How To Make A Base Plate For A Router

How to make a base plate for your router. Before we can get to work, always remember to always wear your health and safety equipment. I've removed mine today for camera purposes.

Basically, a base plate is just a sheet of manmade board. It could be anything. In this case, we've got india but I wouldn't normally use any thicker than half inch.

If you use 80 mil, it's too thick and the cutter has to pass through too much. So, in this case, we've got 9 mil india. All it is, it's perfectly square.

We found the center of the board by joining corner to corner. Where the cross meets, we've bored a 30 mil hole. In the bottom of the router, I've fit a 30 mil bore.

That's why I've drilled a 30 mil hole. This base plate will fit snugly over the top of the router. When we start cutting, the router will pass through this hole and cut the center of it perfect.

There are many different uses for this. One of the things we use here in the shop, if we're routering out large amounts of areas and we don't want the router to tip in use, as it sometimes does, we basically put it in the base plate and this will stop this. It stops it rocking.

This is particularly useful when doing jigs and ten plates on tabletops, etc. All we simply do is lower the cutter into the hole and off we go. I don't even need to fix the router so the base plate because it's a quite tight, snug fit.

Some people don't use the collar within the router. They simply lower the router into the piece of manmade board and then screw the router to that. That's okay.

That's fine but we don't choose to use that. So, what you simply do, as I said, if you're going to go for the collar option, just drill the size of the hole to the size of your collar, which normally comes with your router. Then, obviously, when you commence work, the router will pass through the cutter at a dictated height.

This will stop the work from bevelling out, an extremely useful piece of kit. I hope you enjoy making yours as much as we did here at our shop. And, that's how you make a base plate for your router. .