DIYbanter - View Single Post

Andy Hall

On 2007-09-25 19:56:06 +0100, (A.Lee) said:

With the amount of woodwork I have been doing recently, a good purchase
for me would be a router.
Presumably when hand held, these are not particularly easy to use (say
for putting a door rebate in a piece of 4x2").
So, looking at both Screwfix, and MachineMart catalogues, they have a
few 'budget' router tables. Some look better than others.
These have got to be the way to go when using a router?
Or a complete waste of time and money?
Ta
Alan.

If your main intended use is to be able to do operations such as a
rebates in long lengths of 100x50mm timber, you would be better off
with supporting the timber on a flat bench or equivalent and using the
router hand held, possibly with a jig to support the base. Sometimes
said jigs come with or are available for routers, but it's easy to make
one if not.

I began with using a router table with a 12.7mm router some while ago.
It is interesting for fairly small work involving cutting of
mouldings etc. or for work like panel raising and cope and stick
joints - e.g. on making cupboard doors. These can involve quite large
cutters which would not be very safe or satisfactory to use in a
handheld router. However, the size of the pieces is then generally
fairly small and can be reasonably supported on the typical router
table.

If you do a bit of searching around router tables and components,
you'll find that there are quite a few home made and retrofit designs
around. For example, it's quite popular in the U.S. to fit a router
table plate in a special mount to a table saw or to a bench. This
gives a much more stable support arrangement allowing safer use and
better control than a small table.

Nowadays, I have a combination machine with spindle moulder built in
that can take router cutters, so that I no longer really use the
portable table. However, if I were doing the exercise over again, I
wouldn't buy one of these portable jobs, but would go for one of the
insert type of solutions and build a standalone table or fit something
to a bench in some way. Results would be far more satisfactory.

If anything, I would suggest starting with a good quality 12.7mm router
such as one based on the Elu design (DeWalt 625, Trend, CMT), Bosch,
Makita or for something still good but less expensive Freud - certainly
nothing in the sub £120 range.

After that, I'd suggest buying a good book on routing, routing
techniques and jigs.

I think that you would get a lot more out of that.