yes 4 is non tilt
yes 4 is non tilt
This poor guy selling the Gomad, we are all screaming "scalp him!". Lets hope he isnt a SMC member...
That listing has the hallmarks of a high risk/high reward. Offbrand maker, disheveled photos, and poor description. Finally, and most importantly, you dont NEED the gomad. The harder negotiations are when you really really want the machine.
Reminds me of my jointer buy a few years ago. Here are the images i had alongside a seller description of "16" joiner". I mailed the guy a personal check for the price of a new grizzly 8" jointer, and waited for a uship guy without front teeth to deliver it. Ended up being a 20" machine with a tersa head(which is what i gambled on). It very well could have gone the other way and showed up with frozen bearings, no motor, or worse, not shown up at all! Atleast its close enough you can go and look at it. I prefer to negotiate before i drive 3 hours round trip, but atleast you can always back out if its a disaster upon first glance.
Mark ,Cantek is a whole' nother' animal from Grizzly, Powermatic,etc . They are a way heavier build, I have seen other shapers from Taiwan with the "511", 512 model number under different names that are the same machine. I would not hesitate to have one of these in my shop.
The 511/512/513 imports are decent and a lot different than the grizzly machines. I have a 511 and it's been great for what it is.
Hardwood artisans (who are local to me) are running a couple dfda-4 shapers in their production shop. I asked how they liked them when I was there looking at a Maka and the shop manager said they had been great.
As for the invictas they are well built. The ti-14d would be the tilting/sliding version. My only complaint is the quill travel could be more. It's only about 5.25" and you can't raise the spindle base above the table.
I personally would always go for capacity and capabilities over creature comfort type features like CNC controlled fences if I had to choose. Granted I do this every day, often many times a day, but setting fences and spindle height on a well made, accurate machine can be very fast. I have a friend with a new Martin T27 and a guy with a Panhans that have CNC fences and apparently you can't count on either of them to always give you perfect results every time. So if you're doing fine work you're still going to need to do some test cuts and maybe tweak. Don't get me wrong, on balance I'm sure theyre very handy, but in the opinion of a couple of pros who are daily users to make a living, they're not infallible magic.
Yea, that Gomad is in a different class than the Hammer for sure. The Gomad is really too big with the side table for my current shop but i could make it work. I am looking at subbing out some of the work but plan on doing most of it because the money will pay for the shaper, tooling ect plus pay off a car and then some, the time/duration isn’t as important plus I am doing it for a friend.
That t110 sold, guess he never deleted the listing.
Last edited by Mark e Kessler; 07-29-2022 at 8:34 AM.
Last edited by Mark e Kessler; 07-29-2022 at 8:29 AM.
Brent,
That has not been my experience at all with the T27 and T12. Those fences are accurate to 1\100 of a MM and if everything calibrated right should be very dependable. I Have set up a few T27s, even one in a Chinese shop and we use a T 12 in the Alpine workshops. They are always dead on with no test cuts needed. There are a few things that need to be set up on these to get good results. Please send your friends contact info and I will get in touch with him to see what is going on.
In my own works I use 3 different shapers on a daily basis. My T26 Martin that I bought new 20 years ago with automatic fence and shaft height has been accurate to 1/10mm in both axis. The only time I need to tweak it a bit ( usually 0.1 or 0.2 mm is when doing door and window sticking cuts using the split fence removing 1 mm from the edge. About a year ago the fence started going out of calibration. I replaced the encoder and all is good now. I think it was $400 but that shaper doesn’t owe me anything. This shaper is also easy to set up for first time cuts because you can bump it in 1/10th mm increments.
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my second most used shaper is the Hofmann. It has a solid cast fence with mechanical digital readout. I really like this fence., it is totally coplaner and has a nice fine adjust. That is very important on a manual machine. This one has a digital readout for shaft height that is not totally accurate. It’s a 20 year old machine and either need to replace the encoder or it might be dirty. The mechanical digital fence readout is accurate to about 0.2 mm. Almost as good as the T26 but no worries about electronics. It’s a solid cast machine with no vibration. This one and the T26 work well with euro tooling that comes with drawings and cutter diameters on the cutters.
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My third shaper is the 40 year old Martin T23 that I restored. It is total manual but has some features that most shapers of this era did not have. The height is adjustable in 1/10th mm increments via marks on the hand wheel and the fence has really good fine adjust for either the whole fence or each fence half independently. Pretty quick to dial a cutter in especially if using some setting aids. This one though gets used mostly for tenoning and end cuts. I have a shop made digital gauge for tenon depth. The other shapers have a massive footprint and needed for what I do but the T 23 is pretty compact and weighs in as about 2000 lbs. I had a few SCM and other pre 1990 Italian shapers. They are not bad machines and pretty solid. None had fine adjust on the fences. I set up some new Griggio shapers in a shop and they were not too bad. I’m sure the newer SCM good also. If I ever downsize from semiretirement to total hobby work I could get along just fine with the old T23.
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Last edited by Joe Calhoon; 07-30-2022 at 7:23 AM.
Thanks Joe! I'll reach out, though I believe he's already worked with Martin to get within their specs. If the machine were stolen tomorrow, he would buy the same again without hesitation so no question it's an exceptionally helpful feature. Are you going to WinDoor this year? I'll introduce you.
What about SAC, I know nothing about them. There is a 2002 T145, cast iron slider, tilt 9hp on ebay for 8k, seems a bit high. Also with forward (towards operator) spindle, that seams awkward as far as usability compared to tilting away.