Hand Held Routers Session 3: Router Know How

First step in making a mortise is to lay the mortise out on your leg and what we need to do, notice that there's a great distance from the mortise location to the end of my future leg on this project, that's very intentional. Don't cut this to length, the leg, until after the mortise is produced. We're going to use a plunge router and a fence to plunge, make a cut, exit. If this has been cut to length already and the mortise is really close to the end of that leg. The router is going to get tippy. It's going to have a tendency to fall off. Notice too, I've got another piece of leg stock here, that's so that we can pair those up, so when we make the cut, we're increasing the width of this platform. Otherwise it's very easy for the router to get tippy. And it's going to mess up your mortise. So step one, lay out the mortise, leave the leg long. Step two, routers unplugged. I've got a quarter inch bit in my router. What I want to do is determine my starting and my stopping points now, while nothing is running. Here's the way I'm going to do this. I'm going to bring the router down until the bit is touching my material. Slide it over until the flute of the carbide is right on the pencil line. So what I'm looking at is right there where the carbide's on the pencil line. Then outside here, what I'm going to do is mark the outside of the router base onto the leg. So router is still in the same position, make a mark there. That's where I'm going to start. Now we move the whole assembly to the other end of the mortise. I peek in on this side, I gotta to turn the bit just a little to get the flute in the right spot. Now I'm correctly positioned. Now I'm going to do the same thing over here. Trace the base. That way, when I go to make this cut, I don't have to try to look down through the base to exactly where the router bit is. All I have to do is look at these marks starting point plunge, make the cut, stopping point, exit the cut. To get all this to come together, we're going to pair up our legs, clamp everything to the bench. And I have to check and make sure that I don't have a problem with my fence. Nope. I didn't want the fence to hit my clamp. I've already set depth of cut. Now this is going to be cool because what we'll get to see here is taking advantage of the turret so that we can do this cut in two passes, pretty common for a quarter inch mortise, like I'm doing here, to be a half or 9/16 inch deep. We want to do that in two passes, not one. So currently, if you have a look at the stop rod and the turret, when the stop rod comes down, it's going to bear against the highest stopping point on my turret. We'll make one pass. Then we'll come to the lowest point, this one, make a second pass. Base of the router on my pencil line. Got another pass to go, need to turn the turret. Second verse, same as the first. Excavate out the dust. And there's our mortise cut from layout line to layout line, without me having to crane my neck and look down in there. It's so much easier to use these lines that are marked out here on the leg, indicating the base of the router, rather than look down in there to see where that stops. We're always going to do the mortise first before the tenet, in a mortise and tenet joint. And then later we'd make the tenet to fit the mortise. On your tenet, large variety of ways we can do this. You can cut them on the table saw, the router table, cut them by hand, you can use a bandsaw. What we really wanted to cover here was making the mortise because that's really the tricky part of the joint is getting that correctly routed with our starting and stopping points using the plunge router, taking advantage of the fence and the turret. And this provides you the technique so that you can make mortises like this in your shop. I'm going to show you a really easy to make jig that you can make in your shop. It's going to come in handy, anytime you want to use a router to cut parts to length. And we'll talk about why you'd want to do that. Use the router for dados, lots of cool things you can use this for. Before we get that far, let's talk about this router for a second. When we were doing depth of cut on fixed base routers, I talked about this configuration, and now I can show it to you. We've got threads cut into the router motor, a ring that when I turn that, advances up those threads or down the threads, changing the position of the base, which then in turn, changes our depth of cut on the router. We can also release it so we can do our bit changes. So I just wanted to take a second to show you that other style of base that I had talked about earlier. Now let's look at this jig. Couldn't be simpler. We've got a fence. That's going to act as a straight edge for our router to ride on, base of the jig. I want to make that out of something thin, quarter inch plywood, quarter inch MDF, quarter inch hardboard. What has to happen before we do anything with this jig is we got to make a cut. So where we're at right now