How to Safely use Routers and Router Tables

hi Tom Andrea's here today and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about routers and the first thing I want to tell you is that there really are three different sizes of routers that we use today the shop we use monstrous routers and this one's in the three horsepower range for really large profile bits and then there are some really nice handheld routers which are in the horse and a half range and then some of the new micro routers which are really really nice to use the first thing that I want to go over is how many different types of bits you can put in a router and there are just a huge array of profiles and that term profile is really kind of if you think about them if you ever get arrested and you take a picture straight on and then you take the picture of a profile which shows the shape of your face and so when you look at a router bit or a profile cutter really you're looking at the side edge of it and so in the in the literature you'll be referred using the term profile so if you want to get a profile for a particular type of edge there are so many different ways to look at it for example right here these are referred to as quarter rounds and they cut a really nice round over and they come in a radius and then there are different types of bits called OGIS and these go way back in human history and they cut some really cool-looking profiles and had some really neat architectural elements to your work and this is a little bit of a different type of OG and this then is a chamfer bit that you can set to a different depth and it just goes on and on and over here we've got the larger stuff that we would use in a in in like making a raised panel door or a flat panel door and these are the different cutters that you would that you would install to do this and then this is called a fly cutter right here very very strong rigid bit and that's why we have the three horsepower routers so really no end it seems like too the opportunity to to put a really fancy edge on a product when you select bits for your router they really come in two different arbor diameters and Ann Arbor is this shaft and I'm going to show you how to put them in the router bit they come in quarter inch and then they come in half inch and presently I'm really a fan of half inch routers even if I'm doing small work this the half inch router is a lot smoother and this particular smaller shaped one with the quarter inch Arbor works a lot better in the little micro cutters and it'll basically be surprised at how easy and effective it is to cut using a micro router with actually a pretty pretty large profile okay and one of the first things that I want you to be aware of is is how to install a bit in each router most all the new routers come with different Kaulitz and this is a quarter inch collet and I know this might drive some people crazy but I'm an old machinist and what machinists know is that if you really want for your to get maximum torque you need to utilize some lubricant on your threads and what that will do is it will help so that your threads don't actually bind as you as you torque them down and so what you can see is that this is triangular shape so that as it presses down on this collet it applies a pressure to the to the shank of the bit and so as this bit sits in the collet and we crank that down it has to wedge into the router truck or the column and so I'm going to go ahead and pull this down now one of the things that you need to kind of remember a rule of thumb is it we never pitch down where there's paint so if your router profile has paint you can kind of come to that edge the other thing is we don't want to bottom the bit out if we bottom the bit out it will tend to vibrate up and out no matter how tight you tighten it so we want to go to the bottom of the travel lift it up about a sixteenth of an inch and then go ahead and to cinch that down so when you go to tighten the collet you don't need a massive amount of pressure and so I like to use the wrenches in this type of a pattern like this right here and then when you get out to where your firm then you can squeeze the wrenches together with one hand and not two and that is really all that you need to do you don't want to run these things dry many many people will run the machine screws try and and you won't get the compression that you one against the shaft if if it's wedging and the steel won't slide on itself that's why you want to lubricate that collet and that tapered surface so that it can pull down in there and can apply maximum pressure to the shank of that bit I really recommend that when you begin to acquire a number of profile bits and different style bits that you consider getting one of these boxes that does such a great job of protecting the carbide surfaces on your bits carbide when it gets up against other carbide edges well fracture it's very hard but it's also brittle and so these boxes are from Rockler they come with half edge and porterage holes and so they just they just help you protect your bits while they're not in use something that I think will help you a lot as you do different router profiles on different size of pieces is if you'll go someplace where they're recovering some at some old carpeting and you can actually just use great big pieces of this on tops of your tables and if you if you put if you cover your table with this like I usually have four foot by eight foot pieces this is a four foot by four Vivi's you don't need to worry about marring anything that you're working on and what's really nice about it is if you're going to do some type of type of coding on your on your project it doesn't matter if you get that coating onto this rubberized surface but this rubberized surface provides a nice grip and and keeps it'll hold pieces so that you can go ahead and work with them utilize it at your routers so well the first thing that I want to show you is it on this router this is called the rubber ring and that rubber ring has to spin and it allows it to spin without burning the side of the piece of wood as the profile makes its cut so that rubber ring needs to follow along this edge the second thing is that we need to cut into the wood when we're doing that and so we want the bit rotating into the wood and forward cutting as it xs-2x is the wood and so we're always always always pushing against the direction of the profile bit now this little Bosch colt is a fantastic little router it's really designed for you to hold it right here on the rubber section and then your fingers can actually sit on the platform and so that will help you keep this stable as you go ahead and make the car all right now that went pretty well mostly because I didn't try to cut it all one time and so what I'm going to redo now is the debt and so I'll set it for the final pass I've lowered it so that we're going to take off the rest of the wood so normally you would have this monstrous router that you'd be trying to hold with two hands and here you've got this micro router using a relatively large profile bit and cutting an absolutely perfect profile in that piece of wood and so nowadays rather than use the big routers to do work like this almost all of the work that we do can be done with one of these little routers and they're also called laminate routers but they are fantastic for handling even relatively large profile bits that you would use in a router now I've switched over to my favorite D handle router and the D handle router is used to with a profile bed and and you're doing it freehand in other words you're not on a router table and to a lot of times there's a project