Shaper Origin

Shaper Origin

The Shaper Origin is a hand-held CNC router which can be used to cut a variety of 2D shapes. It is a solid option for CNC for molds and templates with minimal space requirements and very good accuracy.

I have used one of these briefly, to test-cut a portion of a mold block, and it worked very well. A close friend of mine has one and has made some impressive things with it. I worked up a model of one of my nose blocks in Fusion 360, which you can find here: https://a360.co/2pCwsLA I shared it with him and he used the Fusion 360 plugin for Shaper Origin to generate the files for the tool and tossed them on a USB memory stick.

This is basically a laminate trimmer with CNC control in a handheld unit a little bigger than a normal full-sized router. The movement of the cutter on the X/Y axes is about +/- 1". You guide the cutter along the tool path, keeping the path in a circle on the screen, and the machine adjusts to keep the cutter true to the tool path as you do so. It keeps its position via computer vision and “domino” tape on the work surface. This is pretty easy to do, though it takes some practice to not move faster than the machine can keep up with, and the more steady you are the better the results.

This feels like a perfect alternative to a large gantry router for 2D work associated with skis and snowboards: molds, base and core templates, even cutting base material and til/tail fill directly. Only thing lacking is you can’t profile with it, though you could of course make profiles for a planer/sander setup.

A test of the Shaper Origin, cutting a mold part #

Test of Shaper Origin accuracy. Test of Shaper Origin accuracy. Shaper Origin test cutting part of an end block for a mold. Testing accuracy of a Shaper Origin.
Last modified Sunday March 24, 2019, at 20:02:03 UTC


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