On 12/12/2012 11:06 PM, dpb wrote:
On 12/12/2012 6:38 PM, DerbyDad03 wrote:
On 12/12/12 4:18 PM, dpb wrote:
...

2) As said before, use stock wide enough for several rails and cut them
in one pass, then rip to width. Crosscut them square w/ the sled on the
TS first, then run them along the fence on the shaper/router table.

Well, I gotta admit that not one site I've visited, and I just went
through about 6, all from different sources, offers that advice. Every
thing I've read says to use a sled or a push block to keep the rails
square with the fence.

....

I've been doing this for some 50 yr now...the "trick" was in the
original handout on making windows/doors/etc. that Delta/Rockwell used
to distribute (like up to the '60s into the '70s) w/ their shapers
reprinted from an industrial arts text...

If you don't plan ahead and have to have all the multiple sizes, do the
best you can to make as many sets of the same as you can at a given time
but even if it's only the top and bottom rails, cutting them at the same
time ensures they're the same length.
....

One last comment...

Just 'cuz stuff isn't on the web doesn't mean much--it is very new
medium and very little if any that I've seen has anything other than a
single, one-at-a-time approach.

Years ago, industrial production before mill shops were CNC programming
and 4-sided shapers, they were manual operations such as this. In fact,
my old Rockwell/Delta Model 13 planer came from such a mill where they
had an array of 27 of them--9 rows of 3 w/ four operators for each row.
Roughly prepared stock came in and they were preset for three passes
to final thickness and then it went to a series of lines that worked
basically as I described. I got this one when they upgraded these to
18" and cut the lines from 9 to 5 in one of the first (somewhat feeble)
attempts to reduce manpower costs. That was in early 70s.

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