poor mans router

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  • rjb37
    13 February 2013 at 12:13 am #7819

    Has anyone made the poor mans router? I have made about 10 of them and every single one has split on me. One split because I didn’t get the chisel in the hole I drilled. As for the others I am not sure how or why they split on me. I tried aligning the chisel different ways to the grain but that didn’t seem to matter. Any one else or am I alone in the universe with this.

    Florian
    13 February 2013 at 9:06 am #7821

    Hi Ralph,

    as long as the bevel of the chisel is parallel to the grain direction it shouldn’t split. Maybe the hole is much too small for your chisel.

    If you have problems aligning the chisel I find it helpful to draw a pencil line across the hole parallel to the edge for orientation. I even clamped the chisel in a sharpening guide to have more lateral orientation for starting the chisel in the hole and then I removed the guide and drove the chisel in the rest of the way. Paul points it out in the video, too: the fibres will split where the chisel comes out on the bottom but that doesn’t affect the function.

    My first attempt was also a disaster 😉

    Florian

    I enjoy working wood in Germany.

    rjb37
    13 February 2013 at 11:37 am #7831

    Hi Florian,

    Thanks for the tips. I used a 3/16″ drill bit for a 1/4″ chisel like Paul did. I’ll try using a fractionally larger bit with the honing guid trick and see how it works.

    David B
    26 April 2016 at 3:51 pm #136731

    My biggest difficulty in making the poor man’s router (I think it took me about 4 tries to finally get one I was satisfied with) was that the chisel was difficult to get through the hole while maintaining proper alignment so that the bevel runs square/parallel to the stock.

    The second biggest challenge was having the right size hole for the chisel–too tight and it is impossible to adjust. Too loose and the chisel won’t hold the right depth and just slides in and out of the hole. I imagine that the router probably has a limited usable life for this reason as the hole will eventually lose its grip over time.

    But for now, mine works just fine anyway…

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by David B.
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