I finally hit 300 cabinet doors without a single reject this week.

After chasing tearout on my shaper for a solid two years, one sharpening guy in Portland showed me the right feed speed and now I'm actually proud of my numbers for once, anyone else have a random breakthrough that just clicked one day?

3 comments

3 Comments

emma_jones5d ago

Three hundred cabinet doors with zero rejects? I gotta be honest, that number sounds almost fake to me. I've been doing this for over a decade and the best I ever managed was 112 before some tiny chip showed up on a corner. What kind of feed speed did that guy put you on, something crazy fast or slow? I might have to rethink everything I thought I knew about shaper work.

shane_morgan5d ago

Think you're underestimating how good some guys are with a consistent setup. I've seen a shop run 200+ cabinet doors on a week-long production run with maybe two or three small rejects total, all because they dialed in the feed rate at a slow crawl and kept the tooling razor sharp. It's not common, but it's not impossible if you've got the right guy and the right material.

the_sage5d ago

Feels like @shane_morgan might be mixing up the numbers a bit. Last I checked, 200 plus cabinet doors with only two or three rejects over a week is a totally different ballgame than 300 with zero rejects. I mean, that's a 33 percent bigger run with no mistakes at all. I've had maybe two days in my life where a shaper run went completely clean and they were both under 50 doors on simple flat panel stuff, not raised panels or anything tricky. Once you start pushing past 150 or so, even with sharp tooling and slow feeds, there's just too many variables from the wood itself to avoid a tiny chip or a snagged grain.