Routers - 7 Important Things You Should Know

routers are one of the most versatile tools in the shop but because they're the most versatile there's a lot to know i've put out a lot of router videos over the years and i think that you know information gets spread over a large distance so i wanted to do a video where we talk about the seven most important things to know about your router and give you some tips and tricks some do's and don'ts and talk about the seven most important things to make you successful using your router so let's come into the router table and let's quickly talk about router direction and a really cool tip for always knowing the correct way to cut [Music] all right so when a router is in a router table the bit is upwards right so you can remember this using your right hand if you face your thumb up the way that your fingers curl is the way that the router bit spins now let's assume this is just the same mechanics as your saw blade on your table saw just your table saw would be the red piece this would be the blade with teeth on it and you want to push into the teeth consider it like a treadmill if you run with a treadmill you're going to get slammed into the wall behind you but if you run against the treadmill you're going to have a good time unless you don't like working out which probably most you don't not going to have a good time so you're going to push your work piece into the treadmill if you were to go with it you risked it shooting off and hitting you or causing a safety concern so you're going to push against the bit which is scooping this way now when we flip our route over like this handheld router here we're going to turn our thumb upside down and look our fingers curl this way which means the saw blade is now spinning clockwise the exact opposite way so what we can do is look at it like this now to go against the treadmill in the scooping direction you're going to move your router away from you on the right side of a board or towards you on the left side of a board like this so i hope that makes sense remember router table the bit is up the bit is spinning this way counterclockwise right handed when the router is facing down the bit is spinning this way you always want to be fighting against that bit with your work piece just like you would running against a treadmill rather than with it and the real risk is if you go with the bit which is called a climb cut there's very very few instances where that is necessary if i tried to push away from me here remember it's spinning this way so it becomes like the wheel on a car and the router is going to run away from you or the work piece is going to shoot out towards you so you want to make sure you're always cutting the correct way now the second most important thing about routers we're going to talk about is size matters i don't care what your partner told you guys size matters [Music] now this is why size matters here is a two and a quarter horse router and here's a one and a quarter horse router so this bit right here it's a half inch collet so you'd never be able to fit it in this router but let's say you were the reason that the horsepower of the router matters is because there's so much more area cutting the motor needs to resist a change in momentum and i'm sure if i'm saying that wrong somebody who's good at physics will correct me what also can happen is the more material you remove the more the bit can flex now let's take a look at this slow-mo clip here from a video we did a while back about kickback now you can see when this router bit kicks back in our router table look how much flex there is now that is the one of the most expensive router lifts on the table from jessum in lock down tight inside with a dewalt router a base like this two and a quarter horse one look how much flex there is in in that scenario and all it is is a kickback it's not like it encountered anything other than resistance from cutting and that can happen when you try and cut too much material let's take a look at this bit here this is a quarter inch down cut bit in our one and a quarter horse router so what i like to say as sort of a rule of thumb on depth is i never go more than a quarter inch and the reason is as you push this along this whole side of the bit has to cut and that causes forces so when you think you stop it may spring back if you've ever cut a mortise and you noticed at the end there was like a little extra earlobe there where you cut it could be because you know it's trying to cut through so much material as you force the bit through that when you stop it's going to sort of spring back into its correct position and go a little further than you thought it would go so i like to go never more than a quarter inch now that applies to things like template routing as well now i've seen so many times and i've preached this over and over you need to remove as much material before you start using your template routing bit in example i would try and cut this down to a 16th of an inch with my bandsaw maybe eighth of an inch at most before i started template routing this because you don't want your bit working too hard like i said it causes a lot of force and it also can be dangerous more chance of tear out more a chance of kickback so you want to remove as much material as possible so you're removing the least amount of material with your router and that should go for all operations if you're using a chamfer bit like this one and you want a chamfer that big you should never take that in one pass take it a quarter inch at a time i live my life a quarter mile at a time raise the bit to here then raise the bit to here and you'll get the chamfer that you want remember size matters and this is one of those cases where you want as little as possible you want to be removing as little amount of material as you can and that's going to keep you safe give you burn free results and really help you get very nice looking cuts [Music] one of the main uses for router is going to be dados and grooves and i really believe in making jigs or making the accessories for your routers better and edge guides are your friend they're your friend for cutting grooves they're your friend for cutting mortises they work really well in a lot of scenarios but there's two types of edge guides now a lot of routers will come with a very kind of cheaper edge guide or you can buy aftermarket ones like this bosch one here or this dewalt one here now there you have one thing in common the cheap ones always have a gap in the middle and that's so that you could put it beyond a bit if you needed to only use like half the width of the bit and these more expensive ones have an adjustable fence but when you get them in the mail they always come open so the problem with this gap is as you're going along when you exit your piece you're putting pressure on your router to keep the edge guide along the side what happens with this gap before you've exited your board and you've all experienced this is it will tilt because your router will come around because you're pushing inward you're putting slight inward pressure this way so when you reach the end of your edge guide it likes to twist this way so with the nice aftermarket router fence guides edge guides this is really easy to fix you just loosen these screws here unless you have a good reason for your bit being in that gap you always want to keep these closed and then you never run into that issue so what do you do with these cheap ones what's the fix here well i have a dead simple fix so what i like to do is i like to put my edge guide in place so that i get the fence auxiliary fence right against the base of the router you can kind of clamp it in place just to make it a little bit easier to screw and i apologize i don't have the right length wood screws so then we have an auxiliary fence guide and we don't run into that issue anymore when we get to the end of a board so anytime i have a cheap router edge guide i always add an auxiliary fence to it and then of course on my aftermarket really good ones i always close up the fence so now let me show you a dead simple jig for cutting dados and grooves anywhere on a workpiece without even having to worry about measuring [Music] so let me show you how to make it and then i'll show you how it works but this is a brilliant idea i got from dustin penner in about 2015. you're going to take two boards and put them 90 degrees to each other just like this and then once that has had a second to set up we're going to just drive a few screws in it for long-term stability you're going to take a router and let's say we wanted to do a quarter inch groove now i would always label these for my different routers so we'll say the milwaukee 18 volt quarter inch groove and then you just take your router like this so let's say this is your work piece let's pretend it's a credenza it's a piece of veneered plywood and you want to put in a quarter inch divider in the middle that's going to be non-structural and you need to do a stopped dado that ends a quarter inch from the front of your piece so it would be very easy to mark out where your dado is going to go we're going to do our dado stop it a quarter inch from the end draw that out like this and we say this is going to be the waist side we don't even have to draw out a quarter inch or even know where quarter inch ends if we know where our inside piece is i'm going to use a nail gun here because i don't want to try and clamp all this but look you can just line up the edge of your jig with exactly that line now this would normally be a clamp but we're going to cheat a little bit and then you can simply run your dado exactly like this stop right at your line or you could go all the way through you can make these as long as you wanted if you wanted a two feet piece of plywood you could do a two foot piece the critical thing is that it's just 90 degrees to this so that way when you line up your line it's going to give you a perfect groove [Music] now let's talk about plunge versus fixed base now fixed base pretty straightforward if fixed based is when you're looking to do a fixed depth you're gonna do a bunch of repeated grooves and dados and you just want one singular depth and you're gonna do those or you're gonna cut all the way through a piece of wood but a plunge base can do all of the things a fixed base can do however it can do a lot more one of the reasons that you would use a fixed base over a plunge base is like i talked about in the beginning there's a lot of forces so if you don't need a plunger base a fixed base is going to be a lot more rigid and so it's going to give you better results if you're just doing a singular depth cut however a fixed base is really a cool piece of tech and there's a lot of features on it that people don't use okay so the way a plunge base works is it has a lock so right now it is unlocked and i can move down and then when i press this down it's now locked and fixed and then when i release it it comes back up now why is this useful well this little depth gauge here i think is one of the most underused and misunderstood things in plunge bases now each one of these graduations are going to be a quarter inch which if you remember from the beginning of the video is the max depth that i talked about cutting with a router bit all right so let's say we want to cut this mortise out and we want it to be one inch deep now you would use an edge guide in your router to line it up with the outside line if your bit was the same width as the mortise you could line it up a lot easier but if it was wider than your bit you would use your edge guide to dial that in when it comes to depth this is where the plunge base really really excels so there's two ways to do it with this depth gauge here now you've got this stop here that has a micro adjust on it so you can dial it in just barely by twisting the bottom of this but the way that this works there's two ways to do it now we want to go one inch deep and we know that each one of these is a quarter inch so the top one would be zero and what we could do is we push our plunge base down until it's touching the material we then lock it in and we drop our stop to there so now we know that is z zero height is z this is zero so now when we release our bit we turn our router on and we plunge when we hit this here we know we are at exactly a quarter inch from the top we know we can make a safe doable pass we make our pass we release our router we then rotate this one more and we are now at half an inch and but we're only a quarter inch more than we just did so now we're taking another quarter inch pass and we're at a half inch depth we lift it up we rotate one more we drop to the bottom of our stop and we know we are at three quarters of an inch we can make one more pass and just to show you how great that works you can see here that is quite literally exactly at three quarters of an inch so that depth stop is very good and that's one way to use it another way is if and i i know i said we're going one inch and we hit the bottom we only did three quarters of an inch but you see what i mean the other way to do this now is if you have a known depth and it's not exactly on a quarter inch what you could do is you bring your router down to your depth line we're going to lock our router in now what we do with our depth stop here is we set it to the lowest setting and we drop our depth stop now when we bring our router up we can back the depth stop off three steps and we know that we can work our way down to that in fact this should be about a quarter inch here because we only have three quarters worth of stops yeah it's just over a quarter inch by a little bit and then as you do your passes because you know your last stop is your final depth you can make a pass here lock it in unlock it for your next pass you turn this one stop boom lock it and go through and so on so that's one of the most amazing features of a plunge base is you can use this depth guide very easily to make safe consistent passes that don't take too much material and allow you to get a great finish and then of course it also has an adjustable stop so you could bring this up or down or set custom depths or custom steps it is a great way to use a plunge base these are great for you know if you want to do butterfly keys or things like that where you want to go be in the middle of a piece and do something that doesn't go through the board plunge bases are phenomenal phenomenal tool and if your router doesn't come with one almost all routers have additional plunge bases for sale [Music] all right so it's going to kind of be a two-parter but we're going to talk about router bushings flush trimming router bearings we've already talked about how like less is more when you're using a flush trim bit but i'm going to talk about how to use these to edge joint and then what else router bushings can be used for because they are actually a very useful tool and i of course will link everything down below and then to wrap it off we'll talk a little bit about bits and safety and then i will kiss you guys good night now router bushings are for following things and they work really well to do that but they're also really used a lot in inlay and the reason is you can calculate an inner and an outer diameter and do inlay with them in fact this is a white side inlay kit you could buy separately but it works the same as router bushings it screws onto your base plate like this and most router companies sell a base plate or your router comes with it that fits these bushings perfectly but they lock in just like this and it becomes very much like a bearing but with an offset and you can calculate the offset based on the size bit you use but this white side inlay kit it has a bushing on the outside and it uses an eighth inch down cut bit that comes with the kit and so you cut the negative of your inlay with the bushing on and then you pull it off and you cut the positive they're great for tracing but they can also be used for jointing a board let me show you how that works so now that we have our bushing installed let's pretend this is a rough sawn piece of lumber in fact you can see the factory edge is still on here so we would want to clean that up anyways but you can just use some double stick tape and a known straight edge and by the way if you don't have a roll of this double stick tape i'll put it down with all the links of all the other stuff i talked about down below it's just so useful but you're going to take a known straight edge i'm just going to use this is one of our mox invites template that we sell on our website for the mox invites i'm actually on top of right now but you take it and you can just put it you know wherever you want your straight edge to go so now that we have a known straight edge we can rest our bushing right up against that straight edge and make a straight cut all the way through and that's going to give us a straight edge it's a great way to do it without an expensive flush trim bit the other way to do it is with a flush trim bit and you do it in the exact same manner you take a known straight edge and this is my preferred way of jointing with a router and then you take a bit with a top bearing a bearing that's closest to the router if you buy this ultimate flush trim bit which i'll link down below from bits and bits there'll be a discount code as well this is like the greatest router bit you could ever buy they're expensive but it's the most useful and awesome flush trim bit you could ever have certainly my favorite but what you do is you set up a known straight edge and you want to just put it as close to the edge as you can when you're using a flush trim bit you would just use the top bearing so on this bit you would take that bearing off and you're going to run it right along the edge like i'm doing here works really really well and is a great way to joint edge joint to board without having to have a jointer and you'll get great results [Music] so let's talk about some router bits and there are so many different types of router bits and this is probably only a quarter of my collection but there's three basic types and those are edge profile bits bits that have bearings on them that are designed to create a certain edge profile straight bits here's a quarter inch and a half inch spiral i always recommend spiral over straight bits and then flush trim bits this is the ultimate flush trim bit all of these have bits and bits astral coating which i mentioned the company before this isn't sponsored i've just worked with their bits for years and i love them the coding really does make them last longer and that brings me to buying bits now if you are never used a router before and you're just getting started i don't think there's any harm in buying one of those really cheap bit sets off amazon and then figuring out what is your workflow what do you like to use which edge profile do you like which straight bit do you tend to reach for more and then replace them with high quality bits but high quality is one of those things that actually saves you money in the long run uh they're going to last longer they're going to cut better they're going to give you a better edge finish which of course is going to increase your enjoyment of woodworking if you are not new to routers even if you just if you've had some experience in you know your beginner intermediate i highly recommend going with good bits that really makes a world of difference especially the type of metal they use those cheap bits are all going to be high speed steel whereas any nicer bit the cutting edge is going to be carbide and then of course bits and bits has the astra coating which helps them run cooler heat is the enemy of sharpness and it makes a big difference in longevity so i guess to sum it up go with quality it really does make a difference especially for consumables we talked a lot about that in my recent saw blade sharpening videos i'm gonna link a bunch of videos uh there'll be a playlist linked up here in the corner and then there'll be some videos linked down in the pinned comment we've got a ton of great router content that dives really deep into all the types of bits we have a video about kickback with 19 000 frames per second slow motion footage that we shot last year as well as a couple other that are really great if you're getting into routers i highly recommend the playlist guys if you want to support channel head over to the cats most store pick up a dovetail stop block or an apron or some of the other great tools we have in there uh thanks for watching guys stay safe in the shop have a wonderful day you

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 202,133

Rating: 4.9287243 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, woodworking skill, woodworking guide, woodworking project, router, woodworking router, wood router, router table, router basics, router bits, routers, router 101, using a router, palm router, router tutorial, router jig, router bit basics, how to use a router, wireless router, router tips, best router, trim router, router bit, using a router for beginners, router table tricks, using a router basics, using a wood router, tips and tricks

Id: VJgSxZaBqg4

Length: 19min 57sec (1197 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021