is that the distance from the edge of the fence to the edge of our base exceeds the distance from the edge of the router base to the cutter. And our first official act is going to be to cut through that face. Let me get my jig clamped in place. And I'm going to reduce my depth of cut a little. We've only got to go through quarter inch stock. Now you may have noticed we've got a spiral cutter in there. We'll talk more about that. Following our same rules of the road because they are habit forming, feeding left to right, start the router on the jig, shut it off and let it come to a stop before you take it off the jig. Here's what that gives us. The distance now from the edge of the fence to the edge of the base exactly equals the distance from the edge of the router to the cutter. As a result, we have to mark this, so that we know how we set it up. This is for the DeWalt router and it's for a half inch bit. Because if we go to a quarter inch bit or a 5/8 or a three quarter, it changes this dynamic, this edge would no longer be in the right spot. Why do we want this? How do we use it? What's the dealio? Here's what we got. Big piece of melamine, wider than I could cross cut on my table saw with a miter gauge. Certainly can't cut this on my miter saw. But I need to cut it to length. So let's get a couple marks on here. I want to cut this off by that much. I could draw a straight line and use a circular saw, melamine is pretty chippy stuff. We're not going to get great cut quality out of a circular saw. This is where our jig pays off. The way we use it, is, the edge of the jig gets clamped right to where we want to make our cut. And we'll fix that in place. Set to the line on this side. Now we're going to do this in a couple passes. I'm taking off about a half inch worth of wood, same size as the bit. So I don't want to skin off that much material all in a single pass. I'm eyeballing my depth of cut. I'm set right now for about half the thickness of my material, that's a great starting point. Then we'll go all the way through to finish. Now don't disturb that fence position. A couple of things are cool about this. It's possible you don't take enough off. In other words, if as I'm feeding, I pull off the fence, I'd have a little high spot here. All I have to do, as soon as I realize that, is come back and cut again and it'll eliminate that high spot. As long as I ride on the fence, going to get a good edge. The other thing that's cool is cut quality. I'm running a spiral carbide cutter. We don't have to do spiral, but it does give you really good cut quality. Look at that nice sharp, crisp edge that was produced on that melamine. Another thing that's nice about this jig is let's say I need to cut a piece like this at an angle. So instead of doing this, I could position the jig like this and use this to cut this to an angle. Shallow up my depth of cut, do this out here someplace, I'm making a dado or a groove. You can make these jigs as long as you need to depending on what work you're trying to do. So it's a very simple shop made jig, very effective way to use the router as a cross cut tool to cut large pieces like this, solid wood plywood, whatever it is, down to size, make sure that you're making those cuts in small increments, so we're not overworking the bit or the router, and what you'll find, is you're going to end up with great cut quality, like I got here in the melamine. Sign making is one of the funner things we can do with a handheld router. This is going to be different from anything you've seen before. No ball bearing on the cutter, no fence on the cutter. We're going to do it freehand with a little bit of help. Let's talk about bit selection first. Pretty commonly for sign making, we're going to use one of these two profiles. This is a V bit, these are core box bits. With V bits, they come in different angles. They also come in different diameters. The steeper the angle, the deeper the V we can get. Bigger diameter, bigger V we get. With our core box bits, instead of leaving a V-shaped bottom, they're going to leave a rounded, a coved bottom. As these change in diameter, similar to the V bits, it's going to make us have a larger letter or smaller letter. So you just want to experiment with those styles. Match them up to what it is you're trying to do. Now, little help, because I have found, at least with my penmanship, if I try to write letters on this piece of cedar and then copy them, writing the letters is really the weak link. So instead using the computer, I printed out letters. Next thing we'll do is glue this down to our work. And I'm just using a little bit of rubber cement for this. You can use a spray adhesive. There are a handful of different options. Position the letters where you want them. Now, while that's drying, let's talk about our router selection. This is a great thing to do with a plunge base router because we can enter the work, make our cut, exit, enter, work, exit, and I've already got my depth of cut set on that machine. I'm going to