A wood moulder is a machine used to shape wood with profiled cutters. The profiled cutters are also known as knives, and blades. Tooling refers to cutters, knives, blades including planer blades, and cutterheads. Most moulders require the blades to be secured into a cutterhead that mounts on the shaft(s) of the machine. However, some machines such as the Williams & Hussey and the Shop Fox require the blades to bolt directly onto the shaft of the machine.

Wood moulders almost always have the capacity to serve as a wood planer as well. For this reason they are also known as Planer/ Moulders. However, a wood planer does not necessarily have the capability to be a moulder. There are several makes and models of both planers and planer/ moulders on the market.

The wood being fed into a moulder is commonly referred to as either “stock” or “blanks”.

A wood moulder has one or more horizontal cutter heads, and may also have side cutter

Diagonal pliers

Diagonal pliers are pliers intended for the cutting of wire . They are sometimes called side cutting pliers or side cutters, although these terms are shared by other pliers designs, such as lineman's pliers, and may lead to confusion...

 heads. Because it has horizontal cutter heads a wood moulder differs from a spindle shaper, which has one or sometimes more vertical spindles and no horizontal heads.

Common types of moulders

• Single Head Moulders:
• Single head moulders have a Top (horizontal) head only.
• Single head moulders are more economical but they also feed through slower than multi head moulders and, as the name implies, a *single head moulder will only cut one surface at a time.

Multi Head Moulder:
Standing from in front of the infeed side of the machine where the stock is fed into the machine. A common cutter head configuration is;

Bottom horizontal head, a Right hand vertical side head, a Left hand vertical side head, and a Top horizontal head.

This is a common configuration (in order of layout), but there are countless other configurations available. For instance; a multi head moulder may have two Bottom heads and two Top heads in order to size the lumber with the first Top and the first Bottom head, and then finish cut the lumber with the remaining Top and Bottom head.

Machines with two or more Right heads more common in the furniture industry

Furniture

Furniture is the mass noun for the movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating and sleeping in beds, to hold objects at a convenient height for work using horizontal surfaces above the ground, or to store things...

 to give the ability to run shorter stock and more detailed, deeper cuts on the edge of the stock.

Tooling

Tooling refers to cutters, knives, blades, as well as planer blades, and cutter heads.
Most blades are made from either a type of tool steel

Tool steel

Tool steel refers to a variety of carbon and alloy steels that are particularly well-suited to be made into tools. Their suitability comes from their distinctive hardness, resistance to abrasion, their ability to hold a cutting edge, and/or their resistance to deformation at elevated temperatures...

 known as High Speed Steel

High speed steel

High speed steelMost copyeditors today would tend to choose to style the unit adjective high-speed with a hyphen, rendering the full term as high-speed steel, and this styling is not uncommon . However, it is true that in the metalworking industries the styling high speed steel is long-established...

(HSS), or from carbide.
Cutter heads are normally made from either steel or aluminum.

High Speed Steel, carbide, aluminim , and steel for the cutter heads all come in a wide variety of grades.