Based in San Francisco with offices in Stuttgart, Germany, Shaper was founded in 2012 with a mission of making precision cutting easy and accessible to craftspeople everywhere, beginning with its proud claim to the world’s first handheld CNC router, Origin.
Designed specifically for woodworkers with a similar hands-on form factor of a plunge router, you steer Origin following a cut path shown on a builtin display, while Origin makes hundreds of microadjustments each second to ensure you get clean and accurate results.
In contrast to traditional CNC machines, where you bring the material to the machine, Origin is lightweight and portable, enabling you to bring the machine directly to the workpiece. It’s also not bound by a specific bed size, which allows you to cut at virtually any scale. This opens up digital precision to a host of workflows and localised CNC cutting that hasn’t been possible before.
In December of 2018 Shaper was acquired by TTS (Tooltechnic Systems), joining other top power tool brands like Festool, SawStop, and Tanos. Today, Origin is designed and engineered in California by Shaper, and manufactured by Festool in Germany.
After almost a decade since its launch, the Origin System has evolved to support a wide range of woodworking applications from fine furniture to cabinetry, flooring to signmaking and more.
CNC precision, at a fraction of the price
For decades CNC machines have either been too expensive, too large, or too complicated for most woodworkers to use. Instead of a large capital investment and years of training, Origin provides CNC precision, right out of the box at a fraction of the price. Origin has enabled tens of thousands of joiners and craftspeople, especially smaller operations, to gain access to digital precision and make it part of their day-to-day operation, whether that’s through efficient template making, detailed joinery, installing hardware using Shaper’s ready-made files in its Hardware Catalog, or simply offering more customisation to their clients.
Evolving with BenchPilot
Last year, Shaper continued to evolve the Origin System with the introduction of BenchPilot, an autopilot system for Origin, essentially transforming the handheld CNC into hands free benchtop gantry CNC.
With BenchPilot one can simply clip Origin into BenchPilot and let it do the gross movement your hands were once doing with Origin, but the beauty of BenchPilot is again its ease of use. All of the simplicity of using Origin and designing a project directly on the touch screen display, remains intact.
You can stop and start a project easily with BenchPilot and make adjustments on the fly, just like you would with Origin. The end result is an operation that feels much more cobotic than robotic.
For joineries looking to do small batch production with Origin, BenchPilot makes this a more realistic ask as you can set it up and work on other shop tasks while the machine finishes up its work.
It’s also designed to mate perfectly with Origin’s fixturing system, Workstation, which allows for vertical and horizontal workholding, making things like mortise and tenons, finger joints, and other joinery possible on a CNC machine.
Find out more
Keep an eye on Studio, Shaper Tools’ 2D design program for craftspeople where the company regularly launches new updates nearly every month.
For further information on Origin, BenchPilot, or any of Shaper’s products work, Shaper Sessions (shapertools.com/sessions), a twice-monthly livestream, is a great place to see it all in action.