clamp instead of using my no skid pad. Because like doing a dado or a groove, we've got pretty good pressure against this. I want to make sure it stays still. All right, now, here's my recommendation. It's not a good idea to do this in two passes cause it's really hard to freehand cut identically twice in a row. So what we really want to do here is get this right on the first try. I'm set for about a quarter inch depth of cut. That's going to be the final depth of my letters when we're all done here. And the key to this is to just try to use the lower parts of your arms, not your shoulders, but, forearms, elbows, wrists, to control this movement. Rather than doing big body movements. Cause that's going to make it difficult to control. So I'm really going to try to just lock up my shoulders and do this with forearms and wrists right here. The A gives me an opportunity to talk about something here. When you're cutting, and now we've got to do the crossbar in that A, I don't want to leave the router running, come back up the A and hit the crossbar. Cause if I wander a little bit from my first path, we're going to see that. It's better to come out of the cut, come back over the crossbar, plunge again, cut the crossbar, exit. So it's back to this idea of don't try to cut the same path twice any place because you're probably not going to get it identical each time. When you're first warming up with this, do the straight lines first, then go back and do the circles because between the two straight lines are easier. So I'm going to do A, W, W, then come back and do the curves in the G and the O. Let me get the paper off of there and do a little bit of cleanup, and you'll be able to have a look at what our sign looks like all finished. Once the glue was dry with the paper off of there, did some sanding, cleaned that up. There's an example of the kind of work you can do. Take some practice, do some practice signs, before you're ready to make one for a birthday gift, but it's pretty cool with the free hand cuts, has a nice free hand look to it, printing this out on the computer goes a long way toward making this come out more uniformly. Make sure you're in a plunge router, give this a try. It's a really cool technique to do with your handheld router. Fluting is an operation where you're using a core box bit, I'll show you that in a second. We're going to run a channel up this board three times in order to get a decorative detail on the face. Core box bit, we looked at these with sign making, with a core box bit, router unplugged, we've got a cool rounded bottom on it. That's typically what's used for fluting. Different diameters of bit available. So you can change that depending on the scale of the work that you're doing. We need a plunge router. We need a fence on the router. I've already set the depth of my router to the correct depth for this operation, but let's set the fence. And the way I'm going to do that, I laid out on here center of flute, center of flute, center of flute. So next step going to bring my router down to meet the center mark, like that. And then I'm going to position my fence, like that. Lock my fence in place. Now, part of the challenge with this is, it would really good to stop consistently on all three of these so that the bottom end of the flute and the top end of the flute is the same. The way I'm going to make that happen is by putting a block here on my board. And I'm going to fasten that block in place with double face tape that end had a little bit of sawdust on it, so I'm not going to use it, cause it wouldn't be sticky. And the reason I'm doing this is it gives us a really distinct starting and stopping point. This is different from the mortise. On the mortise, when I just cut to the pencil line that I had put on my piece, that's fine, cause if the mortise is just a tiny bit oversized, it's not going to hurt anything. On these flutes, if I'm cutting to a pencil line and I overdo it or underdo it on one of the three or two of the three, it's going to be real visually obvious. So instead, put a block on here and now the base of the router will go against that block. Same thing on this end. Double faced tape is amazingly sticky stuff. And then we'll clamp all this in place. Okay. I think we're pretty well set to go. Some stuff you've already seen going on here before feed direction, while we have the fence on, is important. Also depth of cut, as I said earlier, is pre-set. Router's going to get turned on on our work, cut to the other end, shut it off, let it come to a stop. Now there are a couple of ways we could do this. I'm currently set at a given distance from the edge to the center of the flute. Based on that line I had on here. One way to do this now would be turn this board around, end for end, and make the identical cut from this edge. Can't do that with this particular router. I'll show you why, because on this side of the router the base is straight. On this side of the router the base is round. So the distance from the center of the