Shaper Workstation - careful when clamping to workbench (sharing a lesson learned)

Hi folks. I recently took the cert class to use the Shaper Origin, and had a chance to start using Shaper Origin and the Shaper Workstation fixture for holding vertical work. I wanted to share a lesson learned from my initial experience, in case it can save others some heartache.

When using Workstation, I was experiencing a problem with the black clip-on support bar AND the sliding “tray” that clips on to the front edge of the Workstation, both not being perfectly co-planar with the main surface of the Workstation (the white surface with the dominos). This misalignment was leading to inaccuracies in the cuts I was making.

I thought it was a problem with the Shaper Workstation itself, but after much inspection, I discovered I was causing the problem: When I clamped the workstation to a table/workbench in the wood shop, I was clamping it to the corner of the workbench, and using two clamps, one in the back right corner and another in the front left corner of the Shaper Workstation. When tightening the clamps, I was forcing the Workstation flat onto the shop workbench, and thus transferring a very slight twist from the workbench onto the Origin Workstation. This was causing the black support bar and the sliding tray to go out of parallel/coplanarity (is that a word) relative to the main domino surface of the Workstation.

Lesson learned: Be careful where you put clamps when securing the Shaper Workstation to a workbench, and ensure you don’t over-tighten any clamps and end up transferring any twist/lack of flatness from the underlying surface to the Shaper Workstation.

Thanks!
Felipe.

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Thanks for sharing that insight! Are the MFTs fair game for use with the Shaper? I imagine those may be a lot flatter than the big workbenches.

The MFT’s would be ideal for the Shaper. And the tops are very flat.

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Yeah the MFTs would be great. I should’ve thought to put the Workstation there instead of on one of the big tables. Next time! :slight_smile:

Thanks Charlie and Felipe. I’ll incorporate that into the classes.

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I used an MFT for the Shaper class the other day and it worked great. The workstation has holes allowing you to bolt it down to a table. Could we put threaded inserts into the MFT? During my demos of the Shaper that made a solid connection that did not rely on clamps.

@jiggliemon ?

we would just need some dogs with a threaded end

if i remember correctly that’s something he originally planned on doing, and we talked about turning some in the shop but not sure where that ended up

i did see some dog clamps on the mfts a couple days ago that might work?

A more sustainable approach to adapting peripherals to a fixture table is to mount the peripheral to a plate that fits into the fixture holes.

An MFT top should be considered a consumable. Assume it will be changed out frequently (even if it isn’t changed out all that often).