I want to add a router table to my shop. I am intrigued by the router tables out there — like the Jessem and others. But the idea of investing $1650 for a “fully equipped” deluxe model just does not compute. If money were no object, I’d have it. But …
Of the few pros that I have seen in videos, Except for those mounting their router in the table saw extension, none of them use anything but custom-built tables and fence systems. Many adjust their fence manually and lock it in place by clamping it to the tabletop. I’m assuming that David Marks and Norm could have anything they wanted including a freebie from a sponsor. So I wonder how there is a benefit for something like the Jessem with their “cool” miter slide and the micro-adjustable fence systems. It’s not that I would not want one, I am questioning how functional they really are — ie: what are they going to do for me in terms of my finished product.
The lift is another matter. I do like the capability of a lift that is adjustable from the top.
Have any of you built the Jointech plan or the New Yankee plan? What features of your table do you consider that you would not want to live without?
Greg
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Replies
Build your own. That way you can customize it to your shop & needs. I adapted Norm's plan a few months ago, basically downsizing it a little to fit the space I had designated for it. Instead of a toe kick, I put it on locking casters in case I have to move it around. Instead of his top, I built the one in Bill Hylton's Router Magic, with plastic laminate on both sides and edging of some hard maple I had lying around.
I put Woodpecker's new Super Fence on it. (I routed out tracks in the tabletop rather than use clamps to attach it). I got the Super Fence for two reasons: (1) I wanted to get working so didn't want to spend the time making a fence, and (2) Woodpecker had a promotional sale for it. I love it.
IMHO, the best things about Norm's plan are the storage for bits and other things (I can always use more drawers) and the simple dust collection set-up.
Router table systems are like those drill-press tables that look like aircraft-carrier decks. Very impressive to the casual onlooker, but quite unnecessary. All you need is a square table and a square fence. It doesn't matter if the fence is square to the table since the only critical distance is at the router bit.
There used to be a geezer on PBS -- Bob Rosendahl?-- who made entire projects using just a router and a makeshift table and fence. He kind of overdid the concept, and must have spent half his time making jigs, but he did demonstrate that you don't need micro-adjustable three-storey fences with intersecting tracks with crosshairs. Even for a coping sled you don't need track on the table. You can rig up a sled that runs against the edge of the table. You can build a fence from MDF and plywood (with track if you don't like clamps) that works every bit as well as the brass and chrome works of art. Save your money for good-quality bits. (You'll need it ;^) )
Jim
A router table is one of those tools that "functionally" is not really improved by adding more dollars - $1,600 would likely go further on other tools.
Minimally, you will need a router mounted upside-down to some sort of table. Your fence can be as simple as a jointed board or a scrap piece of MDF
Nice additions can include:
Adding dust collection above and/or below the table
Increased HP on the router
Above the table bit changes
Even better if it is with one tool
Above the table height adjustment
Table mounted power switch
Bit storage
Mobility options are a big plus
Personally, I have the Rockler router table with the 2 HP Triton. I justified the router table purchase because I also use it as a mobile table to mount my other tools (mortiser, Leigh MT and D4, etc). I have future plans to simply mount the router to my TS so I can take advantage of a shared fence and DC... though I'll still use the rockler table for my other tools.
The most challenging part of obtaining (building or buying) a router table is, IMHO, getting something that is flat and will remain flat. Beyond that, a 90-degree fence and you're good to go. It can be primitive or fancy, depending on how much messing around you want to do when you're setting things up for a cut.
I went the Veritas solid steel table-top route, and set it into a simple frame hinged from my table saw originally. I now have it in a very simple cabinet, mostly for dust-collection purposes, and someday, if I ever get more than one hour at a time in the shop, I'll build a "real" cabinet with drawers and such.
This top will not sag, it can be moved from a big cabinet to a portable frame should you want to go mobile, and any router can be mounted into it without fussing with a new insert and such.
I think you're right.
(Just how much stuff on a router table translates into product quality?)
My take.
Greg,
About two years ago, I decided that I needed a router table. I have never been one to spend a lot of time for building stuff for the shop, so I wanted something simple. I bought the Veritas Router Table Top (rectangular) and dropped it into my tablesaw's extension wing. I popped a router in and started using it. If I need a fence, I use my table saw's fence or if I need a sacrificial fence, I'll flatten the face of a board and square up an edge and clamp it to the table. The only cost was the router plate.
