Router Basics, Tips, Tricks and Buying Advice

routers are one of the most versatile tools in the shop and as you can see I have a lot of them recently we released a video about template tips and tricks and I realized from the comments that a lot of you may be either scared of the router don't know enough about them to really even get to that step so I wanted to start from the beginning and talk about tips and tricks for beginning to use the router and I wanted to give you some buying advice as you can see I have bought a lot of routers these are don't even include the one that's in my router table so I know a lot about routers I use them on a daily basis we use them in the production side of our business which you never see on the You Tube channel and we use it in all of our projects so if you want to get to the buying advice portion of this video mark will put the time stamp right here or here or here and you can skip ahead to that portion of the video so let's get into the basics and talk about the two different types of routers so there's two basic types of routers and three ways to use them you first have your palm routers which are usually about one horsepower and then you have your bigger routers which are gonna be you know in the two to three and a quarter horsepower range then the three ways to use them are in a fixed base like these two here a plunge base like these two here or a router table with a router lift the router lift fits into the fixed base category because you can't plunge a router lift you could lift it up but it's not how you want to be using it the difference is and they both have great uses I mean buying a bigger router won't always replace a palm router and you can't use a polymer matter for some of the things you can use a bigger router for a pawn router is great for doing edge work round overs chamfers you can sort of get away if you take small bites doing long dado cuts so that kind of thing dados and rabbets whereas a larger router can flatten slabs it can do dedos rabbets edge work it can do almost all of the things that a poem router can do a poem router is a great luxury because it's very simple fits in the palm of your hand it's very easy to do light work with the biggest difference is about them is a poem router a small router is only going to come with a quarter inch call it whereas a larger router is going to come with a quarter inch and a half inch collet now let me show you the difference between the - so this is the difference between a quarter inch and a half inch call it any larger router you buy will have both so these are interchangeable they just come off and you could put on a quarter inch call it whereas any small router will not come with a half inch bit because the horsepower is not enough to turn this effectively now the biggest difference between that and why these are so much more valuable to have is if you look at the size of a quarter inch versus a half inch shank the forces that you exert on a piece of wood when you're routing are intense and can be very very strong so the Flex that can come into play when you're using a quarter inch collet is massively massively weaker than when you're using a half inch shank now a lot of bits are easier to use an accordeon shank like small eighth inch round overs or a quarter inch up cut down cut spiral bits but you can easily do those with a bigger router I always always always try to buy my bits in half inch shank when available because there is a very noticeable difference when you're cutting how much of a bite you can take so you can take deeper thicker cuts with a half inch call it as opposed to a quarter inch call it so in my opinion half inch shanks are a lot easier to use but some bits like very small bits if you're doing sign making or freehand lettering that kind of thing are only gonna come in at quarter inch caught okay so we're here at the table saw because this is the most important part and this is the analogy that works for me I've drawn arrows on my router to show you the direction that the router bit spins now the way that this works and I've drawn it for you is when you are using your router handheld when it is right side up the correct side up is what will say right side up means your bit is going clockwise when it is upside down like in a router table your bid is going counterclockwise so this is the same exact thing as a table saw versus a skill saw when you are at your table saw your skill saw is upside down and you're pushing your workpiece into the teeth when you're using a skill saw it is right-side up and you are pushing your tool into the workpiece so the way this works is you always want to be cutting against the teeth you would never feed a workpiece into a table saw from this direction it would grab peas and shoot it out of your hand same thing with a router bit you always want to work opposite the way that it is spinning so when it is a when you're using it as a handheld router you're going to work your router on the right side of your piece and push away from yourself when it is upside down on a router table you're gonna put your workpiece on the left side of the bit and push the workpiece away from yourself so hopefully that makes sense we're gonna move on to the second most important part of using a router safely and that is depth of cut now we talked about this a little bit in the template video about template routing but the second most important thing about using a router safely and effectively is your depth of cut in my opinion you never want to be taking more than half the diameter of the shank at a time there's some exceptions to that but I promise you ninety nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine times out of ten thousand if your router jumps out of