Hi there! I'm not having much luck posting to this group - four
lengthy messages have disappeared as I typed them - where do they go?
Anyway, I'm glad to be able to communicate with everyone so "easily". I
live near Greensboro, NC where there will be an industrial woodworking
show on Feb 18 + 19th. If you can attend let me know and I'll meet you
there. I presently own a KF-7 (saw /shaper) with most of the
"excessories" - it's a slippery slope! I am enrolled full time in a
Fine Woodworking degree program at RCC and thus spend quite a bit of
time in the shop. Woodworking is a new pursuit for me and I had no idea
how seductive it would be. My present school project is a bowfront
dresser with twelve drawers - that's a lot of tenons for drawer rails
etc. Which brings me to this months' special that Wolfgang has so
graciously offered the group. I use this cutter for all my tenon work.
By using a sacrificial fence (3/8")over the shaper fences and a wood
crosscut fence to act as a backer I slide the tenon stock over the
cutter and back to create each cheek. I found that the carvers - the
square cutters on top of the cutterhead - were too proud of the
shoulder so I ground down one point on each of the top carvers. The
result is hundreds of perfect tenons up to 1" in length. Be sure to use
the sacrificial fence to prevent the cutter from pulling the stock into
the shaper fence opening. E-mail me if you have any questions. My two
pet peeves with my Felder machine (besides the lack of dado capability)
are the really crappy design of the router spindle collet nut (I use a
strap wrench rather than the pin spanner) and the difficulty in ripping
long narrow stock due to the inability to support the stock easily on
the infeed side. These two issues bother me every day since I change
router bits often and frequently rip stock for ledger strips etc. Well,
enough bitching! After using the large array of machines at school I
realized how spoiled I was since my first tablesaw/shaper was a Felder!
There are several tablesaws with sliding tables at school (excalibur
etc.) which are notorious among the students for being unreliable.
Felder would do well to address this market since most of the students
will be opening their own shops upon graduation. I look forward to
hearing everyones'tips etc. And let's help Felder understand the
requirements of the American woodworker. PS - let me know if there is
some way to start a new paragraph easily when posting to the group.
