Router Table!

I guess it wouldn’t be fair to all you tool wimps to tell you how great I am.

Feast your eyes on THIS:

That is my poor old computer desk, with a new router lift installed in it.

This is not hard to do, believe it or not. It’s hard for ME, maybe, but it’s not hard.

For this the Woodpecker people recommend a 5/8″ straight bit with a bearing on it, and wouldn’t you know, they just happen to have one picked out for you to buy. So I got that, and I bought the MDF template, which is a board with a plate-sized hole in it. I had a hell of a time clamping it to the desk, but I managed. I still haven’t figured out the best way to adjust the depth on the router, but I moved it down by increments, routing around the template over and over, until I got past the 0.40″ depth I needed. I could have done it in one pass; the Bosch is apparently a pretty powerful router, and the MDF and melamine didn’t seem to challenge the bit. But all the books and videos say to take an eighth of an inch per pass, so that’s about what I did.

It was unnerving, making that first plunge into the desk. But it worked perfectly. I got a perfect outer edge on the rabbet I was making. The inner edge was a little off, but that was scrap, anyway. I had read that a router this size was hard to handle, but it wasn’t.

When I got the rabbet made, I had to figure out how to get rid of the scrap in the middle. It wasn’t a rabbet yet; it was a groove, and the stuff inside the groove had to be disposed of. A lot of people recommend a jigsaw, but I don’t have one, and I suspect it would be very slow and make a real mess of the MDF.

I decided to use the router. I clamped boards to the table to use as templates, and I routed until I saw daylight, and then the scrap fell out. I nibbled the remaining rough bits off, freehand. I plopped the lift in the hole, and it looks perfect. The imperfections in the rabbet are pretty small; it doesn’t look bad even with the lift out. I still have to adjust the height, but that’s a five-minute job.

This is sweet. Now I have to do something about dust collection. I removed about three ounces of material and produced maybe thirty gallons of dust. And it flies up and goes under goggles. That was unpleasant. I’ll have to come up with an answer. I guess I need to finish flattening the table, build a fence, and see where I can attach hoses.

I got to use my vernier caliper! That thing rocks!

I feel semi-competent. I will cherish the sensation while it lasts.

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It gets even better! I stuck the router in the lift! It goes up! It goes down! Next year, I’ll install a Wonkalift that goes frontways and backways, too!