Essential Router Skills - Tips, Tricks and Buying Advice

nothing cats Moses and today we're gonna talk about routing [Music] routers are one of the most versatile tools in the shop they really can be used for so many different purposes today I wanted to talk about some tips and tricks as well as sort of some beginner skills and expert techniques that are gonna help you get the most out of them I recently did a video where we built this ultimate router jig here that video will be linked below and right here we're giving one of them away so it's a great way to get even more out of your router so let's go ahead and get started we're going to talk about the types of routers and what they're used for routers like I said come in all shapes and sizes here we have a beast of a router 3 and a quarter horse plunge base this is a Bosch cult fixed base a lot of these smaller quarter inch collet routers come with lots of different accessories this Bosch colt has more accessories than just about anyone on the market which is one of the reasons I think it's such a great router for the beginner these big boys here can take the place of these but they can be very powerful and very heavy sometimes I find lots of uses for these little guys even though I own two of these one in my router table and one here these come with both a quarter inch and eighth inch collet so you can still use all of your bits from this one as well as all the bigger quarter inch bits so routers can be used for many many things from mortise and tenon edge guides circle cutting jointing flattening slab they can be used for routing templates when you want to do repeatable table legs or chair legs really the uses are endless so let's talk about how to use them routers that are upright are always going to spin clockwise as you can see by this arrow most routers will have an arrow on them in a router table when it's upside-down it's going to spin counterclockwise now there's two types of cuts conventional and climb conventional is what you're going to use 99% of the time and that's when you push against the router bit and just like a table saw a table saw blade is spinning towards you you're gonna push through the cut now this is where reading grain comes into play now here on this piece of mahogany you can see the grain is going this way off the board and so if you were to route like this that bit is going to want to reach under those fibers grab them and that's when you get tear out so that's when you'd want to flip this piece over and route so that the grain was falling off and you were severing it this way the very very rare times that you would use a climb cut is if you had to route this way let's say you had a piece that was built and you were doing a round over on the edge and there was just absolutely no way to flip it over and route the other side then what you would do is you would route it down not to its complete depth and then when you had you know just a tiny tiny smidgen left you could do a climb cut sometimes with difficult grain a climb cut is your only option but 99% of the time you're gonna use conventional routing another thing that makes routing on a router table much safer is safety pins and now I also included these in the router jig I just built the previous video there are safety pins included it's a mobile router table that you can flip over and now with a safety pin what you would do if you needed to do let's say you were flush trimming or doing a roundover what you would do is support your board on the safety pin and then move it into the cut like this and that gives you more support so that when you touch your board for the first time you're not just out the open and it could do all sorts of crazy stuff push cutting gives you a lot more control on a router and the reason that climb cuts are considered more dangerous and used much less frequently is when you're going with the way that a router bit is spinning it can pull it out of your hand and send it shooting off into the abyss so when you're cutting make sure you do conventional cuts go against your router bit and always take small passes on a router just because this 45 degree chamfer bit has this much cutting capability doesn't mean you would ever want to do that if I wanted that entire chamfer I would probably do this in four or five passes going up by about a quarter to half an inch at a time depending on whether I had a Beefcake router or a smaller poem router like this one another great little trick when you're thinking about grain direction and you're doing an edge profile is that almost certainly when you're doing the end grade side and coming off the long grain the long grade side is going to tear out so when you're doing edge profiles you always want to start with your end grain then go long grain end grain and finish with long grain and that's going to ensure you don't tear out there's lots of depth adjustments on routers there's macro and micro adjustments on all of these plunge routers you have the ability to go down by hand and then what you can do is use something like the stop on a router which is going to stop it right there and if you need to just go a little bit deeper you can unplug it here and close that up and that's a micro adjustment on that one routers like this triton router here have the same type of adjustment where you go down like that and then they have a micro adjust here where you can do very small fractions they all have stop guides here like this one which are great for when you're trying to get a mortise to the exact depth or a tenon cheek cleaned up to the exact depth those are great there's several different types of cutting when you're using a router there's fixed and free and freehand would be like in the abalone butterfly key video where I was cutting out for the butterfly key before I used my chisels it would be for like roughing out an area and basically you get real close to your material keep both hands on it and kind of go close to your line as you feel comfortable doing there's lots of ways to do fixed routing where you line it up with a certain direction now on my router jig template that I did there's an edge guide here or you can lock it up for a mortise another way to do a fence is to clamp a piece of wood directly onto your board now the great thing about most routers some have a square edge but most of them are round and so when you clamp a board there as long as you're the right distance away from your fence you're always going to be in the same place because it's equal distances all the way around this is another great example of an edge guide this is for the bosch colt and it has a really cool micro adjust feature on it where you can just dial in your piece just so it can get exactly where you need it to be now when you're using edge guides like this one for the Triton it has two pieces that are very wide here which I hate because when you get to the end of the board and as a tendency to come off and tilt so what I like to do is screw a piece of scrap plywood to it which gives you a completely flat edge all the way across it allows you to you really keep your board in the correct location without a lot of work another great trick for routing in a fixed location if you needed to cut a groove or a dado