Trimming Edge Banding on the Router Table

On European style cabinets, typically you have an edge band on the front, not a face frame. So I've got the edge band glued onto this piece, and when I put edge band on, I put it on so it's too big. So my edge band here is projecting past this face. Now what I need is an easy way to trim every piece on the carcass so that the edge band is perfectly flush. Let me show you a great technique for taking care of that on the router table. What it calls for is the addition of this tall fence here on the router table. Where we're going with this is that I've got a bit in the table itself. I'm gonna take this piece, and I'm gonna ride it past that bit, allowing this face to run against the face of the fence so that the bit takes off the excess down here on the bottom. So let's take a second and talk about the cutter. For this application, any straight bit will work. Now, what some people ask about is couldn't I just use a flush trim bit to make this happen? And it's not gonna work for you because for one thing, if we try to just do it with a handheld router, you would never be able to balance a handheld router on the edge of your material, and use a flush trim cutter without tipping it and probably screw up your edge band. The flesh trim bit here in the router table, it would still need a tall fence on here because you have to have this little undercut. There has to be a place where that excess on the edge banding can tuck under the fence, and then be trimmed off. So any straight bit will do it. I actually prefer a spiral cutter like this one, and the reason is that the spiral bit is gonna do a nicer work, a nicer job on that edge band. Less chance of chipping. At this point, we're in so deep. The last thing we want to do is put a big chip in that edge band. It'd be really hard to repair. So this spiral bit in the router table is gonna do a nicer job. Let me show you the setup on this. It's gonna take a little bit of movement of the fence in order to get everything just right. I've got a test board here that I'll work with. And what we want to do is have the fence in a position where, as I slide the test board past, it does not bump into the cutter. So if I come back here, the edge of the bit is actually sticking past the face of the fence. Obviously now, if I made a cut, it would take the edge banding off, but it would also cut way into the face of this. That's what we don't want. So I want to bring the fence forward, pivoting on that end, until I feel my test board slip past. Then I'll lock this end down. The test cuts are a series of working with an edge banded piece, then a not edge banded piece. And what we're trying to do is get it to where it skins off the edge band, but it does not cut into the face of the piece. So now I'm ready to plug this in. We can go ahead and run our edge banded piece past it because we know at this stage, we're not hitting the face of this one. Now with that cut being done, I've still got edge banding sticking past the face of the piece. I've still got glue beads on this edge that haven't come off. The bit needs to take those off. So that tells me that my fence is too far this way. I'm not taking enough material off yet. So I'm gonna move the fence back just a little bit, then we try our test piece to make sure we're not nicking the face. Then we do our edge banded piece. Keep staggering back and forth between those two. So I moved the fence back too far, and this is the symptom of that is the bit is actually cutting into the melamine face. That's why we do a test piece. If this had been my edge banded piece, I'd have just screwed up a piece of my cabinet carcass. So I moved the fence too far. I've got to bring it back forward just a little bit. Try another cut on this one. Now, with that trim, we took the edge banding off. Just a little bit of glue residue left on here. That'll come off easily with a chisel. We can go ahead and run this other face, get that edge banding trimmed up. And then of course every piece that's in the project that has edge banding on it, needs the same thing. So let me go ahead and run this other face, then this piece will be done. Once you get through the slightly fussy setup, this really work wells. And in fact, it's got another function too. You see I've got these extra lines cut on here. Well here's what happened on this project to me. I was sizing my dados, and I grabbed a piece of melamine out of my bin, sized my dados, that piece of melamine dropped right in perfectly, cut all the dados. It turns out that piece of melamine was not from this project. It was left over from something else. So when I went to put this piece into its dado to test the fit, this one was a little bit fatter, so it wouldn't go into the dados. Well, I came right back to this setup, and I trimmed that off by running this piece, lowered the bit in the table, ran the piece just like that. That allowed me to skin just a little bit off the back of that melamine so that piece would drop right into the dado. So in addition to trimming by edge banding, this saved my bacon because you really can't sand melamine like you can plywood. So it allowed me to trim off just enough. The dado's gonna hide that little bit of raw wood because it's gonna drop right in there. So turned out to really earn its keep on this project.