Skill builder: Router

Week 1 Skill Builder:

Since all my past experience with wood cutting has mostly involved making straight lines I wanted to use this week to just make a circle, the god’s great gift to symmetry.

Supply List:

• Scrap wood

• Clamps

• Drill w/ 1/4” drill bit

• 1/4 Dowel

• Hand Router

  • Straight bit

  • Roundover bit

• Circle Jig

• Router Table

The Process:

After finding a nice piece of scrap wood and clamping it down to the table I drilled a blind hole into the wood at the mark that would be the center of my circle. The dowel was then placed in this hole in order to mount the circle jig.

A video of the first pass can be found below.

To cut all the way through the wood I did about three passes. Before the last pass I placed another scrap piece of wood under my wood to ensure I didn’t cut into the table.

2nd pass

Setup change before last pass

Circle cut out of wood panel

And

we

have

a circle,

Folks!

Next I wanted to clean up the edges on the circle so I took it over to the router table. I replaced the straight router bit with a roundover bit.

I did one side of the circle and it came out quite nicely. I thought about stopping there and just deburring the little splinters on the other side but ultimately flipped the piece and started running the other side on the roundover.

This I regret. Even though the thickness of most of the circle hadn’t changed the edge that the bumper was using as a guide was now rounded making its point of contact much lower and resulting in a deeper edge on the second side.

cleaning up the edges

where I should have stopped

so round

Next Time:

At the end of this process I left thinking about one things that I think would make the process better, especially for a more complicated project: more measuring.

I noticed the hand router has a guide that indicates depth adjustments. Right before I was on my last pass I realized I wanted to check how much more I needed to cut. Knowing how deep I was going all along probably would be useful, especially when I don’t want to cut all the way thorough.

This would have also been a check that may have saved my platform when I flipped it to do the curved edge.