How To Use A Router

This is a quarter inch router, it's called, which means that the cutters have a quarter inch wide shaft. You get half inch routers as well which have a half inch wide shaft on the cutters and they are generally for bigger jobs. I'm going to show you two things with the router; one is called a bevelling cutter which cuts a chamfer at 45 degrees.

There are lots of different types of cutter. There's the fluting cutter and the round over that rounds the edge of a piece of wood over - just like the name says. All sorts of funny little shapes you can get for shaping the edge of a piece of wood.

The other thing that you can do that is really useful is to trim things to size, so if you have a template, you can run along with this wheel here. That silver part is the bearing and you can set up a jig where the bearing runs along the template. This is the template, this is what i want to cut and the cutter cuts the lower into the shape of the template and that can be any shape you want pretty much.

You have trimming cutters as well which are slightly different to that. We have a wheel at the other end. First of all, though we'll just put a chamfer on this piece here, you need to clamp it down, get everything out of the way.

They produce a lot of dust – routers - so it's worth having an extractor. Now, the depth of the cutter is determined by that big knob there and you have a stop as well, so you can set it to a certain depth and keep repeating that depth if you want. This time, I'm going to set it at an arbitrary depth.

Need ear protectors. The cutter always goes around that way and with all woodworking tools, you always go against the cutter, so just imagine a wheel would be driving you this way - you don't go with the wheel you go against it like that. It actually has an arrow drawn on the router often to show you which way to go.

You get this tool up to speed and you bring it into the piece you got this - not stable enough - you want to have your work place nice and stable. The flat board at the bottom, were going to put that on the work piece and then slide along. This cutter has got a bearing at the bottom and the bearing is going to run along the edge of the piece of wood like this. .