Make Quality Doors Session 3: Raising Panels

There are a variety of ways to make raised panels here on the router table. And we're gonna take you through three of those methods. One is using what's called a vertical panel razor. This offers some benefits. It doesn't have the large diameter that we're gonna look at in the next couple of bits. So as a result we don't have to worry about the low RPM idea. We're gonna talk more about that later. It also doesn't take anywhere near the horsepower to run that our bigger diameter bits are gonna offer. So why would I use this? Maybe if you don't have a variable speed router in your router table, you don't have a large router in your router table, large being 12 amp and bigger. This is a bit that you can do raised panels with. Router unplugged, we'll get this chucked up. All right, for altitude, this is pretty forgiving on our setup. What we do wanna do is make sure that we get the bottom of the cutter below the surface of the table. So this is looking good. Something like this would be a problem Vertical panel razor, so what that means is that our panel, oddly enough is gonna feed pass the bit vertically like this. What we need to do is control depth of cut. So that one, we're only taking a little bit off at a time. Two, we end up with a tongue on the edge of this panel, that'll fit into the groove that we have already created in the previous step. You're always gonna make your doorframes before you make your door panels. This is one of the reasons for that. I'm gonna bring my fence forward some more and like always I'm gonna lock one end, pivot the other. And I'm just looking here at how much material per pass. In other words, how much is the carbide projecting past the face of the fence here. And setting that so that on my first pass, I'm removing about an eighth inch or so of material. When we do our cuts and this doesn't matter, which of our panel razors we're gonna use, we always wanna do the end grain cut first, followed by a long grain cut. The reason for that is, when we do end grain we're probably gonna get a little bit of chipping here when we do the long grain cut next it'll remove those chips. So that sequence of events is always true with panel razors and really in general, always true with routers. All right, that looks good. You wanna make sure that, you've got a push block of some kind, we've got a rule that you never wanna have your hand pressing over a cutter. And that would be nearly impossible to avoid with this operation. So we have to use a push pad to keep our hand away from that bit. Here's what pass number one then is gonna look like once our router's plugged in. the chipping I talked about earlier, For the sake of our lesson here I'm just gonna work on two edges of our panel. Now that we've got this cut made we're ready to move the fence back. Each time that we moved the fence back we're taking a little more material off the face. Again, we have to worry about how much material we're leaving here, going for the point where that edge is gonna fit into the groove in the frame. I'll move the fence back about another eighth of an inch and same operation. Two passes done. We've still got a ways to go, but it's time to start paying closer attention to where we want to end up. We want our panel to slip right into the groove. So looking at this, I'm gonna estimate that I've got about nearly a quarter inch of wood left to take off of this face before these two parts will slide together. So what I'm gonna do as a setup trick here is I'm gonna trace the position of the fence onto the router table. That's gonna give me something to watch. I sure wanna make sure I don't take the fence too far back and then result in a lip that's too small, an edge that's too small. So watching those pencil lines, I'm gonna unlock this end and move back less than a quarter of an inch 'cause we wanna sneak up on our final pass. Loosen this end, watch that pencil line move back less than a quarter of an inch. It's very possible that to get all the way from start to finish on this, this could be anywhere from a four to a six pass operation to get this to slip in the way it should. Down to about another eighth of an inch. Repeat my process here. Pencil line, pencil line, move back, until you get your panel to slip into the groove. Now there's a couple of things going on here that we need to talk about. One is we've talked about the fit in the coped joint which is where I can slide this in with hand pressure but they're gonna stay stuck. That's not what I want here. I don't want these two pieces to engage. Solid wood panel needs to be completely free from the frame so that as it expands and contracts, it can float independently. If you've got pressure on here that might limit that ability to float which could lead to cracks in your panel. I'm looking at the front of our panel and the profile that we got. We have a significant step here on the front. Do you like how that looks? Maybe, maybe not. What could we do to diminish that? Well, in this case, we took all of our waste off the front of the panel. An alternative would be, we take limited passes from the front and then we use a different style of router bit maybe a cove cutter or a rabbiting bit to take material off the back until this slides into our groove. So in other words, work from the front until the profile looks how you want it to look. Take the rest of the material off the back until we fit into the groove. Or start with a thinner piece of wood. This is a piece of three-quarter inch stack. If we wanna diminish the size of the step if our panel was five eighths of an inch thick, instead of three quarter, the step on the frontier would be smaller, still allowing us to take everything off the front. Good news and bad news here. Good news is running this cutter very user-friendly. We can run it in virtually any