Do I regret spending $3000+ on the Shaper Origin? (1 year review)

we're talking about the shaper origin today I made a video about a year ago called should you buy a shape or origin in which I talked about my impressions of this as a hobbyist woodworker people seem to enjoy that video and they left a lot of comments about my opinions and how that's going since then so I figured a year later I should offer a video that talks about my experience after all this time so today I'm really going to run down what I think the benefits are of it and why you might want to get it and then what the drawbacks are if you're looking for kind of an overview of what it is in some of those basic Impressions again go back to that original video and I talk about why I purchased it initially this one's really about what is still good about it what some drawbacks are and especially because you're a hobbyist woodworker cost and whether or not this investment is worth it for what you do or if you should maybe buy something else invest in like a CNC or something like that because there's huge benefits and drawbacks to each I'm not going to talk at all about CNC machines and what they can do I'm very inexperienced with that but I am going to talk about the benefits I've seen from this and what I like about it so far and where it fits into my own workflow and what I produce in my shop so check it out thanks for watching subscribe like all that stuff that really helps and please leave a comment if you have your own thoughts on Shaffer or questions that I didn't answer in this video and I'm happy to do a follow-up right off the bat if you just want my final conclusion I would buy this again after a year and three months I use it on almost every project and I like to find ways to use it in different projects do you need it no but like any tool in the shop you might not need it but when you have it you like it and you use it a lot so This falls into that category for me it's very expensive right now it's retailing around three thousand dollars with different upgrades and things like that and it can actually get more and more expensive depending on what you want which I'll talk about in a little bit what I like about it still from last time it's portability is amazing I'm in a basically glorified one car garage and having this allows me to have some level of CNC work without having to take up the space of a CNC now the biggest benefit of a CNC is you can set it and forget it you can come back and it will have done a whole bunch of work for you so if you're looking at batching out a whole bunch of stuff this isn't the tool for you because this thing requires you to always be holding it and working with it this is great for those little jobs that you want a lot of precision with and you don't necessarily want to hand hold a router and trust yourself with that for instance I just used it recently to do box joints on some legs of a floating White Oak coffee table and it was a dream it worked really well to cut those box joints they fit together really well it has a pre-measured kind of offsets that allow you to make sure it's a perfect fit for those box joints additionally in the small hobbyist Workshop this allows you to do some things that you wouldn't be able to do just with hand tools very likely so I'm going to show you an example of it and this is going to be in a separate video where I talk about the shaper plate but I made this circle slab joint here which would probably be possible somehow if you did that with hand tools or with maybe a hole saw something like that but with this it made it really quick and easy to make a unique joint that is tying this slab together the other area where it's really beneficial is if you're a small hobbyist you're in a small Workshop maybe you sell some things on Etsy maybe you sell some things to your local community something like that if you want to engrave on your work anything this is going to be a huge benefit to you because you can personalize pieces and if you can personalize things people will often pay more for it because you can make it more engaging more beautiful all that kind of stuff now there's limitations to that it's not going to be able to engrave what like a laser can with that level of detail that's what a Laser's for and again you're gonna have to sit with it it's not like a CNC where you can walk away so if you're doing batches of breadboards or something like that for a winery this might not be the tool you probably want to see and see for that but if you have a client and they say a I'd really like this to be personalized in one way or the other you could use this give them that personalization you could maybe get a little bit more profit out of that and there's some benefits to that so you dove in you bought this thing it's really expensive how can you practically earn some money through this well number one obviously if you're just building Furniture I think this is the tool for you because adding hinges custom hinges specialty hinges all that kind of stuff can be challenging on furniture and it's going to make it a lot easier to do that number two if you're a sign maker at all signs can be a really good income proposition if you're building custom signs for people this can really help for that I used to use a scroll saw to make all sorts of signs and this has replaced that need for a scroll saw and I can make it much more precise and that's better for ultimately when you give that to the client they're going to say wow this is a really nice looking sign how did you do that all this stuff this is wonderful and you can charge more if your quality is higher of course so Sign Making might be a really practical way to do that here's an example of one I just made for my actual job where I didn't sell it but I made it for displays so that people can see it some LED lights in the background and it's a cool sign that can be displayed and show off that logo another area where I'd say this has been great is they're constantly coming up with software updates and that's good and bad so number one they brought out a new kind of operating system update called Jenner so that was their newest upgrade and it's nice they always come out with kind of new small subtle upgrades which all work with this first gen shaper origin just like the newest gen so I don't feel like I'm losing out having this you know first gen one and again if you're looking to buy this you want to save a few bucks I'm not sure I would need any kind of upgrade from this at this point some drawbacks of that so they've gone to kind of a pay-to-play system it seems which I don't love when you pay a lot of money entry level to get into something I understand it's a business practice and they need to earn money on all of the things that they're developing so their justification is well we're putting out really cool software things like that so you know are you gonna pay for it you don't have to it'll still work just fine without it but the benefits of the upgraded softwares are pretty nice so for instance I talked in a former video I think I made a jewelry box uh using their shaper Labs now they have a thing called shaper Studio that shaper Labs went to I loved shaper Labs because it was free and you could tell it was beta and they were putting out different features and you knew it was getting to this place eventually they were going to try to make their money now they have shaper Studio light which is free and it has some basic elements to it but it's really basic so you know I think obviously they're smart it's going to tempt you to want to pay for the shaper studio now I don't have anything against paying for the shaper Studio but they're asking a hundred dollars a year for that for a subscription and to me that's fine I wish it was more like 40 or 50 dollars a year I think it is though a barrier for some people if they're thinking about maybe tighter margins and they don't want to have that extra hundred dollars a year when they're also paying that for probably things like SketchUp maybe they do like Adobe Illustrator or Adobe suite and just all those kind of nickel and diming of subscription-based things end up costing in the long run and for a woodworker that might be a barrier where they say you know what I can hand cut my dovetails I can do some basic bow ties I don't need this for that so it might cause people to actually stay away from it now that aside the benefits of shaper Studio are awesome it does a really good job it allows you to set depths so they have a thing that again nickel and diming called Auto pass that is 200 for a one-time purchase so you never have to pay for it again and it allows basically the bit to auto set depth once you've set that in shaper Studio or On the Origin and that's nice but it's again another two hundred dollars so you see how these costs start kind of racking up in addition to that they put out the shaper plate which again is in a separate video I'm going to review that that costs I think it was 350 dollars so these things kind of add up and add up and you can start to really get inside an investment here that is all to say I'm not a big fan of the nickel and diming but I will say the stuff that they're putting out is pretty good so similar to a lot of tools in the shop is it worth upgrading to that stuff but before you buy this you would want to know that that's what you're getting into because the cost can keep adding up and if you're not using it or it's not something where you can earn money on it if it's part of your business it might not be worth it maybe buy something else so again like I said at the beginning what about again absolutely this thing's great I use it again almost every build I build a lot of furniture so that's just kind of a part of my workflow I don't make a lot of like cutting boards or things like that that I think a lot of people like to sell on Etsy I don't do that world I love making signs I love making Furniture I love making that kind of stuff and it's been worth it I use it really I think once on every project if not more so I'd get it again I don't know what you think go ahead and leave a you know note in the comments um subscribe all that kind of stuff thanks for watching again this is not sponsored whatsoever these are just my thoughts on whether or not this is a good product that you might want to have in your shop

Channel: FalknerMakes Woodworking

Views: 45,210

Keywords: woodworking, diy, build, maker

Id: CWSPfMVJnDA

Length: 9min 47sec (587 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023