Good morning everyone. I'm trying to do some research on insert shaper tooling and not turning up great results. As always it's best to ask around. We currently use brazed tooling for all of our C&S door profiles but I'm heavily leaning towards insert for a variety of reasons but only if it is cost effective.
Brazed tooling is expensive and the quality of the joints is a function of how many times they have been resharpened, and the replacement/retipping cost of 6 piece sets gets very expensive if you run a lot of material. Ever since we have switched some of our profiles to insert knives I have wanted to change our C&S over.
My problem is most of the name brands including freeborn are expensive, and you would have to replace the inserts a significant amount of times before it is most cost effective than say a standard freeborn 6 piece kit. The knives I have seen on average are $30+ each, so in many cases it's 6 knives for C&S. I've seen some new heads from infinity but they don't allow glass door profiles which we do a lot of, and I'm not interested in fiddling with a rabbeting cutter and all that fuss, I've been down that road.
Any input would be helpful. Insert tooling has its advantages beyond initial cost, but if it's exponentially more expensive from the gate it's really hard to consider it.