New Taper Shaper in action

While working the finishes of my first three sticks, I’ve learned how to get this time saver running…

The fuzz on the left end is a piece of tack cloth, which I’m using to create enough friction to spin the stick against the 60 degree pin. I used a 60 degree center finder on the stick and with the tack cloth, it fucntions like a morse taper and provides enough hold to spin the stick. It doesn’t need much because the router doesn’t create the same kind of drag on the stick as a chisel does, which is the secret sauce that makes this machine so special. It’ll cut a long skinny stick without bending it, so you don’t have to create a lot of time-consuming jigs and procedures to work around that problem.

The idea is to have this machine cut a pass on a stick, then let it rest a while so if it’s going to bow, that happens during the build, and gets cut out of the stick during the build, rather than after the build.

Using stabilized wood, I don’t expect much warping. But since the core is not treated wood, I’m allowing for it anyway by building sticks over time. The image below is some of the sticks waiting to get on the machine… The leftmost sticks have already had a few passes and you can see the taper forming.