When you talk about a lift that's adjustable from the top, you're referring to adjusting the bit height, right? Personally, I don't feel the need to spend a couple hundred on a lift. When I adjust the height of the bit, I always crouch down to get my line of sight even with the bit. So what's the big deal with reaching under the table to turn a knob? I think that it might be more inconvenient to use an above-the-table-adjustment. For bit changes with my Bosch 1617EVSPK fixed base router, I'd just unclamp the motor and slide it out. I just got a Triton 3-1/4HP and it's even easier to change bits: just raise the motor all the way up and the arbor automatically locks.
What are the essential features of a router table?
1) Flatness or a slight crown
2) Fence
3) Router
Chris @ www.flairwoodwork.spaces.live.com
- Success is not the key to happines. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful. - Albert Schweitzer
Chris, Chris, Chris. At age 20 you're not allowed to ask such a depressing question as "...what's the big deal with reaching under the table to turn a knob?" Trust me, it can get to be a big deal as time goes by, LOL! I don't have a lift on my router, yet, but I will some day. forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
In my defence, the guy who sold me the router made the same comment. He was much older than I. Still, I feel that the bit height is best judged when it is at eye level.Chris @ http://www.flairwoodwork.spaces.live.com
- Success is not the key to happines. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful. - Albert Schweitzer
Build a table. It will be fun and you can do it for a lot less than buying ready made. I built Norms table with a few mods. It took two sheets of birch ply, some oak for the face frame and top trim (had that in the scrap box). The top was two pieces of 3/4 mdf sandwiched together with formica on top with oak banding. I bought the incra LS 120 fence used from a knots member here and the woodpecker router lift. Put it all on heavy casters so it could roll around. I've used the heck out of it. I like the storage and the fence is great. It was a blast to build as well.
http://forums.taunton.com/tp-knots/messages?msg=20473.1
If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it.
And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Like Chris at Flairwoods I used to use my old Makita 3.5 HP with an adjustment under the table. Now that I have aged some, I have a Jessm lift and since I don't bend over as easy as Chris does, the adjustment is really nice. Half turn and its a small adjustment on my test piece.
Build your own, 1.5" thick of MDF or HD Ply that will stay flat. I swear they change just after you build them and get ready to use them.
I built my own fence from a 28" long piece of 3"aluminum angle Iron and some HD Plywood. Works great. Copied from a Rockler fence priced at 128 bucks, cost me $18. I milled out the opening for a dust port in the aluminum with an old carbide blade on my TS.
AZMO
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Edited 5/14/2008 12:23 am by AZMO
Great post - made me laugh!
I like your idea of an aluminum fence body. I will have to look into that. Do you think that a rectangular aluminum extrusion (eg. 2x4, etc.) would be any better than angle?Chris @ http://www.flairwoodwork.spaces.live.com
- Success is not the key to happines. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful. - Albert Schweitzer
Chris I modeled mine after this, so it has a sliding upper and lower fence. Box structure is for sure stronger, but when you bolt through alumimum and tighten the nut, it tends to bend the side of the box. The angle at 3" is more than enough strength for lateral deflection and the bolt just snugs it together.
I have seen a box structure with all the t slots on the sides and top, but I could not find a piece of that here local. Mine works great with a dust port and all.
http://www.rockler.com/gallery.cfm?Offerings_ID=18064&TabSelect=Details
If you are using a fence setup to router a dado slot, the dust shoots out the slot as you complete multiple passes. I put a hose out there with a catch on it but it still spews dust around alot. Can't seem to find a solution that really works without getting in the way.
AZMO <!----><!----><!---->
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Greg,
I echo FG's advice that a flat top is essential. The Veritas steel top has this attribute, as FG mentions, even with a heavy Triton router slung under it. There is a lot to be said for using a very stiff material for a router table top as any dip at all near the area where the cutter works means you will be unable to route properly. A slight (very slight) crown in the cutter area is OK.
If you use MDF or other man-made boards for a table top you will need it to be thick and probably braced for it to stay flat over time. MDF in particular does not have a lot of inherent stiffnes. It may seem OK to start with but over time it sags, if weighted.
The stiffest board I ever came across is a waterproofed heavy-duty chipboard meant for flooring. This is impossible to bend to any significant degree in sizes used for a typical router table top. Also, it seems impervious to that slow bending when under stress (such as weight/gravity acting perpendicular to its surface) over time because of dampness in the air, which MDF is not. The stuff I used for the shed floor is also very smooth-surfaced and hard, ideal for a router table. On the other hand, it is not so hard that a cutter inadvertently hitting it will get damaged.
