Picture of new shaper, question about cutters

[Jeff Duncan]

Shapers really are awesome tools for running a lot of stock and as the others mentioned, faster, more consistent, cleaner, and even safer. Like most things however it comes down to your own usage. If your making a lot of doors a shaper will greatly improve your experience. If your building a couple here and there on the occasional weekend....well then you may or may not appreciate the benefits?

JeffD

[Peter Quinn]

peter, please elaborate on building doors with a shaper vs router table! are the cuts cleaner? are they more consistent? or is it just much faster? i usually take one pass to do copes and sticking but it is a slight drag pushing the stiles through the two feather boards i have set up to maintain the wood tight to the fence.

Gary and Rod covered my thoughts pretty well. Yes to all three of your questions. A feeder exerts several hundred pounds of down force while pushing forward at a near perfect rate, hard to accomplish that with feather boards and manual feed. The cuts per inch are usually higher, very rigid spindle with less chatter, bigger diameter cutters and all that implies. I might add that I'm usually pushing the stock through back to back, so always one board going in, one coming out. This goes pretty fast. On the router I found I'd have to sort of stage each pass, blow off or vacuum more frequently even with decent DC stuff seemed to escape a bit. On the shaper I feed a pile of door parts like it was one long board, requires very minimal sanding. I feed a bit slower than I should for optimal cutter life to keep the knife marks very close together, as slow as a species will allow without burning, and its still much faster than my router table and no fatigue from holding on to push pads for dear life. And you almost never see threads that start "My shaper table is sagging..."...that big flat piece of cast iron helps keep things consistent, though you could certainly get that in a top flight router table too.

As for coping, its basically the same on either machine IME. Panel raising is so much better on the shaper its no comparison. One pass, nearly sand free cuts when the cutters are sharp, perfectly consistent tongue thickness. And then there are moldings. Panel molding, base molding, crowns, coves, beads etc., all the things that tend to go with doors to elaborate a cabinet job, they all come out much better on a power fed shaper. Pattern work is easier too, though for me the first time I turned on the shaper with that big cutter spinning nearly unprotected, it gave me pause. A long pause. But there too the shaper has the advantage in terms of speed and quality.