I am starting to build doors, I have 2 shapers, sounds like from others that one should be used for rails/coping and the other should be used for stiles/rails.
It is my understanding that only one requires a power feed and the other requires a coping sled. Am I on track with this thinking? I only have room for 2 so will have to do panels separate. I think a majority may be shaker with just a flat panel anyways.
is everything conventional cutting as far as cutter head rotation?
For solid panels, what width do you think looks the best when glueing up?
I have read the majority of related forums on here and also picked up a few books on building doors. I will give it a go. Thank you for any advice.

You want to learn about sizing the stiles & rails with an outboard fence. You can use the same shaper with the powerfeed to do the raised panels. Get a rub collar & back cutter to go with the panel cutter. When you do it that way you are not using the fence in an accurate way. It saves time switching from the pattern to panel cutting. All you have to do is figure out how many shims are required to switch back and forth.

People make a big deal about making doors on 1 or 2 shapers. If you are smart its really easy. Just having two is a time saver.

I made doors on 1 sliding table shaper for a couple of years. I could switch operations in 5-10 minutes.

With one shaper, you can have both tenon/cope and sticking on one spindle.

On one side, you have the feeder running rails and stiles - on the table, with a fence - outboard or otherwise. One the other side, you have the tenon tooling stacked on top of the sticking. You have a 3/4" or so thick coping sled that can be sized (along with the tooling stacks) in height to give you the correct height when the sticking tooling is right.
A double decker sort of operation.
Avoiding having to set heights and fences will save you money no matter what you do. There are other ways than what I mention, but you need to start somewhere.

thank you for all the ideas, I am excited to get going.
I was planning on using the stacked method, but then I bought another older shaper I found for cheap, so not sure what plan B will be, but will figure it out as we go.

Hi Jeff,

Lots of good advice for you here. As far as tooling goes, the company I work for (Rangate) rolled out a new program called CutterShare pretty much exactly for your situation.

It's a way to use the best cutters available as you're getting started without making a hefty investment before you begin production and get some money rolling in. Obviously I'm biased, but I think it really does make a lot more sense to use good tools from the get-go, especially since brazed stuff which is comparably priced isn't going to support tight joinery much longer than a rental period.

Our cabinet door set is a stacked design that you would move the spindle up and down to switch between coping and sticking. The nice part is that it has a consistent cutting circle diameter, so you don't need to adjust the fence between cuts. We did a good video of the process here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgTWNXQKapY

I'm sure this came up in your research, but make sure you cope the ends before doing the sticking, so any blowout you get in the cross grain cut gets taken off when you profile it.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about tooling as you get started!

Alex

CutterShare Tools