Overview of the PantoRouter

I first saw PantoRouter a couple of years ago and was really intrigued by what it does, how it does it, just the mechanism itself is really neat. The work it does is really neat. So I figured if I'm intrigued by this, I bet you're intrigued by this, and just would like to know more. That what I wanna do here is give you an overview of how the PantoRouter does mortise and tenon work, box joints, dovetails, just how it makes its cuts. So here's what we're gonna do, we're gonna do a real typical joint, leg to rail construction, maple, mortise and tenon joint. One of the things we need to know is the width of our rails. And we take advantage of that information by setting it here on this scale. And that's gonna lock in our position in this direction. Now we're going do mortises first. So one of the things we need is a piece of our leg material. And we're gonna locate the mortise on the center of the leg. We're gonna do that by just putting the leg stock on top of this block like this, and then allow this assembly to come down to it. Lock it in place. That centers us. Now of course if you want to be off-center, we could put a spacer and a leg in here and that'll change its position, so you don't have to be centered, you can change that. At that point, we're ready for a leg to go in. The position that we created here acts as a stop, that's gonna control the leg in that direction. Secure in the work to the bed. The acrylic stop that I just slid off, that can be used on the face of the fence here so that every leg that goes on registers against those so we know the legs are going in a uniform position consistent position, every time we put them onto the device here. Now, we're pretty well set, but we still need a couple things. We need to guide the router, and we need to know our depth of cut. Let's do depth of cut first. Very simple, I come over and kiss the router bit against the face of the material and then using the scale here, I set my depth of cut. Now for me, if I'm doing a three quarter inch rail, I'm going to do a quarter inch tenon. I like to make my tenons twice as long as they are thick, so a quarter inch tenon will be a half inch long. I over cut my mortises just a little bit, about a 16th of an inch. So I just set my depth of cut to 9/16ths. Now we're in pretty good shape except we don't want to freehand the mortise, we want to guide the mortise and this is really where the rubber meets the road with PantoRouter. This template right here is what does both our mortise work and our tenon work. And the templates are available in a variety of sizes, a variety of shapes. There's a lot going on here with the templates. The way it works is that the stylus here in the handle has a ball bearing on that end, the ball bearing goes into the slot, lock it in place, and now I bet you can visualize as I slide back and forth here, I'm going to get a cut on my leg that looks suspiciously like a mortise. So we can plug the router in and make this cut. Now dust collection on this device is great. I've intentionally left the dust shroud off because if the dust shroud's on, you don't get to see the cut. So we're not going to get good dust collection here because the basket is off but you're going to get the benefit of being able to see exactly what the router bit is doing. Cut all the mortises on all your legs. We're going to move right on to the rail here because I'm just doing onesie twosie to show you how this works. So you would do all your mortises while this setup is set up, then what we're going to do is I'm going to swap cutters, put in a different diameter bit and I'm going to talk about, well, how do I know how to swap cutter? How do I know what to do next? We'll work through that once we have our tenon material in the jig. I did a bit change, now one might say, how do what size bit to use? Look at the chart in the owner's manual and it takes you through all of the variables, all the parameters of we're doing this size tenon, we use this size bit and this size bearing over here that's going to follow our pattern. So all that information is provided in the owner's manual. That's how I know where I'm going here. So we're ready to do our rails, all our mortises are done. The rail stock comes in, fence is in exact same position. That's part of what gives us great repeatability here. So push against the fence, lock our material. Now remember how we centered on the leg, we do the same thing here, we take a piece of our rail material, use that block, that stop. That'll get us on center. What's our other parameter? How deep are we going to go? We're gonna kiss the end grain of the material, come here. Now I want a half inch tenon length to go into my 9/16ths mortise. Now here's a really, really cool and important part of this. Looking at the template, it's got a little bit of an angle to it. This is crazy clever. So when the ball bearing is here, and rides that template, when I'm all the way here, I'm at the largest part of the angle, which means I'm going to get my biggest possible tenon. When I cut here, I'm at the downside, the downhill side of the angle, which means I'm going to get a smaller tenon. So we're going to start here, see if we get a fit or not. If not, we can adjust the bearing, the stylus in this direction, and micro adjust the size of the tenon until we get the perfect fit. One of the things that's neat about this is that our work is not dependent on the thickness of our test pieces. So depending on what technique besides this, you might use to cut tenons. In many cases, the resulting tenon is very dependent on the thickness of your material. In this case, doesn't matter. This is a pantograph, there's about a two to one difference from the following, that I'm doing here, what the stylist sees, to the cut that's being made over here. And that's why this looks so long relative to the resulting work. So a lot of talking, here's the action. Follow the instructions in the chart. Now what's neat about this is you've probably heard about climb cutting, which is one we feed in the same direction as the rotation of the cutter. Doing stuff hand doweled, it's nearly impossible to do safely because it's easy for the router to get away from you. The benefit to it is that, especially if we're working on a chippy material, climb cutting gives us really good cut quality. It's one of the things that we can manage easily here just because of the mechanics of the way the PantoRouter works. So I'm going to climb cut a tenon here, and the result is going to be a really nice clean shoulder all the way around that tenon. That's pretty cool. Now before I take this piece out and test it, I want to know that the next rail piece that comes in is located in the exact same position, left to right. In order to make that happen, what I'm going to do is kiss the router bit against the end grain and there's another stop I can use here. So you'll see when the next rail comes in, that's going to provide my stop point for my material. Alright, see what we have. A mortise and tenon, and as I expected, the tenon is a little bit too big, I want that to slip in there with hand pressure, not going to happen. So here's what we do. Ride the fence. Kiss against the end of that router bit, that locates me left to right. Lock our material. Now in this case, I'm going to bring the stylus and the bearing out. So I'm using a narrower part of the angle. And go again. Alright, let's do one more sneak out, get that tenon just a little bit smaller. Now we're cooking with ethyl. Once we have that setting, once we have that ready to go, now you're ready to do all your rails. Now here's what I'm gonna do. Change my setup just a little bit, we're going to come back and look at double tenons. So let me do a couple changes here at the machine and then we'll have a look at how that works. Wider rails should get a double tenon setup instead of one big tenon. So you can imagine how those mortises get cut, following the same protocol. I'm going to show you how the tenons get cut. First thing I've got a wider rail, so I need to move this scale accordingly. Once again, that acts as my stop, I'm going to use the router bit like we did before to control my left to right position. And then when you look at the head of the machine here two tenons, so instead of one big template on here, I've got two small templates, two small patterns. Same thing, we're just going to ride the outside of those. And if you put on your thinking cap and use your imagination, you can see how these are going to result in two tenons on the end grain of our material. Pretty cool. Now let's get gee-whizzier. Angled tenons. Now I'm single angling, we could put an angled shim between the fence on the board and compound angle. Because we're introducing an angle, I got to change my setup just a little bit. And we are ready to go on a double tenon at a 10-degree angle. Pretty neat. So mortise and tenon. Now, again, use a little imagination. You can see how if this template was on our fence, and we follow that with a stylus, we would get box joints. There are also other shapes available. So conceptually we're going to use the same idea over and over again, the stylus is going to follow a pattern, the router bit's gonna make the cut, and we're going to get the fit that we want in the resulting joint. So there's your overview on a PantoRouter, pretty neat tool, and really capable of a lot of different types of joinery.