Making your own cutters is an art form in itself. While there are many over the counter options, you need to do a cost performance analysis of why your doing this. My two shapers are vintage Oliver 287 shapers. These do not support metric cutters. So I have had to make spindles for these machines to accept mainly 30 mm cutters. I have also dealt with odd cutter designs that are no longer in production or use.
Matching profiles such as cope and stick cutters require very precise tolerances. Profiles that are decorative and stand alone can tolerrate a bit more slop. So I prefer using euro insert cutters for the precise work. Felder, Garniga, Lietz and others have many options in the insert market.
When you need a few feet of odd ball molding, you often resort to using cutter blocks with corregated knives. Th ese are the most popular when you have knives ground to a special profile. Slip knives are also useful but you need to know what your doing or you may be headed to the ER.
The misconception about corregated knives is that they dont cut on both profiles evenly. No matter how accurate you are, this is a fact of life. So what I always did is to offset one knife by one notch in the head to force one knife to finish cut and the other to tag along and do rough cutting. This also kept the cutter block balanced. While doing this forces you to reduce your feed speed for surface finish, the limited number of feet needed did not present an issue. Running production runs of tonque and groove in high numbers can benifit from a more precise setup and I have since gone to an insert head for this type of job.
Grinding corregated knives is best done on a profile grinder. My last shop used a wynig profile grinder. Smaller more hobby like machines such as the viel profile grinder can certainly help in this regard. Here you grind both knives at the same notch setting to get them as identical as possible.
While carbide inserts have come a long way in the euro insert heads, carbide never had as keen an edge as that found on tool steel stock. Older cutter heads often used brazed carbide knives attached to a steel body. The issue here is that the carbide that can tolerate the brazing temperature could never hold a perfect edge. Inserts use a different grade of carbide which cannot tolerate the brazing temperatures; however, outperform the the edge quality of brazed knives. Certainly carbide can tolerate much longer runs than steel but steel provides a superior edge.
If you only use a shaper or molder for limited use and low volume runs, you may find using steel knives an advantage. Sharpening between runs is easy. I dont really care if the cutter block is a safety design or not. If you set up shapers routinly, you know where those knives are. So using standard, old school corregated blocks is a no brainer. Grinding knives on a grinder such as the viel is easy once you read the manual.
The problem with grinding your own knives is you get spoiled. A few years down the road, you wind up with a entire tool cabinet full of knife sets. Used once twenty years ago and never used since. I often kept one off knives thinking that another profile may pop up in which I can regrind an old obsolete knife set into a new profile. But I still have lots of knives.
One advantage of using hollow and round molding planes is that you can create any profile you want and your not limited to commericial offerings. When you grind shaper cutters, you can do the same thing. Use a commercial profile when its easy and functional, grind a custom profile when you have to. Some of my profiles are for french spindles. French spindles are rare and some consider them dangerous.
The shaper is often the queen of the shop even if you have CNC capabilities. A molder or shaper can run circles around a CNC mill for cutting stick. I will always have a Martin, Robinson, Hoffmann, or oliver shaper parked next to the fancy german CNC router for this reason. Unlike modern managers, I need to the job done and out the door. I have actually ground knives on a profile grinder for use with cutter blocks on the CNC router.
While this diatribe does not answer specific questions, it does offer an insight to this area of woodworking.
I suppose it is halfway to hand grinding and ordering in what you need.
