I Master the Router (mostly)

My grandfather-in-law generously gave me his router in the fall. This tool has been kindof intimidating to me. First it was unclear what purpose it serves, then people were suggesting it would be impossible to use without mounting it in a table. I decided to try it out for the most unique thing it does (to my thinking) which is create grooves and edge details. I wanted the drawer fronts to have some interest so decided to do 2 vertical and 2 horizontal grooves on each one. I spend a lot of time experimenting with depth of the bit and how to set the guide the correct distance from the bit. The result once I finally got going was exactly as I picture it and pretty fast to do.

Then I decided to add some detail to the top edges so they wouldn’t be so sharp. Using a bit I got for Christmas that makes a double scallop type design, I did 3 sides of each top piece. This was harder to control and you had to be careful on the corner to get them to line up. There were a couple of errors but nothing major that a little wood filler won’t fix.

I managed to finish all this detail work in under an hour. The cleaning up after was when it all started to go bad. The guide piece is a plastic block, attached to the router by screwing in 2 metal rods which are then screwed from above into the guide. While removing it, I broke the top of one of the screws and am now unable to remove the guide. We are still trying to come up with a way to get the screw out because the router is unusable if we can’t. So I mastered the router and then broke it all in one day.

And now we know: be careful with pliers of metal bits of old tools, metal fatigue is real