Category:Shapers (woodworking)

Shapers (US) or Spindle moulders (UK) are woodworking machines used for many tasks, broadly those of forming a complex shape along the edge of a piece of wood. They have a horizonal table with a rotating spindle pointing upwards through it. A variety of cutters may be mounted on the spindle, so as to form different shapes. The spindle may be raised and lowereed to control the cut height, and many spindle moulders allow the spindle to be tilted as well.

Spindle moulders perform much the same work as a router, but are physically larger, more powerful, and capable of using far larger cutters.

In the UK, a "shaper" is an intermediate machine, somewhere in scale between a spindle moulder and a router table. It is a fixed spindle pointing upwards through a horizontal table (like the spindle moulder), but uses smaller cutters with a shank, fitted into a collet chuck on the machine (like a router).

In metalworking, a "shaper" is an entirely different machine tool, where a single point (chisel-like) cutter moves back and forth with a linear movement.