Another truly useful thing about the Veritas router table system is the fence. It's adorned with many T-slots and has a two part bottom and a one part top, allowing many configurations. This also allows sacrificial faces to be easily mounted (e.g. one set per cutter profile) as well as hold downs, guards, stops and various other useful bits to support many kinds of routing operations. If you make your own fence I suggest that inclusion of T-slots, at least, will increase the versatility of your table a lot.
Finally, I recommend that you make an arrangement that allows you to move the fence relative to the cutter by micro amounts. The Veritas fence pivots at one end, the other end being adjustable via a calibrated micro-adjuster that reads in thous of an inch. Many joint-making operations on the router table benefit from very fine adjustments to the final cut - finer than can be easily achieved by eye/hand without the use of a micro-adjuster of some kind. If you want perfect cope & stick joints, finger joints, sliding DTs, lock-mitre joints and so forth (all joints requiring a very good fit) then a micro-adjustment fence is needed.
Lataxe
"a calibrated micro-adjuster that reads in thous of an inch"
For wood? Er, doesn't that stuff move? And how many thous do you allow for glue?
Pass me the surgical goggles. ;^)
Jim
Jim, if it's any comfort that micro-adjuster is an optional-use thing. I can say that the first time I set up a drawer-lock bit, it would have been nice to have that instead of the primitive wooden home-made fence I was equipped with at the time, LOL!forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
Jim,
That adjuster reads thous. Naturaly one tends to use tolerances of around 10 - 20 thou (0.05mm) when making joints. It's good to know that the adjuster is capable of moving the fence with the precision it does, as opposed to the method of giving it a tap with the heel of the hand, a squint of the rheumy eye and hoping for the best.
The TS and BS fences also have adjusters that read in tiny amounts (0.01mm). I can and do use them to make adjustments of 0.05 - 0.1mm and I can tell the difference in the fit.
No doubt the wood will move later on. But having the joint made with the best achievable precision in the first place means that any movement will have a lesser rather than a greater effect. Of course, some lads don't mind a bit of joint slop or crack.....
What tolerances do you aim for in a joint then? Perhaps we should draw up a table. :-)
Lataxe
A bit of Lee overkill IMO, like those scary enlargements in his book on sharpening. Who cares, as long as the darn thing cuts. If you never -- and in fact can't -- use a thou, why have it, unless to impress the ignoti? I'm quite happy with tolerances that the human eye can cope with, because I'm hoping that nobody carries a 10x loupe in order to trash my stuff. In the end I usually wind up using trial and error and careful measurement of the workpiece rather than the fence. Repeatability isn't a problem if you sequence your cuts properly. And there are always problems that can't be solved by a micrometer -- end grain that doesn't want to be measured in thous, bit sets that don't match that closely. The latter happened to me recently on a set of divided light doors, and the disparity was quite visible. There was nothing for it but to cut too long and grind away with tiny file and rasp. No precision fence would have helped. That's why I said earlier save your money for good bits.
I suppose it's an ideological thing too. I imagine every Chinese furniture factory has machines that work to tolerances invisible to the naked eye, but I don't want their stuff. I don't want to have absolute machine-made precision in a piece, and finish it off with a few visible swipes with a Marcou (wish I owned one) just to let people know it's "handmade." Might as well throw a bunch of keys at it to "age" it, and end with a coat or two of distressing Debbie Travis paint. I suppose I'm not being entirely logical. I use machines because if I didn't I'd never finish anything. I just prefer to use them only as required, and not to be their understrapper. Putting off the inevitable day when the memes belong to the machines.
Jim
Jim,
I sort of agree with you to a point - precision isn't required to 0.1mm for many aspects of furniture, particularly the visible surfaces and edges. In fact I have come to prefer the slight imperfections and irregularities left by planes and spokeshaves on those aspects of a piece.
Joints are a different matter. I've hand cut a fair number of DTs, finger joints and M&Ts in the last couple of years. They began as "poor" and are now "acceptable to good". If the joint is not going to be stressed a lot I still make it by hand, just to get the practice and in some cases to get the handmade look.
Where the joint strength is important, such as with leg-to-apron M&Ts in an item that might be dragged across a floor or weighted by contents or a human sat on it, I have reverted to use of the machines make the joints. With machine-made joints I can achieve a precision of fit that only the very best craftsmen seem able to achieve with hand tools, after years of practice.
An M&T made with a piston fit will, I assume, remain stronger after being subject to racking forces than will a hand made one with a less-than-precise fit. Same for any stressed joint. Racking force seems less likely to move a piston fit joint (eventually causing slop) than an imprecise joint that has lots of small voids between the mating surfaces.