collar to here is not the same as the distance from the center of the collar to here. So if I do this and make a cut, my starting and stopping points are going to be different. So instead I'm simply going to reposition my fence for each of the three flutes that I want. Unplug the router cause we're making adjustments. Center on my pencil, my chalk line. With the blocks on here, one thing to watch out for is sawdust. If this looks like this, there's a big pile of sawdust in front of that block. When I come here with my router base, I'm going to hit this, instead of this. So we want to clear that out. Make sure we have good contact with the wooden step All right, let's see how this looks with the blocks off. Well, face tape works great. Works really great. A little bit of sanding to get the fuzz off of there. And that's going to look really nice. A real common approach to this would be to then take another walnut block, cause we're working with walnut here, cut that to fit at the bottom, that's called a plinth block at the bottom, probably a little chamfer across the top of that. This could be the side of a mantle that you're making to go around your fireplace. Simple procedure, core box bit, plunge router, fence, simple layout. And you'll be fluting in your shop in no time, playing a lovely tune in your material. When you're using your handheld router and your skillsets go on and on and on, it's going to be important that you understand about guide bushings, which are also called template guide bushings, for your router. This is an example of a guide bushing. What happens is that this will fit into the bottom of a router. It'll drop right into the base. So what's the deal with this? Well, we've talked about guiding router bits with the bearing on the bit. We've talked about guiding routers using a router fence. Sometimes neither of those options works. So then a guide bushing, or template guide bushing, might be the answer. For instance, this is a template or a comb off of a dovetail jig. And the way this gets used is that when the guide bushing is in the bottom of the router, that's going to allow the router to follow these fingers and make the cuts. This is an application where a bearing router bit doesn't really work. Can't use a fence. So the guide bushing is a good answer for this. Now with guide bushings, there's been kind of a default style out there for a while which is this style of guide bushing. A lot of people call it a Porter-Cable style guide bushing, they were the ones that really got this going. And what you'll find with your router, this is not a Porter-Cable router, but Bosch makes an adapter that goes into their base that will then accept the Porter-Cable style guide bushing. So you're going to have to look at your particular router and what the setup is to determine what kind of guide bushing you need to get. I could alternatively get Bosch specific guide bushings for this router. Then I wouldn't have to use the adapter. So there are a bunch of different ways to skin this cat. Let me show you one of my favorite guide bushing gizmos and why I like using these things. I've got a piece here of melamine that could be a cabinet carcass side. And one of the things I'd probably want to have in that cabinet carcass are holes for adjustable shelves. And that's what this jig is for. It's got a series of holes in it which oddly enough are the same size as a 5/8 inch guide bushing. So here's how this plan comes together. Guide bushing goes in and it's going to get locked in with a neural knob that's going to go right back onto these threads. And we have to do this work with the router unplugged of course. When you tighten that neural knob, no pliers, no wrench, just as tight as you can get it, finger tight. And there's our neural knob right there on the top. I've already set my depth of cut. What's going to happen is we position our shelf drilling jig right where we want it. And this is going to allow me to drill uniformly-spaced holes for adjustable shelves. A couple of things are great about this particular jig. Instead of doing this on the drill press it's great doing it with a router, these shelf holes, because a router runs at 20, 23000 RPM, very high speed, with that good sharp quarter inch bit in there, you'll see it's gonna make a really clean hole even in this melamine. Much nicer than I would get off a quarter inch drill bit in a drill press, much more consistent results certainly than I would get from drilling by hand. Once the jig has made, the repeatability from it is really good. Here's how it works. Let's have a look at those holes we punched. Nice and clean, even in that relatively delicate melamine face. That entry hole looks great. This is just one application of template guide bushings. So really good to know about. Good to keep in mind so that as you get into projects and you're looking for an alternative way to guide a router when a fence won't work, when a bearing on a router bit won't work, template guide bushings might just be the answer.