Beginners Guide to Routing – How not to chop off your fingers.

Here is a quick and simple guide to making your first few cuts with a router and actually being pleased with the results.

Included are tips for when not to use a router, the different cutting bits you can use, and what to expect from this powerful piece of equipment.

Safety First.

Wear goggles and a face mask. I can’t emphasise this enough. If you can’t afford a dust extraction unit, or you are only making a few cuts and don’t want the hassle of setting it up, then wear a face mask. It’s uncomfortable and sweaty, but a router produces incredibly fine sawdust which will get into your lungs and make you cough.

Goggles are essential because sometimes a splinter or chip of wood can be torn from the end of a working piece and hurled with an incredible speed in a random direction across the workshop. It’s not funny if it hits your face, and eye damage is one of the hardest to heal. Don’t become a D.I.Y. statistic.

A router can cut to the bone in 1/10,000th of a second. Treat your tools with respect. Be aware that they are dangerous, and never, ever assume that something is unplugged without checking first. Always disconnect your router from the mains before changing the cutting bit. You will need a spanner to change the bit, and accidentally have the router spin whilst you’re holding a spanner round the shank will either damage you or the router. Don’t risk it.

Mess.

The router generates a huge amount of sawdust after even a modest amount of cutting. I recommend having a vacuum cleaner nearby. Clean up after each day, because the accumulated dust will make your life unpleasant until it is tidied up. If you can cut in an area free of clutter, then so much the better. Anything in the room with you will be coated with a fine patina of sawdust.

Mistakes.

You will make mistakes whilst routing. Don’t worry about them unduly. It’s the easiest thing in the world to lift the router from a piece of work and have it make an unexpected cut, or to measure wrongly and cut in the wrong place. These things will become second nature to you once you have practiced for a while. You will know where

to measure from, and which types of cut require which setups.

Before you try anything on a piece of work, make sure that you are relatively comfortable which how you are going to use the router. Make a few cuts on a piece of wood that you can afford to waste. It’s worth going down to the local woodwork shop and trying to collect any off cuts that they are throwing away. It’s surprising how much wood you can get in that manner.

When Not To Use A Router.

Don’t use a router if you don’t have some way to secure the piece you are working on. A router table will help with this, because essentially you will be securing the router and bring the piece by hand towards the cutting bit. But router tables have their own hazards, not least of which is that the cutting bit is pointing towards you.

Don’t use a router if you don’t want a mess or don’t want to clean up after yourself. I’ve mentioned the amount of mess before, but only actually doing a cut will truly bring home to you how much mess they really make.

A router isn’t always the correct tool to use. For example, you wouldn’t use a router as a hammer. Besides anything else, if you mess up the bottom of your router, you’re probably going to have to replace the whole thing. Get a good combination of tools together and know how to use them before you try the router. The chisel is an excellent tool to finish off work started with a router. You will undoubtedly need chisels, so it’s worthwhile getting a set and keeping them sharp.

Choosing Your Wood.

Choose a soft bit of pine for your first attempts at routing. It’s much cheaper than harder woods such as oak or ash, and is easier to get hold of, and doesn’t matter as much if you destroy a piece you’re working on. It’s a nice fast growing variety that gets replenished very quickly, and you won’t feel like you’ve just destroyed twenty years of growth with a single slip.

MDF is a good contender, and is even cheaper than pine. It also takes a router cut very well, but has the disadvantage of producing hazardous sawdust. The glue that they use to stick the fibres together is toxic, and will become airborne when routing. If you disregard the warning about wearing a mask for pine, then at least wear the mask for the MDF. We really mean it. It’s nasty.

Cutting Direction.

Hold your right hand with your thumb perpendicular to your fingers, making an L shape between finger and thumb. Your palm should be facing away from you. The direction your fingers are pointing in is the direction you should be moving the router in.

For an inside cut, one which makes a groove in a solid piece of wood, it doesn’t seem to matter, but I would always cut away from my body given the option.

Cutting Speed.

Don’t be scared of the router. It’s a tool. Turn the speed to a high setting, and hold it firmly by the handles. It’s a very noisy tool, and it can startle you the first time you use it. Get used to the noise before trying your first cut.

Too slow a setting will result in the router gripping the wood and lurching out of your control, whereas too fast a setting could potentially scorch wood and produce burn marks on the surface. These marks can often be removed with a light sanding however, and add character to a piece that you are planning to stain or varnish. Your first cuts should be with the router set on a high setting. You can try slower speeds after you become used to the router.

Choosing A Cutting Bit.

You’re going to have to get a fairly wide selection of cutting bits if you want to do any routing. To start, I would recommend a selection of fairly cheap bits that fit your router. You probably have a quarter or half inch shank. Your router probably came with at least one bit, so measure it and get all your bits the same size. The easiest cutters to use are ones with a bearing on them.

