Right Router for Your Shop

If you're trying to decide what route to go for routers in your shop, I can help you out. I've got three distinctly different types of routers here I want to talk about, give you some advantages and disadvantages of each one in the family here. Help you pick what's best for your shop. Starting down here, I have, what's called a trim router. Now the history of these babies is that people used them forever to trim plastic laminate for countertops. A couple of things I really, really like about them. Easy to get your hand on here. This is a one-handed machine. Very, very handy router for small bits, 1/4 inch roundover, 5/32 Roman Ogee. Now small bits, something else comes into play. The collet on trim routers is typically limited to 1/4 inch. So in other routers, we can get a collet that goes to 3/8, 1/2 inch. Trim routers, it's typically limited to quarter. In horsepower, in general, you can say these are one horsepower and less. So they don't have a lot of oomph but they offer a lot of convenience. Great ease of use. I use this router all the time to do roundovers and small profiles on my woodworking projects. Here in the center of the table, we take a step up in bulk. We take a step up in horsepower. We're going from one horsepower and less here. In this category, routers are 1 1/2 to about 2 1/4 horsepower. So I have a bigger motor, more capabilities. In other words, I can drive a bigger cutter. When we get to the collet, I can take 1/4 inch collets and 1/2 inch collets. That's real standard. There are some router bits out there that demand 3/8 collets. Many of these category of routers also provide that. With these routers, these are great for handheld applications where you're doing a bigger edge profile. You're running a dovetail jig. Anything that demands more of the router requires that bigger horsepower. This center of the category, this category here in the middle is gonna be great for that. Now here on this end, this is a big boy. Routers in this family, three horsepower and up. Lots and lots of oomph here which also means this is a lot of router. The best thing, if you're kind of deciding up here on this end is if you can get to a store where you can pick up and handle one of these and one of these. This is a big, heavy, bulky router. So if you're finessing an operation, a great example would be dovetails on a dovetail jig, not that this router won't do it, it's plenty capable, but this is a lot of router to handle for a delicate operation like that. A lot of people take these routers and mount them in a router table like this. Now in features, let's have a look at some other things that these routers can offer such as variable speed. Here in the center router, there's a dial right here, similar setups on the other two. This speed control allows me to change the RPM of the machine. So it's very, very important. I think you really need to have electronic variable speed, especially on these two categories of routers because as you use a larger diameter of bit, you need to reduce the RPM of the router. So a single speed router doesn't offer you anywhere near as much versatility as a variable speed router. The other thing that a variable speed will bring to this is what's called soft start. This is a great feature. What soft start means is that when you turn the router on it slowly ramps up to speed instead of just jumping from zero to 23,000 RPM. So especially when you're in a handheld application, it's easier to maintain your grip on the router and not feel like it's torquing itself out of your hands. These big routers are really great for a router table. You get one of those mounted in a table, there's very little you can throw at it that these boys can't handle. Now here's buying advice I often give my own students in my woodworking classes. These 2 1/4 horse variable speed routers, extremely versatile, probably the best direction for most woodworkers to go as far as having a machine that will do a lot of stuff handheld and can also be put in a router table for most router table applications. You want a dedicated router to the router table, you can't beat these big three horse boys 'cause of what they're capable of. Now, once I've satisfied those needs in my shop then I would really consider the trim routers, very handy thing to have around so that you can do those lighter duty edge profiles with this, very convenient to handle, very easy to hold on to. So little bit of buying advice on three different aspects of the router category. Hopefully helping you focus in on what route you should take when you buy a router.