Micro adjusters might read in thous or other tiny increments that are beyond the necessary precison even for these piston-fit joints. But the point is that the ability to move a fence that precisely means that grosser movements suitable to wood will be accurate. For example, I trust Mr Lee's micro adjuster to move the fence 0.5mm much more than I do my unassisted hand and eye using only a 1mm-divided scale.
Moreover, some joints do benefit from much finer adjustment. If a box or drawer is made with 1/4 inch finger joints using the router table and a key to move the fingers along evenly, the fit of the mating fingers can be adjusted from very tight (for softwood) to "easily mated" (for hardwoods) by adjusting the key-to-bit gap by just a few thou. You cannot do this by eye or feel as your senses cannot resolve anywhere near that tiny degree of movement.
As to absolute measurements - I try to use them as little as possible. Once basic dimensions have been established for a piece, it's more a matter of relative fit than absolute size.
But if an absolute measuement is needed, I use a vernier with a 0.1mm resolution. This is useful, for example, to measure whether a piece of home-made stringing is exactly the 6.4mm width out of the drum sander to match the 6.4mm groove cut by the router bit, in which the stringing will go. If there is 0.1mm inaccuracy, the stringing will either be sloppy or will go in only with a force that tends to dimple the sides of the groove or scrape off a sliver of the stringing.
In short, micro-adjusters have their uses, even with wood.
Lataxe
Could not agree more.
I'm going in the opposite direction -- my hand-made joints are going from decent to lousy thanks to arthritis and Dupuytren's contracture. So I'm actually using machines more than I did for them -- I just don't use the router for most. Maybe I should. I usually oversize them slightly on the TS and finetune by hand. I can see the allure of precision machinery, especially for metalwork, at which I'm a complete dunce. It just seems counterintuitive to me for wood. And a router to me is a scarier beast than a TS -- just waiting to jump up and bite me.
Cheers, Jim
The micro adjust is great to sneak up on cut. I've used it numerous times to get things just right that was just a hair off and you have repeatiblity. I love that capability on the PRL lift and the Fence. By far though is a good flat surface that is large enough to support the work is the best thing to have IMO. Mine is mdf and I've had it for 2 & half years and she's still flat and going strong with the PC7518. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
I used to have the Freud table, which was mdf and never sagged. I had it on a shop-built Norm table, and got rid ot it to make more space. Now I use a cast-iron leaf on the TS, which I guess will stay flat too, with a Triton 3 that's easy to raise. I've resisted the (small) temptation to go high-tech with the fence, because the one I had before was more trouble than it was worth. 90% of the time the fence doesn't have to be parallel to the table anyway, but the TS fence automatically is, and it's easy to rig up a sacrificial fence with dust collection. If you wanted, you could fiddle with the TS fence to get extreme precision, but I don't see the profit in it. Same with the miter slot -- it's there on the TS, but you don't really need it. A springboard clamped to the table and featherboards clamped to the fence are quick, easy and effective. Guess I'm a neanderthal.
Jim
I hear you about the leaf in the TS. I think it was a year or so after I bought my Griz TS & made the rounter table that they came out with a leaf option. I would have gone that route as well just to save the space. But now that I have the one I have (norms plans modified) I like it. It provides good storage. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
I personally do not have the room for a deicated router table. I have worked for years with 3hp router mounted in my shop-built right hand extension on my old Delta contractor's saw, using my Beismeyer fence with an auxilliary fence that slips down over the Beismeyer & has a dust collection port. I have built literally hundred's of raised panel doors, panels & mouldings in the last 30 yrs. My very first router table was a piece of plywood with an arborite top, a hole for the bit (not even a removeable router plate), a jointed pivoting 2X4 for a fence & clamped to my work bench. Think I saw the original in an old article about Art Carpenter & his shop, only his was mounted over a steel 45 gal. drum. Worked great. Can't really get my head around all these fancy router tables & all the doo-dads available for them.
What a timely topic, I have just recentlty(7 days ago) built a new router table from left over stock in my shop, a little plywood, some fir legs, an eastern maple fence. The price for that $0.00. I did buy a plastic insert from a local tools shop to make that part easy, oh and some bolts to secure the fence,(already had some black hand knobs) $22.50. I did a test run on a new set of bits for syles and rails and voila, beautiful rails, nice profile. I made a sled to run against the edge for the rail bit and the outcome after adjusting the router bit was a perfect fit. All this done on the cheap and very cheap. My table stands at the height I want it, stores and rolls where I need it too, you should have one too.
Regards,
carpenter5
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