My Favorite Template Routing Tips and Tricks

lately we've been doing a lot of projects with templates and I have really grown to like templates they really make things easier both the mocks and vice that I did a few weeks ago and J's child-sized nesting chair that I did last week only took me about an afternoon and like the mocks and vice for example I drew in the computer I was able to print those templates out full size and cut them or do them on the laser or CNC and this is something that I get a lot of questions about so I want to put together a video where I give you my favorite tips and tricks for template routing now this is the beginning of a router skill series we're gonna be doing over the next couple weeks culminating in a homemade shop router table that we're gonna make next week so let's get into some of my favorite tips and tricks so the most important part about template routing is attaching your template to your workpiece and it is so important that this does not move during your routing application otherwise your pieces are going to come out not the way you intend it the way that I usually do it is with double stick tape and now it's important that you find a double stick tape that you trust I will link this one below but this is the absolute bugatti of double stick tape and it's really cheap it's like fourteen bucks a roll lasts forever easy to rip and it's ultra thin that's really important to me and there's a lot of really thick double stick carpet tapes out there and that can allow the template to flex a little bit while you're using it so really good double stick tape or another way that I've seen people is using a pin nailer which is shoots a nail that has no head on it and these are great especially if you're using a dark colored wood or something because these holes are so small they don't show up that's another way to do it it's not my preferred method because I don't like to add holes to my workpiece if I don't need to let's talk about bits when your template routing there's two types of bits there's a top bearing or a bottom bearing there's bits like these two that have both these are the absolute best bit on the planet I get these from bits bits there's a 15% off discount down below they put an Astro coating on these that you can see this one's way darker so this one's uncoated this one's coated and makes a bit last twice as long which is why I love going through them these bits are very expensive but I've had this one for three years and it's still as sharp as the day I got it what's important about this where your bearing is is that grain direction matters get into that in a minute there are straight bits as well that are much cheaper that you can get but they're not going to be as easy to use but they do get the job done this is a up cut spiral bit with a top bearing these are compression bits that the cutters go both ways which really helped eliminate tear out and tear out is something you really have to worry about wooden template routing so when I'm putting on double stick tape for template routing I don't try and cover the whole piece because this stuff is so sticky that you can break your template when you're taking it off so just be careful when you're removing it especially if like these these templates for shipping purposes they come split with a dovetail so you want to make sure that you don't break that when you're removing the template and there's two ways to cut out your workpiece now it is really really important when your template routing to get as close to your line as possible now I feel very comfortable with my bandsaw so the way that I do it is I put my template on so that it has wood all the way around it like so and then I just cut my piece out on the bandsaw making sure not to hit my template the other way to do it is just to hold it down and trace around it with pencil and you know that your pencil is your absolute maximum location at which you can go to so you then take your template off and cut as close to your pencil as possible and trust me when I say this the closer the better template bits have a tendency to grab grain that's not going the right direction we're going to talk about that again in a minute but you really want to get close to your lines so we're gonna head over the bandsaw and cut this out I'm gonna do it with the template on there if you don't trust yourself draw a pencil and cut it out with the bandsaw getting as close to your line as possible you could also make a secondary backup template just in cakes one of the good techniques to use because when your temper adding all of the material that's outside your templates gonna be removed so you don't care what it looks like one of the ways that I get any inside corners like this you could tell I'm using a 3/8 inch blade here so it does not make turns very well and you could stop and put on a smaller blade but there's an easy way to just nibble at it you just come in it straight and just keep nibbling away and tell you then you can make a straight cut so like for these areas which are really tough to get into with a big blade like this let me show you how I handle them [Music] okay so I've drawn arrows on both my router and my router table to show the direction that the bit spins you always want to go opposite the bit except for a few exceptions now this comes into play especially on in green and when you're doing corners when you use the router it's gonna flip over and the direction of spin is going to be different so it's gonna be exactly opposite when I show you on the router table but this applies to the router as well the reason I chose this piece of maple this has really defined grain and maple is one of the hardest types of wood to route now I 99% of the time use this compression bit because I've never had an issue going around corners or within grain with this bit um and I wanted to show you with this one because in J's chairs project this is a quarter inch curve here so you have to use this bit for those inside curves there but you can see here on the grain the grain is going like this and you can see that by the lines and so if you were routing you have to go against the router bit most of the time and you would want to go this way and because otherwise if you went the other way let's say this piece was flipped over and you were going this way this is going to catch and you're gonna get tear out the piece can shoot out of your hand and it could lead to a dangerous situation at the worst and at the best you know ruin a workpiece that you spend a lot of time milling and preparing for your final piece of furniture so grain direction is important which is why a bit with two bearings on it is so great because without taking the bit out of the router and without changing where your pieces you can ride on the top bearing or you can flip it over and then ride on the bottom bearing and so bits with two bearings