(jazzy music) Marc:Hi, I'm Marc Spagnuolo from TheWoodWhisperer.com. Now in this month's Wood Whisperer column I discussed routers and some of my favorite tips and tricks that I like to use in my shop. Now honestly these are really just things that I wish I knew when
I first started routing, would have saved me a
whole lot of heartache. One of the coolest things that I learned about routing was the
use of a flush trim bit. They come in all different
shapes and sizes, but really they're all
based on the same principle. Let's take a close look
at some of the ones that I have on hand, and then later on I'll even show you how I use a pattern bit to create these keepsake boxes that I'm making for the holidays. Here are four bits that
I have in my collection. The basic anatomy is the same from one to the other. They've got two blades and a bearing. The bearing is in perfect alignment with that blade so that as that bearing rides across a guide or
some sort of pattern, the blade is able to trim
any excess material away. The key difference between these, you'll notice the first
three are all the same. This one is slightly different. The bearing is located closer to the shaft on this one. Typically when I shop for these I notice that they'll
call this a pattern bit, but these three are called
the more generic name which is the flush trim bit. So keep an eye out for that. The other thing to look for is whether the blades are straight or whether they're at an angle. This is a little bit more expensive, this particular bit, but it gives you a cleaner cut because you're cutting at this slightly-skewed angle just like when you skew a hand plane, or you buy a helical head for a planer or a jointer. If you're wearing socks, prepare for them to be knocked off because this is the bit to rule them all. This is one that I picked up at the William Ng School and has a lot of cutter heads at
a very severe angle here. This helical-style head on this thing is going to trim just about any hard wood no matter how gnarly, no matter how hard, and you're going to get
a pretty darn clean cut even on end grain here. This is not cheap, but very sexy. As a quick example, let's say we wanted to cut a nice curve using this template into this block of eight quarter cherry. I'm just going to attach the template to the eight quarter using
some double stick tape. There are a number of ways
you could handle this. One example would be to use a pattern bit with a handheld router and just run it along this way. You could also take a
standard flush trim bit, put that into a router table. Let's pretend that's my router table, and you'd be able to
run it along this way. If all you have is a pattern bit, you can even put that in the router table, flip the work piece over, and you could run it along like so. Over the years I've accumulated a lot of these little quarter
inch plywood templates just for various different projects. I always hold onto them,
label them with the date, what the project was. Even if I don't ever
make that project again some of these things really come in handy like this nice curve is
perfectly symmetrical. It worked great on that project, but you know what? It comes in handy for a
lot of other things too. Here's another example. This is a big leg template that I used to make these big armoire
legs a couple years ago. The idea here is you would take this on a very large eight
quarter piece of material I would use the template, draw the shape onto the leg with a marker or a pencil. I'd take it over to the band saw, trim off the excess, and then I go back to the router table. I double stick tape the template onto the work piece, and then I use one of my flush trim bits to clean up the extra material. It's a great way to get perfect copies. When you need to make
four of these things, you need perfect copies. A template is the way to go. I'm making a bunch of these little keepsake boxes
here for the holidays, and I've got a secret little lock here, a little pin that locks it in place, and the lids slides off
on a nice little dovetail. But what I want to show you guys today is how I create the little
cavity on the inside. I use a pattern bit and a handheld router to do that. Let's jump in. I've got a piece of scrap here, and I'll show you exactly how I do it. I'm going to use my little
circle template here to trace a circle onto the surface. Now I'm going to go
over to the drill press and use a Forstner bit to clean out the bulk of this material. (drilling sound) I've got a pattern bit
mounted in my router here, and you'll notice that the bit itself is not really going to be long enough to go all the way down. We're not going to get
the full depth out of it. So a cool trick is to
go as far as you can, bring the bearing even with the template, and go around as far as you can. That will create, I
would say, three-quarters of the depth that we need. Then you can plunge down
a little bit further, and now the bearing will ride on the wood, and the wood will serve as the guide for the rest of the cut until we get to the depth that we need. It's a two-step process, but it works really well. Let's jump in and start hogging away some of this material. (drilling sound) As you can see what we've done so far is we've cleaned out the
bulk of the material. We've got about a quarter
of an inch roughly to go here so we're going to lower the bit in the router. We're going to clean out
the rest of the material, and now the bearing is going to ride on the wood itself. (drilling sound) We can remove the template and you can see what we're left with is a nice, smooth, even hole. There's a little bit of
burning here and there, but that can be fixed with a little bit of sandpaper. As you can see, flush trim bits are just one of the reasons that the router is one of the most versatile multitaskers in our shops. Hopefully you'll be able to take some of those tips and
tricks from the column and what you saw here today apply it to your shop and
make some great things. Thanks for watching. (jazzy music)