your hands it's because it's trying to take too much material you always want to remove as much material as possible for things like a dovetail cut or if you were doing a dado you would want to go a quarter inch at a time if you were using a half inch shank or an eighth inch at a time if you were using a quarter inch shank or something like a chamfer bit these are both Whiteside chamfer bits that I got from bits bits but if you can see this is a quarter inch shank so I wouldn't do more than 1/8 inch chamfer at a time and you can do that by lowering your raising your bit or lowering your bit depending on which orientation you're using it in and continuing your your chamfer you're gonna get a lot less tear out that way you're gonna get a much cleaner cut no chatter and of course more most dangerously as you're not going to break bits so if I was gonna try and take this entire it looks like about an inch and a quarter chamfer I would do that in three or four passes and if I was going to try and take this entire chamfer I'd probably do that in three passes is what it looks like because you know the flex in the bid if you try and take too much material on a quarter inch shank versus a half inch shank like we talked about before is really intense now here's something that took me a long time to learn which is because it's a dovetail bit obviously you can't take multiple passes you're just gonna have a even with dado instead of a dovetail I've snapped a ton of dovetail bits and well it took me a little while in fact Shawn Boyd taught me this which is instead of just trying to power through that cut what I would do is mark out where my dovetail is gonna be and then I would use a table saw to remove as much of that material as possible in fact all the way to the width of the smallest part of the dovetail I would cut all that out with a table saw or a straight bit on my router before I would attempt to cut the dovetail one of the the best ways to accomplish this when you're doing straight bits or even a bearing based bit and you want to get a huge edge profile is to use a plunge base router now the way a plunge base router works is you lock your router in there and you can move your router up and down so let me show you how to repeatably and accurately set your depth of cut for multiple depths quick little aside before we get into this when you're putting a router bit in a collet you never want more than half the shank outside of the collet so what I just do I usually bottom it out or take it out just a little bit too if the cutters go down below they call it because you don't want to dull your cutters not that you would ever use that whole cutting surface at a time but then you just tighten it in so never more than half of your shank outside of the collet when you're setting your depth for multiple plunges with a plunge router there are something that all plunge bases have in common whether using a smaller a big router and that is these stop rods and these turrets with different stops on them and on a small router to go back to what I was saying about never go more than the thickness of your shank I'm sorry then half the thickness on your shank the small router has eighth inch steps and the big router has quarter-inch steps because this would use a half inch bit and a quarter inch bit there are two ways to set your depth first is you have a known distance that you want to go down let's say you have you want to go down exactly a quarter inch this is a quarter inch set up rod you could cut these out of wood no big deal the way that you would set a known distance let's call it a half an inch here so we have to do multiple stops so I'm gonna set my turret on its smallest on its deepest stop so I'm gonna bring my piece down to the wood here lock it off so we know that that is zero and then I'm going to take a half inch an own measurement it could be any measurement and put it over that stop and bring my rod down to it I'm going to press that down tighten my rod and now we know that when we plunge that down we're going to go down exactly half an inch however we don't want to make a half an inch pass at a time so we're going to move our call it one click and now we know that we're only going to go down a quarter-inch the first time we're gonna make a pass and then we're going to switch it back to the original stop that we had and we're going to go down to there so the way that looks from the top of the router so right now we are at zero that was the zero that we set and we're gonna click our turn it back one stop there we're going to turn our router on and we're gonna plunge down to our first stop and lock it off and make our pass and as you can see that's half the distance of our block then we're gonna unlock it turn around or off we're going to move our collet to the deepest one and we're gonna plunge down again lock it off and make our pass and as you can see we're right there at our half-inch mark in fact if I look at it I'm a little bit over and that's something that you'd want to check and it's very easy to adjust all lock rods on a plunge base router are gonna have these micro adjusts so you can spin it away or towards if you need to just get a little bit more or a little bit less very very easy to just a plunge base is definitely my most used base a where as a fixed base is going to be used for making repeatable cuts of the same thing where you don't need to adjust it alright let's talk about the different kinds of bits now essentially there's two types of bits you could maybe split them into three categories but the two are bits with bearings on them and bits without bearings on them bearing bits are designed to follow an edge to create either a profile or exactly match that edge like the flush trim bits