Spindle moulder

Also called: spindle molder, shaper

A spindle moulder is a stationary power machine that spins a set of cutters on a vertical spindle rising through a table, used to cut mouldings, decorative shaped profiles, and other shaped edges in timber. It has, together with the high-speed router, all but replaced the hand moulding plane; mounted stationary beneath a table, an electric router does much the same job.

Where it stands in the shop

Table saws, jointers and planers are standard equipment in most shops, but the spindle moulder shows up less often. In American mills it is known as a variety moulder, or shaper, and is counted among the essential machines of a working plant. Fitted with special cutters, a jointer can take over its grooving and light moulding work, and traditional profile shapes such as flutes, reeds, ovolo and ogee, curved and grooved edge profiles once cut by hand moulding planes, see less use in modern work generally. Bird (2004), with more than twenty-five years on the machine, states that it can be run both productively and safely.

Cutters on the spindle

The cutters are normally held on collars, fittings that clamp a single cutter to the spindle. For heavy work, or a complex moulding that needs several cutters at once, a slotted cutter-block, a fitting that carries several cutters together, replaces the collars. A small dovetail-shaped rotary cutter can be fitted to the end of the spindle for dovetailing work, and one form of dovetailing machine is simply a spindle moulder modified and set up solely for automatic dovetail-joint production. A small cutter mounted on a spindle moulder or a table saw can plunge straight into the workpiece to cut an arched recess, acting like a small grooving saw. The machine's fence holds the workpiece down against the table and shields the operator's hands, and a reversible machine lets the operator flip the cutter to work the top face of an edge.

Typical jobs

Standard practice is to rough out a shape on the band saw first, then true it up with a router or a spindle moulder. A mitre can be cut using a correctly angled cutter from the machine, as an alternative to a router table fitted with a mitre bit. A lock-miter joint, an interlocking mitred corner joint well suited to plywood, can only be cut on a spindle moulder fitted with special knives. One joint's profile was reworked specifically for the machine so that a single cutter and setup could produce both halves of the joint at once. Machine-cut rounded dovetails, made on a router or a spindle moulder, offer a cheaper alternative for quality work in repetitive production runs. Cutting a rebate with the machine or a router after a frame has already been assembled removes the usual need for long-and-short shoulders, a technique in which a tenon's shoulders are cut to two different lengths to allow for a groove or rebate on the matching edge. Excess laminate is trimmed away with either the spindle moulder or a handheld power router.