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Better than the Delta and not nearly as expensive as the Powermatic. All in all, a good buy for the dollar and I would rather buy three of these rather than one of 3 combo machines that Grizzly make. Useful machine - we have 2 in the shop and they work well in tandem doing production rails and stiles for doors, windows and cabinet ends. Not sure that they are up to the job of working all day on the raised panels that we do but then we also have a 5hp beast that does that with a power feeder.
I am skeptical about how well that will work though. They cover the bare metal with a grease/wax of some sort and put all kinds of oil in the small parts bags. There is no dust collection port on the fence, however. I was expecting much less than I got with this shaper.
Price can't be beat. The cutter area has many openings where chips can fly and even with rear dust collection chips will find their way out, I believe. So, it is necessary to fabricate one to attach to the rear. Only drawback (so far) is the clean up of the grease and oil.
It has a nice fence, good fit and finish and solid running motor. All in all, I feel I got a good machine. Have a lot of rags and some kind of degreaser ready. On the up side, I didn't notice any rust and that's the whole idea.
One of the holes was clearly not where the other one was. Other than that, no problems. This shaper is a solid value and works well, however, while I was assembling the shaper I noticed the fence was out of line by about an 1/8 of an inch. After spending time elongating the hole, I could finally get the two fences to line up. Also, comes with a cast iron hand wheel instead of the plastic one whown in the photos. Manual says to shim the fence boards, but don't bother. Instead take a closer look at the screw holes in the housing cover where it attaches to the table top.
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