Always remember to bring the router up to speed before letting the blade touch the wood. Failure to do this may result in damage to the router. They are not designed for a stationary start.

The bearing is placed against the wood that you will be cutting, and the blade will easily and accurately cut out a nice edge. This is perhaps one of the best ways to get used to a router’s behaviour, and trying different bearing cutters will give you a good feel for what shapes you will be able to create.

The danger points are the corners of a piece. The router may slip as the direction of your pressure changes whilst going around a corner. Prepare yourself for it, try a few corners, and get used to your individual router’s behaviour.

Using A Cutting Bit Without A Bearing.

Measure everything twice before you cut when you plan on using a cutting bit without a bearing. Your router probably came with a piece of equipment that looks like a triangle with the top chopped off and two metal prongs coming out of it. This is used for cutting in the middle of a narrow piece of wood. To line it up properly, adjust your router so that the cutting bit is just resting on the work surface without digging in. Make sure that the blade is closest to the edge that you want to cut.

Place the router over the surface you intend to cut after making sure that the piece is firmly secure and cannot move. Push the prongs through the pegs on the router until the triangle’s stops rest against the edge of your piece, and then tighten the screws holding them in place. Remember that the router is quite capable of ruining your piece of work as doing it properly and that concentration on keeping the stops firmly pressed against the side of the piece is essential for a clean cut.

You should not cut too deeply in a single pass. Adjust your router to a depth not more than the width of the blade. The shallower the cut, then the more cuts you will need to make, but the easier they will be to control. As you get more experienced, experiment with increasing the depth of the cut, but avoid cutting deeper than the width you are cutting. So for a 18mm wide cutting bit, you would have to cut a depth of 22mm with at least two cuts.

The danger points for cutting the middle of a piece of wood are right at the beginning, when the router has just finished spinning up and it touches for the first time, at the end, when you will want to remove the router from the piece and you cannot rely on the stops, and two others if you are working close to the end of a piece. The stops on the triangle often have a space in between them and there is a point at the beginning and the end where only one of the stops is resting against the wood and you want to either get another one on, or have just taken one away from the surface of the wood. The pressures on the router will have changed, and you have to expect this and handle it.

Using A Cutting Bit With A Template.

There are hundreds of templates available made from the finest materials, but they suffer from being prohibitively expensive, far out of the price-range of the occasional hobbyist. You can make a few good templates with a few small pieces of plywood.

The easiest, and one which does not require screwing anything to the bottom of the router, is one which is simply a square of plywood with a piece of 1×2 pine attached to it, sticking out of one side, effectively making a flag shape. This will be converted into a template for a specific router and a specific cutter, and can’t easily be interchanged with other cutters or routers.

Using the router and cutter that you want, rest the flat side of your router against the plywood and cut through the 1×2 in a single pass.

Now you can line up the cut with a piece of work, clamp the plywood over the piece and simply rest the router against the straight plywood edge. This produces excellent cuts, and is surprisingly simple. If you always move the router bit through the 1×2, you may accidentally damage it, but it should be fairly easy to replace it and rout out a new cut.

A Right Angled Template.

For this template, you will need to have the circular template piece attached to the bottom of your router. It looks like a piece of metal that someone has pushed a finger through, leaving a ridge all the way round. This ridge rests against the template that you place and clamp over your work, and cuts the piece below. Remember that a template will reduce your effective cutting depth, so take that into consideration when you are measuring. This is why professional templates are made out of thin but heavy-duty metal.

If you have an L shaped template, clamp it to your work, and rout round it. You will instantly see the problem with templates. They cannot cut right angles. You will have to finish off the corner with a chisel or saw, so keep your chisels sharp and well oiled.

Finally..

Remember that the router cannot do everything, but the things that it can do, it does very well.

Practice with your router often. Get small pieces of wood from anywhere you can and practice different ideas that you have. You may surprise yourself with how creative you can be.

Take heart and don’t get discouraged. Routing is difficult. It’s easy to think you’re useless after you mess up a piece of work. You’re not useless, and this isn’t easy.

The most unlikely things often work surprisingly well. Don’t be scared to try new things.

Little projects are probably the best place to start. Don’t try a big project as your first routing attempt. The pressure to get it right will be enormous, and a single slip could put you hours behind. Work up to a big job gradually. If you can avoid telling anyone what you’re trying to accomplish, you might appreciate it later. A full-size treasure chest can become a children’s toy box if things go wrong, and no-one but you and God will know.

Enjoy the experience. Not everyone can do woodwork, and not everyone wants to try.

Suggested reading:

Router Techniques: An in Depth Guide to Using Your Router (by Paul Schmidt)

Woodworking with the Router (by Bill Hylton, Fred Matlack)