I am Considering an Exorcism

I got my box parts all ready to go today, and then I turned to the most dreaded machine in the garage. The router. This thing is possessed. And I knew I had to make it behave, in order to produce a decent box and avoid ruining all the preceding work.

I learned a lot. Mostly, I learned that anyone who tells you a stick with a screw through one end and a clamp on the other is a good router fence has been smoking too much pressure-treated sawdust.

One of the things that sets great tools apart from good tools is the ability to do repetitious jobs without driving you insane. The stick with a clamp is a good tool. To make ONE router cut. If you have to make the same cut over and over, at different intervals in the same piece of work, you might as well kill yourself. When you move the stick, the angle to the table changes, and if you’re using stop blocks, each one MOVES relative to the router bit.

If you’ve used a router, you know exactly what I mean. If not, go look at Lolcats.

The best kind of router fence moves at both ends, and it remains parallel to the front of the table when you move it. And you can adjust it with screws and dials, not rulers and tape measures and bits of wood that you use to bang it into place.

There’s a guy named Pat Warner who makes incredible router fences. He can adjust cuts to within a few thousandths, I think. I used to think he was nuts. Maybe he is, but he can do things with a router that I can’t, and there are things that would take me half an hour that he can do in three minutes.

I made LOTS of mistakes routing the compartments for the lathe tools. I can sort of cover them up in the final assembly, but the truth is, it’s time to man up and look for a decent router fence. This fumbling around is just idiotic. And I need to get a Harbor Freight digital caliper and cut it up and turn it into a depth gauge.

Today I wondered why they don’t make milling machines for wood. A router is just a crappy version of a milling machine. Why not go whole hog and hang it from a ram over a table? Then I realized…nobody wants a five-thousand-dollar router. Except maybe Pat Warner.

They make something similar to a milling machine. I think it’s called an overhand router. You can find it on the Grizzly site.

The table saw is the greatest invention in history. It does exactly what I want, and it does it easily. The router is vicious and unpredictable, and the only way I’m going to subdue it is through superior technology. The clamp and stick are not working out.