Understanding and Choosing Antique Router Planes

[Music] [Music] the next group of planes we're going to look at our outer planes so the word router really means just to clean out or scoop out between two edges to rout out and that's exactly what these planes are designed for to scoop out across the grain waste material in a in a data we were mentioning before quite often used to clean up data and things like that and I have three styles of planes here the simplest may be the oldest style is something called an old woman's tooth and this one is particularly nicely made often they they use the craftsman was use a plane iron from their top lane as the cutter so they could choose different lists of irons and it's just set into a block of wood and the it may be just a circular hole here for the chip relief and all that and some Mecca mechanism for capturing the iron there but a very simple router plain and clear you can adjust the iron up and down quite easily for whatever depth is cut so those are called old women's teeth slightly pejorative term but charming nuns nonetheless and Stanley made a couple of different kinds of routers the 71 style like this was a sort of larger plane and then a mini version of that the 271 and they each have their own particular uses and I'll go through that in just a second but when we look at this this router plane here we can see there are two handles and a sole that rests on the work like that and then the cutter right here you can see the cutter protrudes through the sole like that and the cutter ability to just cutter there's a caller here that you can loosen and then you can screw the cutter up or down to regulate whatever depth of cut you won and once you've set it to the correct position then you can tighten the collar up again so there's no way of setting an exact depth on here other than by IR by measurement and but that that's how the how that set right there they did come with a variety of cutters and I've got three examples here one of them is in the in the router also already a narrower cutter and then a cutter with a spear point type edge like this so typically made three cutters the spear point makes a very slicing cut so it very it makes a very fine service at the bottom but you can uh you can find these it old tool shows and things like that often a router that you find in a food Michael I just have one cutter in it and these two will be gone that's not a problem as long as you have a cutter narrow enough for the narrow screws you're going to cut you're in business the other thing that they had was a census and you may or may not find these fences with the router there was a fence with a straight edge and a fence with a curved edge so that you could work these um this routing action along the parallel to the edge of the straight grain and long grain cut or you could work around a curved surface like for example a window or a circular window or a table edge since I got to have a long curve on it so it rests on just two points here and you can work your way around a curve so those were screwed to the sole at one of these two screw points I hear clear they're reversible and you can move them in or out to have some some level of adjustment about how far and you wanted so you can find these properties float around separately but very seldom you actually find them on the router itself they may be missing and in reality you're using a router almost invariably you're using it to clean out and groove it's already been established so senses are not necessarily that that that necessary there's usually nothing wrong with these planes in terms of their construction their tools tackling no moving parts so sometimes the handles might be cracked but you can easily turn a handle replacement handle all that there is one difference between this router and another style of stanley made and this particular otter has what's called an open throat you can see here that the casting does not come all the way across so you're working with a piece of wood on if you're working a stake cutting a hinge mortise or since I got on a narrow piece of wood there's no real support here like that to give a router support so Stanley did come up with a a device here that you could they could clamp in there and set that and so they could effectively close the throat so working on edges like that they would have support all the way across the width of the other router for making that cut they also made a router with a closed throat in other words the casting went straight across like here I think that broader was called a 71 and a half this was called a 71 so the 71 and a half is a closed throat router this little mini router embodies both aspects you can see that here one side is open one side is closed these will routed here are perfectly designed for cutting the shallow narrow mortise for hinges and whatnot on the edge of doors or cabinets and things like that and the iron can be dropped out and put on one side or the other depending on whether you wanted it open or closed and there may be times when you want to open throat they basically came with a single iron and but nowadays tool companies are making both this dollar router and dis style here modern versions with enhancements both Lee Nielsen and Veritas make router planes and they often make these small routers with a variety of of width of cutter so that you can have you can cut very small grooves for example banding inlay pipe cuts and whatnot now this is why he's router bits often are missing just fall right on out so here I am here all the way and later on we'll talk about a joint if you're interested in learning traditional woodworking with hand tools visit my website at wood and shop comm you can find free video tutorials buying guides and reviews make sure you subscribe to my regular blog post and also check out my 10 steps for getting started enjoy [Music]

Channel: Wood and Shop

Views: 46,084

Rating: 4.9267974 out of 5

Keywords: woodwork, woodworking, traditional woodworking, roy underhill, woodwright's shop, chris schwarz, lie-nielsen, hand planes, hand saws, chisels, router plane, handplane, router

Id: EOeZ9iP360w

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2017