like a like a tabletop a big tabletop and you just can't get that up on your router table it's which is normally what I would use to handle a bit of this type so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to adjust this bit so that we only really want to get this in about three passes I find that if you don't get it in about three passes that that you wind up running the risk of chipping and so one of the things I want to talk about a D handle router is it gives you a lot more control over this right here which will really foul it which will really foul up your profile if you if you get this to where it's rocking down here and this isn't running these two planes aren't right on top of each other the base and the wood then you your profile will not be it won't cut and you'll be very disappointed with it so what I'm going to do is show you how to utilize this this D handle router so that you can be more stable and keep the base plate right exactly in contact with the wood surface now you can see that if you that my bit didn't precisely follow right along this edge and so you're going to make that type of a mistake when you use it so I tell everyone that it's very common for you to always make two passes whenever your router in whether it's with a handheld router or whether you're on the router table so I'll go ahead and make that second pass now one thing to keep in mind is it if you're burning you're moving the router too slow and if you're chipping you're moving the router too fast those are kind of a general rule of thumb so the other thing that can be that you can adjust of course is the speed of the router itself and a lot of these have a variable speed on them this one doesn't you see their offer it's on and so the speed the burden speed has everything to do with your forward motion and like with all power tools it's really important to have a fixed velocity that you're moving along that cutting edge you can't you can't jerk and stop and go and stop and go or you're going to leave those tracks in the woods so I'm going to readjust this to take my second cut and remove some more material yeah now I don't know if you notice that technique but what I want you to observe that's going to improve the quality of your work is that as I use the D handle router I can hold this position and I pivot the router around the corner as my t-handle knob right here stays in a fixed position and that is going to help you a lot with quality I'm going to go ahead and reset for the final cut you one thing you want to watch also and you probably saw it right there in that video is how close that power cord came underneath and a lot of times in cabinet shops this is really kind of the preferred way of doing it and that's because it gets that cord out of the way so if you caught on to that you were paying close attention it is a little bit better technique wise to throw the thing over your head and get it out of the way I'm going to make that second pass hopefully I can get rid of some of that burn by moving just a little bit quicker and you'll be able to see how to keep that cord out of the way well I got a little bit but anyway those are the techniques for using a larger D handle router one of the things that I think has really improved the quality and safety in shops today is a router table and they're really handy to use it's almost difficult to make a mistake if you have them set up properly the first thing you want to remember is that rubber ring needs to be about a 64th of an inch on this side of your fence so that your piece actually rocks up just a little bit over it and rides that rubber ring that's going to keep your piece so that you can keep it engaged with the profile a lot nicer the other thing is that I like to mark these with feed direction that helps users do a lot better job because if you were to come from this direction and the bit was going this way then that board would come slinging back this way I also like to cover my profiles with this type of a guard which keeps keeps it so that it's much harder to get your fingers in there if you slip and have an accident and I like to use these anti-kickback feather boards that make it difficult to come back backwards once they're pressing down on them works so you get you get the profile engaged much more consistently if you're able to push down on this piece of work across this table as it comes through here the thing I like to tell people also is that you don't want to you don't want to violate the blue and so that's about a fist and that's again always a safety margin in my shop and so we want to handle this piece in such a fashion that we're not not going to be crossing over into the blue plate and so one other technique that will work pretty nice for quality is if you do the endgrain first if you cut this and grain spin this around and cut this in grain and then come back and rip the profile on both sides you're going to have a much better experience it tends to tear out as it comes through the bit the bits going this way there's not much to support it as it exits the wood so I'm going to go ahead and fire this up okay I'm going to make two passes each time I go through this router table and the reason is because a lot of times you won't catch away from the ring and then the profile perfectly straight as you pass nice young people let's go ahead and make two passes on each okay so what you can see is that that that that is absolutely a perfect cut with perfect death and consistency all the way through there if you'll make those two passes on each piece that you make the router table is far safer than using a hand router there's a lot less that you can lose control of and as you can see this is a much safer setup than you would use if you were manually handling a router so I'm at the big router that has a three and a half horsepower electric motor on it and one of the things that people can really take advantage of in a shop and nowadays is to go ahead and make moldings and what I've got here is a bit for crown molding and I want to show you how to stabilize it so that you can get very consistent results with using your crown molding the first thing you have to ascertain the course start with is this large profile bit the first pass that I'm going to make is going to be a regular relatively shallow pass through this cutter head you can kind of see that just part of that cutter head is exposed and the reason that you have to take shallow passes with this tooling arrangement is because it exits it at such a steep angle and so it tends to pull chips away and I think that's one of the reasons why most people have some results with this bit that they're disappointed with but I'm going to go ahead and fire this up see that the mid has done a really fine job I'm going to go ahead and just take one more pass but you can see that there's not a lot of chatter in it if you get it set up where it's stable and there's a high amount of pressure behind it now but we'll go ahead and make the final pass on so you can see that if you use a crown molding bit that you can do some absolutely fantastic work in the shop and that stuff that would have cost you a ton of money if you had to just go out and buy it and right in your shop with a router and the right bits and the right technique you can produce the highest results that are available so I hope you like this video if you did click the like button and subscribe to the channel

Channel: Shop Class

Views: 64,380

Keywords: Tom Andreas, how to use routers, how to use a router table, router bits, router setups

Id: OC5dVZOh6a0

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 18 2015