Notching drawer boxes for Blum undermount slides.

Karl Brogger

Member
Messages
519
Location
Dennison, MN
This has been a little side project of mine for way too long. I bought this shaper in 08' or 09', and hadn't set it up anything until yesterday. I picked it up at an auction for $200. It just sat under a pallet rack for a couple of years until I moved into the building I'm in now, back in 2010. I'd tinkered with it a bit here and there.

I made the red plastic top for it, (I can't remember what the product is called, the shop next door uses it here and there), a few months ago from a piece of scrap the neighbor shop had. I had to run a tap through some existing holes on the shaper deck, either it was some oddball thread, or they were just really gunked up. I couldn't get a bolt into it.

I had to have collar spacers made by a local machinist, since it came with none.

The dado head I had custom made by Freeborn. They normally come with a 5/8" hole to go in a tablesaw, this shaper has a 1" spindle. So they had to bore out two sets for me. Had I been thinking, (and this just hit me now), I would've just had them do the blades that I would've needed for this operation, and the other set could be set up in a tablesaw in the future just for cutting the dado to accept the drawer bottom. Dang it.

Now a shaper typically spins at 10,000rpm. Way, way too fast for a dado head meant to go into a tablesaw spinning at 6500 rpm. I made the mistake of switching it on with the dado head in it. Scary. I covered my man bits, switched it off, and quickly shuffled away.

My $200 Rockwell/Delta shaper didn't come with a fence of any kind. That was the last hurdle, and I just hadn't gotten around to doing it. Yesterday I had some time to kill since I was waiting on material. So I made a fence for it. It was a pain in the rear, and took all flipping day to get done.


I bent a piece of uhmw into what would make up the structure of the fence. This is purely for dust extraction.
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Sorry I didn't get more "during" pictures, but this is it completed, sans a hole for dust collection. I just wanted to test mount it, to make sure everything was going to work out well, and to figure out where the hole for dust collection was going to go.
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I posted these pictures of it on Facebook, and a non-woodworking friend, (smart boy), asked what does it do? So I made a quick and dirty video to explain things, and show how it works.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur8etQ5Q8SY&feature=youtu.be"
 
That's great Karl. I always enjoy your posts. You seem to have a gift for merging the creativity and shop-made innovations of a home-shop woodworker with the needs of a pro shop. Very cool setup.
 
well done karl it takes time for folks like you to think these things threw so you can do it right the first time, we just make many mistakes first and sometime stumble upon a good idea:)
 
Excellent conversion of a shaper to a dedicated notcher for your shop. Scary though, I got a little nervous watching the video ... :eek:

My hands are never anywhere they'd get clipped. There's no way to put a guard on it, a carriage of any kind makes no sense to me from a time cost perspective, and I don't know how you'd make a powerfeed work at all.


That drill and notch combo that chuck posted looks fast, simple, and safe. Definitely less awkward as you don't have to flip the drawer.
 
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