Interested in Tenoning on the Shaper - how to evaluate machine tooling capabilities?

[Phillip Mitchell]

I adopted this shaper/feeder ( SCM L’invincibile T100 ) nearly a year ago and it’s been my first experience with shapers. I have been very pleased with the speed, efficiency and accuracy of rabbeting, smaller tenoning w/ shop made sled and grooving between acquiring and using a 125mm shear cutting rabbeting block and a 140 mm adjustable groover. Tenons are obviously smaller (cabinet doors sized) and I am flipping parts and cutting one face at a time of a centered tenon.

I want to explore the potential of cutting larger tenons in one pass with either tenoning discs or potentially saw blades (if need be) mounted with spacers. The saw blades are less preferred as I would still need to do the shoulder cuts elsewhere in a another operation / set up. It would be amazing to have 3-4” of tenon cutting capacity from the shaper set up for passage / entry door rails. I do a variety of joinery size sizes and there is rarely a standard unless it’s doors.

How do I know what the reasonably tooling capacity of this class of machine is and where the line is? Or does it make more sense to eventually seek out a larger class machine with sliding table for this specific work and keep sawing larger tenons with either dado stack or bandsaw in the meantime? I don’t know if I have room in my tiny shop for more than 1 shaper.

It’s a 5HP motor, 1 1/4” spindle with less than half a thousandth of runout. The table is dipped 2 thousandths somewhat close to the feed area (About 6 o clock standing in front of the machine in relation to the cutterhead.) I have not noticed this little dip affecting anything thus far. This machine is stout and probably weighs ~700 lb + if I had to guess, so beefier than it looks but obviously has limits.

Looks like the widest opening the steel fences will allow is about 10.5” which is basically the diameter once the smaller ring is taken out.

To be clear I’m talking about a pair of something like this, though I am unsure on appropriate size for this machine and then there’s the question of the best way to run the parts through without a sliding table.

https://www.whitehill-tools.com/cutt...s/tenon-discs/
- the last time I looked at this page there were larger diameter tenon discs up to 300mm or so. Not sure what happened to them.

What do you shaper guys think?

PS - the obvious answer is to just get a bigger shaper in addition to this one but space is limited and that would be a down the road purchase unless a deal fell into my lap.