• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

How The Spindle Moulder Gained Its Notoriety

i have dabbled. Guided by Dan, who is the expert here. Scary tools and I use a remote control starter. I think routers are also potentially dangerous and so I have a lot of respect for all high speed spinning tools.
 
Spectric said:
Some of those cutter blocks look really barbaric and I can see why the router table became more popular for home use than a spindle moulder.
Click to expand...

Some are more fun than others.
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And sometimes the sheer size of thr heads is amusing (8"x2.5" rebate blocks & 254mm scribe head)
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Some of those almost look like a slice from a P/T cutter block and use that same screw arrangement to wedge the blades in so if it comes loose that blade will be ejected outwards harder than kickback on a table saw. It looks like the newer blocks actually retain the blades which is much safer.
 
I think it is worth getting a fully guarded SM. I had a couple of false starts (sold on at no loss luckily) and ended up with a Sedgewick SM4 Model II. I find it a great deal safer (feeling - so may be imaginary) than using a router table to do similar things. It came with quite a lot of useful cutters, from an eBay dealer. I mainly use it to do t&g for oak flooring, overlap MDF, strip for panel mouldings, and some skirting. I've done a few hundred maybe even thousand metres of mouldings for acquaintances, which has pretty much covered the cost of the machine. It has a pretty basic power feed and a remote starter (rigged up by me). As I am super careful with changing cutters, and it has a cover head thing, I am generally well away from the firing line. I actually feel safer with it than my old router table (only any use for small amounts). Will probably move it on though soonish as I suspect this is our last house renovation.
 
Spectric said:
Some of those almost look like a slice from a P/T cutter block and use that same screw arrangement to wedge the blades in so if it comes loose that blade will be ejected outwards harder than kickback on a table saw. It looks like the newer blocks actually retain the blades which is much safer.
Click to expand...
The wedge gib is an older design (but still available new over here). The current style corrugated heads are pocket gibs with grub screws.

Modern pocket gib head
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Smooth back vs corrugated (the corrugated is an original from my 1950s 4 sider)
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If you look at a cutterhead from a P/T the knife pockets are smaller as are the gibs and gib bolts. Though the same concept.

Screenshot_20260324_220718_Gallery.jpg
 
We used to have a big old Wadkin 5 head planer/moulder that had square blocks, sometimes if just a small amount of moulding was needed we would use one of the blocks in the spindle moulder, this seemed perfectly normal at the time but I wouldn't be doing it these days!

The Wadkin had a maximum capacity of 4"x3" which became a bit limiting so we got a Dominion which could machine up to 7" wide which was great for skirtings etc.

We still kept the Wadkin and it was left set up for making dado rail, this was in the 80's and we sold 1000's of feet of the stuff. I remember we sold it for 25p per foot and couldn't make enough of it at the time.

For some reason talking square cutter blocks got me feeling all nostalgic 🥹
 
I don’t have a lot to do with tenoning heads, these are the biggest I’ve had dealings with.

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A mate bought them but they were for a 2” shaft so wanted a sleeve to fit them to his machine so he sent over the shaft off his tenoner & the blocks & we machined him a shaft up.
I saw them in action a couple of years ago & they certainly removed some material in a single pass, not for the faint hearted.
 
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