortieth.