Stop Fearing Wood Routers - Watch This!

one of the things I don't see an awful lot of on YouTube are people using routers and the reason for that is there's such a fear by so many people even experienced Woodworkers have this fear of routers today I'm going to show you some tips on how to use a router I want to help take away that fear and open up a whole new world of all the things that you can do with a router so let's jump in so very quickly there are basically two kinds of routers there's the small what we call laminate or trim routers some some of them are corded this one happens to be a battery operated and then there's a larger routers for bigger jobs bigger bits more heavy duty and this one is a three and a quarter horse compared to this one which is probably about a quarter horse and of course this is for bigger bits and for doing bigger jobs and when you try and put bigger bits in a small one like this what happens is you burn them out because it's just not designed for doing big jobs one of the things I hear from time to time is people say well I got a new router table and I tried to use it and it just pulled the wood out of my hand and that's because you were feeding the wood from the wrong direction so today I'm going to show you how to check that and always know now you'll see if you've watched other YouTube channels you'll see people have these directions where if you hold your left hand here and along the wood and then or your right hand maybe it's your left hand I'm not just sure and your if it points in the direction of your thumb that's the direction you push the wood from it's like I always get confused on those I never know which one is which today I'm going to show you the science of how you can never be wrong and look at the bit every time and know where you're going to be feeding the wood from so let's start off by looking at a table saw blade now every table saw blade has a flat side and of course when you install this in your tables in your table saw the flat side is what you're looking at where you start pushing the wood so the wood comes into the flat side and that's The Cutting Edge because when you look at the back of the tooth you can see that it's slanted back so you wouldn't want to be pushing wood from this direction because it's not going to cut the the table saw blade of course Cuts in this direction where the flat side cuts into the wood it and that's the same on every tool that you have your jointer your planer your table saw and even your router bits work the same so let's have a look at router bits okay so let's have a look at a couple of bit examples here so this round over bit here is the face side the flat face side of that bit and this is where the action happens right there that's The Cutting Edge in this flush trim bit the same thing this is the face Edge and right on the edge is where the cutting takes place right on that sharp edge because when you look at the back of it you can see that it's at an angle just as this flush or this round over bit see how that's cut at an angle and that's because that makes a nice Cutting Edge now both of these bits when they're installed in a router they will always spin every router will spin exactly the same way they will always spin in this sort of a direction the bits and the routers are all made the same so every rotor will spin in that direction and this one will spin the same thing in that direction so what that means if the bit is spinning in that direction what we need to do is the the wood needs to enter the bit from the face side so it needs there's the face side and it's going to be spinning in that direction it's going to be spinning towards where I have the wood right now it's going to be spinning in the direction of the face so the wood will have to enter the bit in that direction and that's what's going to cut the wood the same thing with the flush trim bit it has to spin in that direction and it will and because that's the cutting action of this bit the wood needs to enter in the same direction that the wood can be cut we put it at a bit of an angle so you can see this is where the wood is going to cut and you can see the angle in here and you can see the angle in here and the wood is going to get cut as it enters the bits in that direction so now that you know that you know exactly where you need to either move the router or move the wood into those bits let's take a moment to look at some router bits for a second you'll notice that all of these on my right hand side here all of these have a quarter inch shank and although the bits are all different they all are have a common shank compared to these which have a half inch shank now if your router only came with a collet for quarter inch bits that's probably all it will take and that's because it's probably a lightweight router probably a horse and a half maybe a horse and three quarters so it's a small lighter router if your router came with both collets half inch and quarter inch it will take both of these sizes so you can put whatever you want in it and it's more of a heavy duty so it will be more like a a two horsepower or more so that's the difference in sizes now now the you already know where what angle these bits spin in you're probably all looking at them going yeah I can see that see this one here how the face side there's the face side and when we spin it around you can see the angle so we know what direction this bit is going to spin and all of these are the same every one of these if you look at them closely you'll find that there's a even this one has a has a face side has a flat see that has a flat face side and as you spin it a little hard for me to do that you can see that it's angled at the back so we know what direction all of these bits are going to spin on now for example there are when we look at bits you'll notice there's a bunch of them that have bearings on the top and there are some that don't have bearings on the top these with bearings on the top they allow you to either run your bit along a piece of wood like this so this is a round over bit so to do a round over a bit you would set the depth to something like that and it would spin like that long and round over the edge and the bearing prevents it from digging into the wood any further because that's the point of a bearing is either to run along a piece of wood like this or some other template or hard firm object these on the other hand that don't have a bearing if you were to run this along a piece of wood like this it's it's going to wander it's going to cut deeper and shallower it's going to cut all over the place and make a big mess and that's because this is designed for using either in a router table or with some sort of a jig and I'm going to show you a couple of those in a little bit so that's the difference between bearing bits and bits without bearings so let's have a look at just a few specialty bits that are available for routers so starting off on this side this is a planing bit so if you get rough lumber and you want to plane it down or maybe you've got some specialty work to do maybe you're making big tables or something this is the kind of bit that you would use and obviously you would put that in a big router this one is a finger joint bit and you can see if I put my finger down there so you can see all of the angles and this is what you will get from a finger joint bit that is a finger joint I know a lot of people call box joints they call them finger joints but now you see exactly what a fingered that is a true Finger Joint right there over here is what we call a bowl bit and it's straight up on the sides and then curved over so this is used usually for making bowls but all sorts of different things and of course the last one everybody will know what that is that's a dovetailing bit so before I bring out some of the jigs that we use for routers I want to talk about some of the things to take away that fear of using a router the first thing I tell everybody is first of all take your time we're not in a production shop uh take your time and know what you're doing and now that you know the direction the bit is always going to spin whether it's in a router table or you're using it freehand now you'll know which way to push the bit because the wood needs to feed into the bit on the flat side of that router bit no matter what you're doing the other thing of course is if you're using a router table and you've got smaller pieces of wood or if you're using it freehand make sure your wood is clamped or and or use some push blocks you can buy these or you can make them I've got videos on how to make these and this keeps your hands away from the bit and that's a good safety thing to keep away from the bit the other thing of course is to wear good eye protection and good hearing protection because that nullifies that speed and that noise especially that high pitched wine that routers can make if you follow those that should help eliminate a lot of your fear of using a router and of course the next thing is to just get there and do it and get used to it and that too will take away a lot of your fear let's have a look at some rotor jigs that you can use well here's a few of the jigs that I have for routers some of them are commercial some of them I've made myself and honestly you can go to woodwork web and look up router jigs and you'll get lots of hits on that because I've made lots of different jigs for routers so first of all this is a commercial one this is a dovetailing jake pretty simple but it works really well and it uses the half inch bit so that's a jig that I really enjoyed this is a jig that I made a few years ago it's basically a data Wing jig so if you're making a cupboard or shelving unit and you want to cut dados into into the wood basically the the way this works is you just adjust this there it is so you put your the wood that you want to make the thickness of you adjust that so and then you lock that down like that and then this pivots back and forth and your router sits in here and these pivot back and forth so that it snugs up your router in there so when you lay this on your on your board on your wood to start cutting your dados it gives you an exact data of of whatever it is so even if your bid is a little bit small you can move it around in there and it will make that fit in there perfectly so that's another handy jig this is another commercial jig and I did a video for a company called Empower I like this jig because it does so many things you can see it does some scroll work it does a really good job of edging dadoing mortising just Edge treatments there's so many things and look that's all it's not really complex there's not a ton to it but it just does so many things so I'm going to put a link to that in you'll be able to go and have a look at that I'll put a link to that right there you can go and have a quick look at that if you've never seen that because it's an interesting jig to have a look at that concludes my video for today hopefully I've stimulated some interest in routers with you today I'm calling connect for woodwork web thanks for watching

Channel: WoodWorkWeb

Views: 39,148

Keywords: wood router, woodworking, furniture making, work shop tools, woodworking tools, router, wood

Id: yTUqx7cB4E8

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023