wow where do I start. The only machine I bought new was a German Hoffmann TFS1200 tilt spindle molder. I think Hoffmann makes the finest shapers in the world. Slightly better than Martin and that says something. I sold the Hoffmann not because I didn’t like it but because of domestic bimbo problems! Agggggh!!!! I hate that bimbo!
now, the Hoffman had a forward tilt. Yes, a forward tilt can get you into trouble. But the tilt feature was not that useful. It did make tramming the spindle harder with all its extra hardware. In all the time I used the Hoffmann, I never used the tilt feature.
I found the tilting two knife cutter head more useful for bevel style cuts. Easier fence set up and no binding issues and easier throat plate setups.
The tilt feature can buy you some tooling mileage as long as your using a straight profile. If you have a profile, then you either need a fixture setup or you take a parallax shift in your profile.
while there are cases in which the tilt of a profile is desired it is usually a strange up. Like trying to put an ogee profile on a section with an angle. Off ball stuff.
if you need to cut a v groove in a piece, you can use a rebate head like garniga or lietz and tilt the head. Otherwise you need a special cutter like a v groove router bit on steroids.
I just found that it’s easier to set up a non tilt shaper for most jobs and not deal with the tilt.
on many shapers like my Hoffmann and the Martin, the head tilts front or back, whatever. The heavy duty sliding table is mounted to the left. So if you using the sliding table, you have no option of using the tilt anyway.
to get around this, you need the smaller removable sliding table which mounts in front.
don’t get me wrong I think some of the tilting shapers are way cool. I just didn’t find them as useful as I thought.