router, regardless of the RPM qualifications or motor size of the router. One of the bad news things, and I think you'll see this as we work along here is cut quality. Think about the way this cutter is operating. It's spinning this way which means as it feeds pass our material, it's doing this. So as a result, there's a natural tendency for this bit to lift the material a little bit. When we go to our next cutters, they are gonna spin this way and result in a better surface quality. We also have a limited field here. We can only get this profile so big because of the nature of these cutters. With a horizontal panel razor, we can get that profile to be just a little bit bigger. Maybe that looks better for the scale of your project. So we'll compare those as we go here. It's just something to keep in mind as you're choosing which bit you're gonna use for your project. That takes care of our setup for a panel razor, we're ready to move on to some other panel raise and operations. Here's another approach to doing raised panels. In this case, I've got a horizontal panel razor more specifically, three wing. The profile of course, that we see here in the carbide is gonna get transferred to the face of your material. So there are a lot of different profiles of panel razors out there. Before I even think about putting this in the router, first thing I'm going to do, is reach into my router cabinet and lower the RPMs. It's very, very important that when we go to these large diameter cutters you take the time to lower the RPMs. We have to run these big bits at 10 or 12,000 RPMs. If you don't do that, it's very, very, very unsafe. Next thing, I wasn't ready for that board just yet. We can get the router bit in the collet. Now this is not unlike the vertical panel razor. It's just like it, but different, 'cause it's horizontal. What I mean is we're gonna have to control the depth of cut of the router bit in order to control the lip, the edge that we're leaving on the panel, getting it to a point where it's gonna just fit into the groove that we've already created in the frame of the door. So here's going to be my approach to this. I am getting my straight edge 'cause I wanna have a look at how much bit is currently above the table. And I can get a pretty good estimate just by seeing that the wings of the cutter are below the top of the table. So I know I'm not gonna overcut on my first cut. The highest part of the cutter is about a quarter inch above the table. Good spot to start. I'm gonna bring my fence forward, until the face of the fence is even with the face of the ball bearing. In the case a vertical panel razor we made a pass, moved the fence back, made a pass move the fence back. In this case, fence remains fixed. We'll make a pass, raise the bit, make a pass raise the bit, whittling away at our material until we get the profile we want and the fit that we want. Now, a couple of things are gonna sound different probably when I run this cutter, first off, when I first turn it on, you might hear the router ramp up to RPM and then kind of settled down. This is a function of what's called electronic variable speed on a lot of these machines. What happens is that I've set it at a given RPM the router has to kind of learn how much power to provide to keep this bit at that RPM. The other thing that you may find is that, as I'm cutting it might slow down for a second, then come back up to speed. Similarly there, what the router knows is that I've set it at 10,000 RPM. If it dogs down, it's gonna provide more amperage to bring it back up to 10. So you might hear some cycling going on here as the router kind of finds its happy place. We've got our rule where we're always gonna do end grain first end grain cut, long grain cut. I am gonna just do two sides again so that we can work through this process and check out this horizontal panel. So a little bit of cycling. There's where we're at so far nothing to really write home about. I'm gonna bring my cutter up, a little over a 16th of an inch. One full turn on this lift is a 16th, I went about a turn and a quarter. Now we're starting to get something. Now this is gonna change from profile to profile, as far as the look that I get here. I'm gonna do another pass, and then I'm gonna start to talk about other options here. I'm gonna add another 16th to my height. All right, 'cause here's what I wanna do. I talked previously about the concept of liking what you have on the front of the panel and then excavating, removing material from the back. That's the approach I wanna show you on this one, so we get all our bases covered here. This profile I'm gonna consider that done. I'm gonna take this bit out, get another bit in the router table, so I can show you this process of working front and back to get the fit you want. All right, I bet you can see where this is going. What I've done is put what's called a cove cutting bit in the router table and it is oddly enough, coving out the back of the panel here. So what we need to do is get material off the back until we can fit into the groove. At this point I don't have this bit set high enough to get us there. We'll do another pass. Now, before you're pointing it out to me in comments about this video, I am doing this the wrong way. I'm doing long grain and then end grain 'cause I only did two sides on this panel. Normally of course, raising a panel we'd be raising all four sides. So then end grain, long grain, end grain, long grain, including on this pass. But because I've only got two sides I'm doing long grain, end grain. So don't write me nasty letters later, I know I'm doing it wrong. Gotta raise the cutter just a little bit. Do this again, see where we're at. Almost, but not quite. Now we're slipping into our frame, got the latitude that I talked about earlier. So that, that slips in nice and easily. Now there's a very important aspect