Best interior passage door shaper cutter set?

[John Carlo]

I would appreciate the advice of anyone experienced with this topic. Thanks in advance!
JC

[Peter Quinn]

Best? I like Freeborn, Schmidt or LRH in that order for traditional braised carbide tooling. I hear Garniga is quite good for insert tooling thought I have no personal experience with their shaper sets. They are quite expensive.

[David DeCristoforo]

+1 Freeborn (tantung) I have a lot of tooling from Nordic that is very good stuff. Plus they have an awesome selection and do great custom work. You just have to be willing to forgo the fancy paint job.

[Chris Rosenberger]

I built 26 - 1 3/8" thick 4 panel oak doors for a house this year. I used a set of cutters from Grizzly.
They worked very well & better than I expected. They still seemed sharp when I was finished. I had always used Freeborn cutters before, but this job needed a profile that Freeborn did not have in stock.

[Jeff Duncan]

Someone say Freeborn....yup good cutters, not cheap, but good. Custom stuff I've recently started using Schmidt but they are pricey. LRH aren't bad either, I have a couple sets of their cutters that worked well.
The question is how much quantity are you going to be doing? If your going to be knocking out a lot of these you may want to bypass brazed cutters and go directly to what the big boys use.....insert tooling. that's a whole different animal and also not cheap to set up, but better (or so I'm told) in the long run.
good luck,
JeffD

[Brian Peters]

Freeborn is the best IMO but pricey. But you buy them once, get them sharpened retipped etc they last a long time

[Steve Clardy]

Freeborn here

[Peter Quinn]

I checked out a Garniga insert head, its an 8 cutter set (cope and mold cutters plus groovers for both 1 3/8" and 1 3/4" doors) that stacks just like a traditional set, comes with inserts to do four different profiles, cost around $2200? I think Laguna sells a bunch of the Garniga stuff, some where I have another source book marked but can't seem to find it now. Looks like a great idea if you are going into the door business on a small production level and need the flexibility to have different profiles available. It would actually be cheaper long term than buying four regular sets and maintaining them.

I'm using a Freud RP2000 insert panel raiser and that works great. The carbide inserts seem sharper than any braised knives I have seen. I've run into situations at work where some one needs to run a door job, realizes the last guy put the cutters for that profile away a bit dull, then they have to go out for grinding and there is a bit of lag time there, PIA. Seems like inserts would simplify a lot of things. I'd love to chat with some one who has actually spun this type of stack to see what they thought. Garniga's tooling catalogue is available online in PDF format if your curious, big files that pull down VERY slow, but lots of detailed info and drawings.