on it are worth their weight in gold especially something like this that lasts forever and makes template routing so much easier so let me show you what happens when grain catches I am a trained professional quote unquote and I expect this to happen so this I'm gonna show this to you so that you don't do this at home so you saw that fly straight out of my hand as a second I touched it so how do we overcome that one never start trying to cut in the middle of a curve you always want to work your way up to it and work your way around now like a curve like this that has an apex on it you would want to cut this way and stop in the middle at the apex of the curve and then you would want to come the other way so flip the piece over and go the other way to the center of the curve and cut this way and that may involve changing to a different router bit or switching which barring your cutting off of the other way to stop that is use a compression bit and take off as little material as possible so this brings us to climb cutting climb cutting is where you go the same direction the router is spinning this is something you don't use very often but works great when you need to get around a curve where the grain is just facing the wrong way and so you would start on your straight spot and just come back a little bit now the dangers here is when you go with the spinning router bit it wants to take the piece so you need to make sure when you're doing that you're using push pads and being very careful it's not a technique that you need to use very often especially if you have a router bit with two bearings so let me show you how I would cut this curve we're going to switch over to our compression bit to make it a little bit safer and easier but I'm going to show you the different ways that I would attack something like this [Music] okay the same thing applies here as you can see we're cutting an inside curve here and so the grain is coming off the board this way and we're going to want to share that grain so this one is from this area to the end here we're going to want to cut with the template on the bottom and the bottom bearing and then when we want to do the other side we're going to use the top bearing and go with the grain this way and that's going to ensure safety and ensure that we cut with the grain now again with this bit I could do the whole thing but in general if you're not using a bit like this this is what you want to do [Music] okay let's talk about the workbench versus the router table now this is just as easy to do on a workbench you just need to work in sections by clamping your board to your workbench or you could double stick tape it and then you would run your router the opposite way again because the bit is spinning the opposite eye would be go on this side downhill I would then flip the board around and just work in sections now there's something called a safety pin which is very helpful in routing and I probably should have installed it for the first demos but I'm so used to this router table I kind of get lazy which is never a good thing so here this is a safety pin and what you do is it's for entering the piece into your work you push your piece against the safety pin and then you push your piece into the work and this allows you a little bit more control and if it grabs like you saw in the beginning there it's going to have something to rest against and it's going to not kick back the way it did as hard you still obviously the use of a safety pin isn't going to protect you against that but it helps you in that now I've come up with a way in the past that I do this on my router and what I can do I'll look at that Dewalt router and do all clamp I'm so fancy if this was my workbench what I would do is you can take your clamp and rest it against the work and use that to bring it into your piece so I have my clamp in the back here and I've got that rested on my work so I have a pivot point on my router and then I just bring that in and when I start cutting and I just rotate the clamp away a little bit so it doesn't affect my cut but that helps you enter and even exit the workpiece safely you can rotate your clamp back and then rotate your router off turn it off let it spin down and then remove your non spinning router so quick tip here because on this channel we don't hide our mistakes we show them and we show how to fix them I was trying to show using the safety pin and when doing a little b-roll and I have my router bit set to high what you want to do the only way to set your router bit is you want the cutting part of the router bit to be only as high as your workpiece I had it set you can see here where the black of the laser cut has gone away and because MDF is compressive and I had a very small portion of the bearing on there we ate away a bunch of our template there and that would be that would be a catastrophic err I don't know if that's one I could fix oh it's a good thing to know set you're cutting don't don't worry that just oh my bearing is on my template make sure that you're cutting the cutting part of your bit is only on your workpiece maybe just like a micro piece of a millimeter above the finished workpiece okay my last little tip is when you go to remove your template the best thing I found is a putty knife you don't want to just get one end up here and then try and remove it because this is what's gonna happen you're gonna end up breaking your template it actually didn't break it just split where it was supposed to but I've broken many a template trust me when you're using quarter inch MDF so what I do is I very carefully I get my putty knife in there and I just get it up just a little bit at a time and I'll do it from your angle so you can see me let me just start the price lowly and the pressure the putty knife will remove it and there we go simple as that guys thanks for watching I hope you found some joy out of us we're gonna be releasing some router videos coming up so there'll be a lots of great router based content let me know down in the comments if there's any techniques that you're unsure about and you'd like to see me cover thanks for watching if you'd like to support the channel head down to the cats Moses store which is linked below and get a dovetail jig a stop lock or a t-shirt stay safe in the shop guys you

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 323,906

Keywords: woodworking, template routing, routing, template, router, woodworking router tips and tricks, router tips, template routing basics, template routing question, router table tricks, pattern routing, temlate routing, router tricks, router template guide, router templates and guides, router template, routing basics, template guide, router template cutting, router template making, using router template guides, templates, wood router, routing plywood

Id: 2U4Op1wWo34

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019