that we talked about in the template routing video or these are edge profile bits this is a quarter inch round over a quarter inch shank chamfer bit and a half inch shank chamfer bit the other types of bits which I would probably into two categories are straight bits and bits that have a shape to them now bits that have a shape to them are usually the ones where you want to remove material with either a blade or a cutter before you start using them because you're gonna want to create that profile once and only make one pass now I get all my bits from bits and bits com there's a discount code down below now here's my buying advice about bits only only get the bits you need I have probably more than I care to admit in my case that I have never used like I've never used this keyhole bit I've never used that dovetail bit and it's an embarrassing waste of money router bits can be expensive and one of the things that I suggest to newbies is only buy the bits you need and your router bit is not dull it just needs to be cleaned yet simple green simple green is the best blade and cutter cleaner like you can see this bit here I have used it to do a ton of template routing with some sappy wood and there's just a little SAP build up there that will come off with a little simple green you just soak it for about five minutes spray it one more time and just wipe it off make sure you go the direction of the cutter which is a mistake I have made more times than I care to admit so that's my buying advice for router bits only get what you need the higher quality bit the longer it's gonna last you do what you got to do but use that discount code at bit Smith's they're awesome so let's talk about how to use these bits and avoid tear out which is the scourge of routing is tear out that's the number one problem now when it comes to avoiding tear out there's a couple ways to avoid it one of course as I said before is take very small bites small passes leads to better cuts cleaner cuts less burning and if you try and hog out a ton of material in the router you're just going to have either unsafe conditions or you're gonna have a terrible looking cut the other thing that happens when you're using a router is you get tear out when you're doing edge profiling now the easiest way to do that is cut against the grain first now this is a quarter inch cut and I'm in a large router that I've used a ton so I know that I can take this pass all at once and get an edge profile whoever if I was doing a ton of this I might back this off 1/8 of an inch and do all my edges and then come back and do the full pass especially if I was using a poem router so let me give you an example this what I'm gonna do is route my edge grain first and you'll see I'm gonna get some tear out here but then I'm gonna do my long grain and that's gonna fix it because the tear out is not going to be above where the bit is gonna cut now you can see we've gotten some Tara here look at that that's pretty ugly and the reason is because wood fibers run this way hence long grain and end grain and so when you get to the end and it's unsupported you can get tear out and so quick fix is we're just gonna run the long grain now which is why we always do angry in first now you can see we have a perfect corner without any child so let me show you another way when you're doing profiling to avoid terra now another great way to avoid tear-out is using a backer board now this would be let's pretend this is my fence I would take a scrap piece that is as tall as at least the cutter that I'm using and just run it behind and now that would obviously be an unsafe cut against a fence so you would want to use a miter gauge but I'm going to show you how this works just freehand because I don't want to take the time to set up my fence which is why we're building a router table which will be out a week from now next Sunday so now you can see here we have a completely tear out free cut okay let's head back over to the bench and talk about some buying advice okay let's talk about what I have mistakes I've made and what I would recommend now I have three levels of router I've got a palm router a fixed and plunge base medium duty router and a heavy duty router now I made some big mistakes buying routers which is probably why I have so many first off my first router I bought the bosch colt which was a one-horsepower there now all the little ones are 1.25 horsepower big mistake that kit now is going for a hundred and forty-four dollars whereas the two and a quarter horse Bosch kit is going for a hundred and eighty-nine dollars the other thing that I didn't like about this was the collet broke after about a year's worth of use which is not typical of Bosh Bosh is known for their routers so maybe I just had a bad experience but it came with this chintzy edge guide I ended up spending another forty dollars for an edge guide so I made the mistake of trying to save 40 bucks and getting something that was way underpowered and did half the task that I needed it to do the second router I bought was the Triton three and a quarter horse which is currently going for two hundred and sixty-five dollars now I got that because I was so bummed out that I bought this small router that I thought I should just get the biggest one on the market now that has its place and all the companies make a big router one of the things that Triton did that is incredible is they made it so that you can put it in a router table as it is so all you need to do is buy the $50 Craig router table plate and it's ready to go in a router table they have a lot of really fine adjustability features in it that are great some of their parts are very chintzy like the locking mechanism vibrates loose on my router table about every two weeks