How to Make a Poor Man's Hand Router | Paul Sellers

A lot of you have asked whether we could show how to make the poor man's router so this will be a very fast short video for you I've got a piece of pretty rough three inch wide material, it's an inch and a quarter thick it could be thinner this is just three coarse it depends on how much you're going to use it for a particular task we used it on the workbench and that's where the request has come most from so I'm going to take this piece of wood I'm doing it sideways normally I would put it in the vice this way and bore through but I'm going to go this way so that you can see what we're trying to do I need a brace and bit but I could just as easily use a drill driver, a screw gun or whatever, now I'm going to use a half inch chisel for this, which is this one here so I'm going to use a half inch chisel so I'm going to make my whole three-eighths of an inch and that will give me enough bite on the walls of the hole to hold the chisel securely in the wooden stock, so now here we want to bore a hole somewhere in the middle like this and roughly the angle needs to be between somewhere between 30 degrees 35 degrees and 45 degrees so if you want to you can set something on here that's 45 so I would get my position that way so I'm just under 45 and then I bore my hole, but I'm going to start higher up like this just to get my brace boring in position there, now I've got in the middle of a knot here so that slowing me down a bit so somewhere under 45 will work and don't worry about it breaking through on the other side you're going to have to go all the way through this is very boring if you're not doing it pull the shavings back out with the auger now we're going to take this chisel and we're going to tap this into the hole so like this eyeball, you can go anywhere between the sixteenth of an eighth and an eighth wider and then just eyeball it as you go so that you're going down the center of the hole, look at it from the other side you don't want to hammer in to your bench almost certain it's going to break out on this on the side is most likely going to break out I'm through and that I usually just break off this area here with a second chisel but don't run into your other chisel just take off those high spots there this is coming in behind the chisel so that doesn't really matter too much and I've got a piece of work that I've been working on here but we can set this now to the depth, once it's gone through the hole is usually quite easy to adjust so I'm not quite down to the hole so I tap here keep going till you got the depth set pretty close and there is my poor man's router fully, fully functioning and it works as well as any router and if I want to adjust this I tap here like this, that retracts the cutting iron of a chisel so here's another one and it gives a very nice finish on the bottom of this hole and they can go into the corner here and just chisel this out like this So that's a poor man's router that's how you make one

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 1,019,160

Keywords: Paul Sellers, Woodworking, Hand Tool Woodworking, Poor Man's Router, router plane, router

Id: B_2a_FwjAgk

Length: 5min 1sec (301 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 10 2012