sliding table

[craig lapiana]

i came across a excalibur sliding table which was off a powermatic shaper. does anybody have a sliding table on their shaper?

how do you like it?

my delta shaper has the adjustment wheel built into the front of the table so it would be a little bit to mod the slider. wondering if its worth it.

thanks

[Charlie Plesums]

My combo uses the sliding table for both the shaper and the saw. I use it for all the end-grain shaping. Some people even cut their tenons on the shaper using the sliding table (but I am into floating tenons instead)

[Dev Emch]

Hi Craig...

Please review my post "Belated Gloat" where I posted pictures of my shaper and its sliding table. I know this is hyper kill as this machine is industrial and actually works for a living.

But you can see that sliders on shapers are out of this world! The best place to install a slider is on the left side. Ideally, the slider should be the front half of the table but that only applies if your shaper has a tilting spindle.

The slider on a shaper will soon become one of your go-to tools. It has tons of uses ranging from doing tenoner cuts to getting locked down and functioning as an extended outfeed table. Tenons become cake. You stack on two rebate heads with a precision spacer inbetween and the shaper cuts the entire tenon in one pass. Clean corners and edges. I also use it to cut super precision angle cuts. I rough cut the the actual angle and then cut it with a shaper to unheard of accuracy. The gravy in this is that I can blow out four super precision mitres almost as fast as you can or faster than you can using your other trusted process. Shapers are not router tables. Even though they leave wonderful, glass smooth surfaces, they are pulverizers when it comes to cutting!

So yes, you should put a slider on your shaper and the faster the better! I also use draw boring to strenghen mortise and tenon joints so I do not use floating tenons. Draw boring would place one of the glue joints in the floating tenon into extreme film shear and will ultimately cause this joint to fail.

[craig lapiana]

thanks for the feedback i think i will put a little time into figuring out how to rig my shaper with this slider. wow dev that machine is a beast.