and I have to go looking for this teeny little screw I've had to reorder at several times the power switch on it broke so as far as like heavy heavy duty routers go that are gonna save you money Tritan is a good choice because you can just put it straight to a router table without having to buy another router lift which you know these can get expensive this one was like 400 bucks they go down to like a hundred and eighty-nine dollars and I know that a lot of companies make a add-on router lift for the router so you can search that so Tritan I do enjoy it for flattening slabs this thing is a beast you can take massive cuts with a huge bit and get it done really fast it's now kind of become that's all I use it for because other than that I'm never really hogging out material with my router like we've been talking about all all videos you want to take small passes so other than for flattening slabs and doing really big jobs I don't use that that often the one that I am very very happy with is the DeWalt DW 6 1/8 in fact I have two of them this one's gonna go in our new router table because I love it so much everything on them is well built high quality stuff and it's only 186 dollars for this kit as you see here it doesn't come with the edge guide I ended up buying one after market which I think was about 30 40 bucks but that's definitely worth it there's tons of accessories for it just like the boss or the makitas you know you we're all fanboys of certain brands so whichever one is in the two and a quarter horsepower range if you're only gonna buy one that's what I'd recommend it's it's heavy duty enough that it's gonna get anything done that you need it to it has a half-inch call it a quarter inch call it then your second router should be a polymer matter no I love this battery-powered one because I never have to plug it in i keep a eighth inch roundover bit in it at all times and i can just run around and it's just super easy to turn on it's nice and quiet and it's very easy to control and with the battery actually it's heavy enough that it really feels like it's not gonna go anywhere so typically people make the mistake of buying the smallest router first because it's cheaper by about 40 bucks and then moving up to a bigger router and then you just basically have two routers that do the same thing if you're gonna buy a poem router whether it's plug-in or battery you don't need the plunge base because you're never going to need to use it if you have the bigger one with the plunge base just get the fixed base throw a round over or a chamfer bit whatever you prefer for breaking edges and keep it in there all time real easy to use they're about a hundred bucks the battery one is about 125 but either way it's a good second router to have first router should always be a medium duty one Dewalt I can highly recommend I haven't used Bosch before like I said I didn't have the greatest experience with their small and however it was a workhorse for me I didn't get a lot of stuff done so maybe it broke because I was trying to get it to do to heavy duty and stuff make sure that you can get accessories free router because you will want to expand it in the future things like bushings are really great for tracing things when you don't have the ability to template route them and there's lots of different ways you can do it when you get into router tables and router table lifts there are very nice router lifts like this Rockler makes an amazing one that won an award last year these Jessen ones are great wood peckers makes one in fact if you look at them they all kind of look the same they're probably manufactured in the same place but I don't know but you can get different levels of them down to about 189 dollars all the way up to 400 bucks I think is the most expensive ones summarising get a medium-duty kit first for about it should only spend about one hundred and eighty-five dollars then go with a poem router anywhere from 79 which is I believe the boss colt you can get $79 with just the fixed base to a hundred and twenty three dollars for a battery-powered one and then if you're doing a ton of really heavy-duty work like slab work that kind of thing then you'd want to get like a three three and a quarter horsepower router or if you want to skip buying the router lift and you really want a router table Triton's a great one because it comes with everything you need to set up in a router table except for the plate that you would get from Craig that's the extent of sort of basic router tips tricks and buying advice that I can offer you this is the second video in a series about routers there's going to culminate in a router table build that we have coming out that's going to be really cool with all the bells and whistles thanks for watching if you'd like to support the channel please head over to the cats Moses store pick up a stop block a dovetail jig or t-shirt really helps out Stacy in the shop and have a wonderful day god it's actually turning into a hot day this vest is killing me but I want to keep continuity in fact I'm I'm really invested in this Oh God [Music] you

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 268,488

Rating: 4.944325 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, router, router basics, wood router, router bit basics, using a router basics, how to use a router, router bits, router tutorial, router tips, using a router, wood router basics, router table basics, router table, woodworking router, router 101, routers, using a router for beginners, woodworking router tips and tricks, router tricks, using a wood router, hand router basics, router table tricks, basics, router jig

Id: Ba0j5cf7lVI

Length: 21min 5sec (1265 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 10 2019