Reply To: record 071 handheld router plane
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Personally, I wouldn’t go looking for a fence for the 071 router at all.
They’re of little or no use. That’s why they’re always removed and lost.
The fence-retaining-screw is too short to store the fence on top of the router, and the thread is uniquely obscure, so you’ll never find a longer one.
Besides, routing a groove along a long edge is a job for a 044 Plough Plane which has a decent fence and better-aligned thrust. Anyone tried routing a groove on a long edge with a 071? It’s like riding a bike on a tightrope. TWO fences and you might just get away with it. Adding a wooden fence to the 071 is far more effective than that little one-inch affair Stanley and Record offered.
They needed TWO screws through the base, with two SLOTS in the fence. Instead, they opted for just the one screw and a couple of parallel grooves at 90 degrees to the angle-of-attack. No other plane in history had sideways grooves in the sole, even corrugated planes had the grooves in-line with your work! No wonder its so much smoother when you add a wooden sole.
None of my FIVE routers has the shoe sitting parallel to the sole, and that depth gauge rod is rarely vertical – that’s why they stick. If you need to close the throat, you simply add a wooden sole – not faff around trying to adjust a misaligned metal shoe on a non-vertical rod with two course screws.
That funny ‘depth gauge’ they added to the 071 is not a depth stop, it doesn’t stop you routing when you reach the required depth, its just an indicator. Would you rely on that sticking rod to fall smoothly under gravity to tell you when to stop? How do you know when the gauge had bottomed-out? It doesn’t mate fully with the housing anyway. You can’t lift the router to check. You have to get your nose down to the work and check all round the gauge to see if its touching in one spot. A ruler, marking gauge, or Rabone-square wins that one every time. If you were routing for lots of hinges, you’d test each fit individually. You wouldn’t run a production-line of similarly routed recesses hoping all the hinges were manufactured to the same thickness. The same goes for your tenons.
They opened-up the throats to give improved visibility. Then they obscured your view worse than it was before with a bridge, bracket, depth gauge, screw, shoe, and another screw. When you watch Paul using his 071, he’s taken all that stuff off. Then you still have the bridge and bracket directly in your line of sight.
Stanley & Record obviously wanted to offer all “bells and whistles” to those buying their first router, but I think they missed the mark. In the 71 1/2 they already had a metal equivalent of the ‘old woman’s tooth’ router and that worked admirably. The 71 1/2 is in my opinion the much-better of the two and normally a lot cheaper.