Good Evening, Everyone!
(Sorry for the long post!)
I posted a short time ago with a question about an aftermarket shaper hood. Well, I had ordered an Aigner shaper fence and was looking for a better hood than the unit that came with my Minimax CU300Smart, but I ended up mounting the Aigner fence to the Minimax hood and thought I'd post a few pictures of the unit and provide a little feedback on the Aigner unit after taking a little time to get used to using it.
To begin, the Aigner fence is a very heavy duty aluminum piece built in Germany (I believe) and is extremely well made and precise. As you will see in some of the pictures, it has some very interesting features (take a peek at the fingers that extend over the cutter head!).
Mounting the unit was pretty straight forward. Though the Minimax hood didn't accept the much thicker mounting bolts on the Aigner, the issue was easily remedied with a little boring out of the existing mounting slots on the Minimax unit with a hand file. The Minimax hood is made of aluminum, but is much lighter and easier to modify. With a little adjusting of the Minimax unit, the Aigner fence mounted pretty easily and squarely without much fuss (a small amount of shimming to bring the two fence pieces to a coplanar state was all that was necessary).
Once mounted, the Aigner and Minimax units work well together. The fence pieces move inward and outward smoothly, and the Aigner fence has a feature that allows you to raise and lower the fence vertically on it's own mounts. Sliding some pieces of wood in front of the unit proved to also be very smooth, with the added weight of the Aigner fence making the whole process seem much more solid.
The fingers that eject from one side of the fence to span the gap between the two fence pieces are awesome. A great safety feature, these fingers reduce the chance of me slipping my already mangy fingers into the "spinning blades of death" as my wife refers to them.
I purchased the unit through Minimax after seeing Sam Blasco of Minimax use his during a recent shaper seminar (if you don't use your shaper, I highly recommend you learn from Sam how to put it to good use!). Though it is not cheap, for those of you that use your shapers often it will add greatly to the safety of using this great tool.
Hope you enjoy the pics!
Mike
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