like we did in the Moxon vais video and you'll see in the motsek advice video I use an edge guide but if it was in the middle of a piece where you couldn't get an edge guide you can take two pieces set them at exactly 90 degrees and then on a scrap piece of wood you can take your router run it through with a straight bit and that'll give you exactly where that straight get bits going to be as long as you know this is 90 degrees and then you could make a mark of where you want your groove and you could line that cut up I think I saw Dustin Penner do it once I'll link the video where he does another way to use a router in a controlled manner is through bushings and they're great because you can just follow any pattern you want and use a bushing so let me take you in here here's a pattern that I used for the Nakashima shops tool I did some really great template routing in there in fact when I was talking about earlier about uphill versus downhill this was a really tricky one because one of these would route uphill one would be downhill and so we need to keep flipping the piece over and using different bearings and this is the one for my boss call what you would do is you would take a bushing and this is one with an inside diameter of a quarter-inch an outside diameter of 5/16 so you can calculate exactly where it is you need your piece to be you would insert it in your router here use one of these screw on cones and screw that on and then one of the things you could use that for is for edge joining you could take a straight edge and put it right on top of your board so that your bearing would ride on the straight edge and give your piece of very straight edge it'd be a great way to joint a board the other thing that these are great for is for inlay you can do some really really cool things by hand using patterns and different size diameter bushings so for example if you were using an eighth inch bit with an outside diameter of five sixteenths you could then calculate what bushing you needed to cut the negative and positive of that shape and in lamb so let's talk about the different kinds of bits you can use there's basically two types of bits and that's bearing guided and non bearing guided and then it breaks down to different categories from there there's lots of different edge profiles these are all round overs these are all radius it's we have chamfer bits slot cutting bits flush trim bits and those are all bearing gibe it's a little trick for baring guided bits is always make sure that your bearing is tight if that screw comes off in the middle of a pass with your router you will ruin your piece there's then non guided bearing bits like these straight bits which very rarely are used freehand almost always if you're using a non bearing guided bit you're gonna be using some sort of a fence or an edge guide now when you're buying bits one thing I highly recommended is buy a cheap set like this and then only replace the ones you use I feel like people have a tendency to just buy lots of things that they don't need so what I like to do is buy something like this I think I picked this whole set up for like a hundred bucks it's a quarter inch collet router bit set this is the eighth inch collet so you could see the difference in size there but here are some of the bearings that I've replaced that I use on a regular basis from these kits that's a chamfer 45-degree bit which is bearing guided lots of different flush trim bits from you know little ones like this for doing small areas bigger ones and then this beast of a bit this is by far my favorite bit it's probably more expensive than all of these put together this is a white side double bearing bit and this is so amazing it cuts in both directions both up and down it's got a bearing on the top a bearing on the bottom both of those can be removed so when we talked about the uphill and downhill example you could route the the downhill way and then flip the piece over and route the downhill way going the other way this is amazing bit it's about a hundred and seventy bucks I'll put a link down in the description but if you're gonna buy any flush trim bit this is a great one they also have one for a quarter inch collet that's really really good this is another inexpensive set that I got for my quarter inch router as you can see some of them I've really just used and abused like this straight bit here this flush trim bit the fact the bearings frozen on that and those are all the ones that I've replaced another great style of bit are these spiral up cut and down cut bits these are just the best when it comes to straight bits they're great at removing material and also getting waste out of the hole so I use these a lot from mortises were for cutting small lines or if I needed to cut out like a circle something where I'm going to completely remove material I'll use these because they really are great at cutting quickly and getting material out of the way this is a centering cone and this is what you use when you put on bushings it can fit in both 1/8 inch collet and a quarter inch collet and the way it works is you put it in your car and bring it straight down so that your base plate is completely centered and that will allow you to screw on your bushing and know that it's in the direct center of your router so when it comes to purchasing routers and also bits I have two pieces of advice for you one obviously buy the best one that you can afford this Triton router is an incredible full-sized router because it already comes with a router lift built-in you can save money and put it in a table or this colt is a great router for a smaller size because it comes with so many accessories it's really powerful for years I got it all done with the router like this comes with all kinds of accessories you can buy it with the fixed and plunge base in a kit you can get edge guides for it you can get bushings for it it does everything that this does except for it lacks the same amount of power both of these have variable speed and I can highly recommend these two here when it comes to router bits my advice is the exact opposite start with a cheap set like this one and then replace the router bits that you wear out or that you use all the time a set like this is the cost of two nice router bits and so there's no point in trying to buy a bunch of different router bits and something you don't ever use and then you can get router bits that suit your workflow so I'm kind of to sum it all up get the best router you can replace the cheap bits with expensive bits that you need rout with the grain go downhill and go slow above all else stay safe in the shop have a wonderful day

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 2,177,576

Keywords: router, woodworking router tips and tricks, woodworking, skills, router basics, wood router, router table tricks, router tips, router tricks, using a router basics, using a router to round edges, using a router for beginners, tricks, routers, woodworking router, router 101, trick, palm router review, best router for woodworking, router bit basics, router plane, router review, which wood router should i get, router trimmer review, easy router table

Id: 2YaHMNeZrDc

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 26 2018