of this, which is what you're gonna wanna do when you use this approach is do test cuts and a piece of scrap, so that as we're sneaking up on this final cut you don't accidentally take too much material off. There's a very important aspect of those test cuts which is the material you're doing, the test cuts in it has to be exactly the same thickness as your panel, because this set up, to achieve this final thickness on the ends is thickness specific. So you do wanna make sure you've got a scrap board available for those cuts and it's the exact same thickness as your panel. The benefit to this approach is that we can get the profile that we like on the front relieve the back until we get the fit. The other thing that comes out of that is that it keeps the panel centered this way in our frame. In other words, the panel that we did earlier is gonna project very far toward the front of the frame while this one is gonna be more centered in the frame 'cause we have a little off the front and a little off the back. That takes care of this style of horizontal panel razor allowing us to move on to my favorite kind of panel raiser. This type of router bit is my favorite way to do raised panels. 'Cause I think it makes it very very simple to get everything right the first time. This is called a panel razor with back cutter, this being the panel razor, this being the back cutter. The distance between the two, is exactly the size we need to produce a tongue that will fit into a groove. So it makes this really easy to set up, really easy to use. First step, getting it in the router table, still got our router on low RPM from the previous cut. And I'm gonna check that to make sure 'cause we did run that cove cutter. So we'll have a look here in a sec. Yep, still good there. Now for our elevation, we have to do things a little bit differently because of the back cutter. We have to start with the bit at the right height. And here is a great way to get the bit at the right height. These frames that we made earlier have a quarter inch groove in them. This is a piece of quarter inch bar stock, I use this for setups on tools. Anything that's a quarter inch will fit in there. What we wanna do is project that groove out to where we can see where it corresponds to the cutter. So just doing this, I can't really get that material close enough to get a good reading between the groove and the cutter. But if I do this and I projected out like that what I want is for the bottom of that bar stock to scoot right over the top, right there right over the top of that carbide that's gonna be our setup. That goes away. We still have to control our depth of cut. We can't do this all in one pass, but in this case we'll control depth of cut with the fence location Now, open up the fence, so it can capture our cutter without touching it. And what I wanna do initially is find my last pass. We've done this before, this being locating the fence face of the ball bearing even with the face of the fence. Right there. That's where I wanna end up, it's not where I wanna start. So I'm gonna put a line on the table and a line on the table. I'm gonna work my way back to those. From that position, I'm gonna measure out, three eighths of an inch and, three eights of an inch, and bring the fence forward. Now here's the dealio with this. I'm running a three horse router in this table. So I'm gonna do this in two passes. Three horse would be a 15 amp motor. If you have a 12 amp motor in your table, I would do this in three passes. So then I would come out a half inch, I'd have a mark at a half, a mark at three eighths, and then our zero mark, so that we can do this in three swipes instead of two. My cut will be end grain, long grain, and again, you're probably gonna hear the router cycle a little bit as it finds its RPM, it finds its happy place and maybe cycle up and down a little bit as we get it under the cut. I'm sure you could see we're starting to form our profile on the front and our cove on the back, leading to that tongue that's gonna be the perfect fit for our frame. Go back to my pencil line and my pencil line for the final pass. Finished profile, that will scoot right into the frame of our door. So like I said, this is my favorite way to do raised panels because of this. We can scoot them right together. Now, if you wanna check the elevation of your bit here's what a lot of woodworkers and cabinet makers go for. And that is achieving the face of the panel to be even with the top of the frame. So in this case, I'm missing it a little bit here. What that means is that in this case, the height of my bit, my raised panel cutter could have been higher in the table by this much. So when I'm making doors, what I do is I set the height of the bit, then I do a test cut, just like we did here to see if this is right. If it's not, then increase or decrease the height of the cutter, do another test cut until we get the face of this in plane with the face of this. One of the benefits to that is that, if you're using a surface sander in your shop once the door is glued together, because the face of this aligns with the face of this, we can send everything through that sander to get it dead flat front and back. In this case, what I've got going, I wouldn't be able to send this through the sander because the back of my panel is so much higher than the back of the door frame. So it's a simple fix. We just have to do a correction on the height of the bit and then it would be just right. So the panel razor with the back cutter really simplifies achieving the fit that we want. And like I said, you just have to control height of the cutter, make sure you're doing it in multiple passes two or three swipes, so that we get good cut quality. And it's easy to make those cuts. Once you try this, I think you'll find like I did, that this really simplifies the panel raising process.