Shopsmith Forums

JPG40504 wrote:What are you using as a guide for the workpiece?

iclark wrote:thanks to all 3 of you for the replies. I appreciate what you are saying and I understand it.

however...
the last time I needed to use a router, I was doing a 1/4-round round-over of 3 of the 4 long edges of a 2"x10"x10' board. I assembled my cheap router table (decent little steel table - worthless fence), mounted it on a Dewalt miter saw support cart, and tried to do the routing on the table with a support roller on each end. after one pass, I unmounted the router and did it freehand. there was not enough stiffness in alignment between the support rollers and the router table.

While this may seem to be something that was hard to do you did have the basic idea of what needs to happen. In the old days I had a very small sears router table and had to deal with the same problems you have mentioned. What has to happen is that you need to find a "good" spacing of the stands in relation to the router table. You need to make sure they are on the same plane... as you feed the wood onto the router table it should stay flat on the table as much as possible. Your hands need to keep it flat on the table or you need to add a mechanical device to make sure the wood is flat on the table.

Often wood is warped or twisted or has a bow in it. In fine woodworking you would attempt to correct this. In less critical application you learn to live with it but if it is too bad sometimes a table and all your efforts will not work well enough. You found the solution and that was to go to a hand held router. With the hand held router you reduce the "table" size down to the size of the router sub-base. That is a lot more forgiving then a 24" table.

Having a large table may not make the situation better. In some cases it may make it more difficult... why?? Because if the stock does have a bow or twist that is the problem not the size of the router table and more surface may make it more difficult for you to have to fight that issue.

for that 10' long 2"x10", it seems relevant to me whether I have a 2' long router table (fence parallel to the rip fence) or a 10' long router table (fence parallel to the table connector tubes, jointech table on 520 rails, and 5' connector tubes in both directions used to build the SS table system).

Ed, your example has the fence parallel to the bench tubes, but you have gone to the effort to set up the router table as an outfeed table rather than mounting it between the main and extension tables. you avoided using the extension table or main table to support or interfere with the workpiece.

If I dug through my photo's I'm sure I can find one with the jointech table mounted as they intended it to be used. I know I have used it in that mode as well as mounted off the end of the shopsmith. The picture of it mounted behind I had set up for some small work I was doing with pieces up to about 4' long. I also have the clamp set so I have also used the fence turned at 90 deg from the normal mode. For me it about flexibility of use.

Somewhere in my photo collection I have a picture of me routing a long piece of wood and the piece was so long that I had to open the door between the house and garage to get the out feed length I needed. The wife took it quite well and snapped the picture as the wood went past the utility room door.... In that case the roller stand was about 5' away and it all worked out pretty well.

for small pieces, I guess it is handy to be able to walk around 3 sides of the router table, but, for longer pieces, it seems like assembling floating table, main table, router table, extension table, floating table on 5' connector tubes with legs would make an excellent long router table except for the ridges in the aluminum table tops.

As far as the ridges I wouldn't worry about them. I have several router tables that are made that way and they all work fine. What you do need to worry about is having the mounting plate level with the surface of the table, same with inserts and anything that can catch the leading edge of the work piece. If the wood is catching in the ridges of the table then we are back to wood that is twisted or warped as a likely reason.

it feels like I am missing something fundamental. SS gets put down because of the relatively small table saw table. SS could point out how small all the non-SS home shop router tables are compared to the 510/520 if we just turn the fence 90* from the traditional position. but they don't. and the experienced people here don't. (and at this point, I expect someone to offer me some cheese with my whine]I'm a big fan of routing and have done a bit of it over the years. I've had about 10 router tables setup for some time, now I'm in the last couple of years I have been in the process of getting that number down to say 6 or so. None of current ones have a table over about 38-40" wide. My first "ultimate router table" I built was 4 feet long with a metal router table mounted between two built up sections. I used that for about 3 years before "ultimate router table 2.0" it was a lot smaller. After 3.0 came out I began thinking there is no one solution to a best router table and the best solution was many router tables.

If you want to use the shopsmith as a very wide router table by turning the fence direction I see no problem with it. I wonder just how wide you can go with say a set of 5' tubes out each end... maybe something like 16'??? I have only one set so maybe someone with two sets can set it up and take a picture (wide angle lens please).[/color]

sorry to get so wordy,
Ivan

reible wrote:Hope that clears up a few more of the issues.

JPG40504 wrote:IVAN: RE routing the edge(s) of a 10' workpiece.

Clamp a board(fence) the length of the workpiece. Let the edge of the sole plate ride against it. The distance to the edge could be adjusted(and clamped) several places along the length. FWIW:)