Tricked-out overarm pin router

[BuckeyeDennis]

A couple of years ago, a nice stand-alone Shopsmith overarm pin router followed me home from Craigslist. I'm finally getting it equipped and in service, and it is awesome. This is it's story.

First things first, a teaser shot, fully loaded.

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Next, the aftermath of milling 1/4" x 1/4" grooves (for tongue and groove paneling) on some 250 linear feet of Sycamore hardwood, using the undertable router.

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What you see in this photo is the entire complement of escaped sawdust from almost 100 yards of grooving. Meanwhile the lumber lost upwards of 200 cubic inches of volume, filling up about three five-gallon buckets with shavings with the help of a Dust Deputy. Doing the under-table router duty was a 15A, 3-1/4 hp Triton TRA-001 router. It never complained, and barely got warm. For dust-collection hookup details, see reible's thread. I did have to turn a custom dust-manifold block to connect the various hoses. It's still unfinished, and temporarily clamped in place under the table, but by golly it works just fine. To drive home that point, here is a close-up photo of all that escaped sawdust.

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[ERLover]

By the looks of things it a stand alone? After rereading i guess it is a stand alone Nice table!!

[moggymatt]

Not bad . I don't think I've ever seen one come up on CL or a yard sale here in the last few years I've been looking.

[BuckeyeDennis]

The stock stand-alone OPR has one annoying quirk. As it came from the mother-ship, the over-arm is clamped to the support post with a couple of hex bolts. If you need to reposition it, it's pretty easy to loosen the bolts. To make that even easier, I stole reible's idea and replaced the hex bolts with ratchet knobs.

But there was still one little problem.

Let's say that you want to loosen the overarm clamp, so that you can swing it aside to use the undertable router and fence. Well, it loosens easily enough so that you can swing it. But then, it also wants to drop like a rock. My own little innovation was to install a 2-3/4" shaft collar on the support column, flush against the bottom of the arm. Now you can loosen the arm and effortlessly swing it aside, without changing the height. And when/if you want to change the height, just reposition the shaft collar first, and then move the arm. Quick and easy.

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[BuckeyeDennis]

Not bad . I don't think I've ever seen one come up on CL or a yard sale here in the last few years I've been looking.

They're somewhat uncommon around here, but not really rare. I'd guess that they come up on CL a couple time a year, on average. In addition to the one in the photos, I bought a rusted-out basket case for $20 at an online estate auction. Most of it was scrap, but the overarm mechanism was still good. I have it cleaned and freed up, and when I get time, I'll to convert it into a way-tube mounted unit for routing mortises on my 520, in horizontal mode. I also salvaged and repainted a couple of the rusty leg braces to replace missing ones on my good OPR -- these are the side braces that you can see in the photos.

[reible]

Nice!!!!!!

Like the stop collar idea, I have an order I'm working on for some stop collars and I'll add one in the correct size for my machiine.

Looks like the JessEm fence works well with the side mounting hardware, is that true or did you have to work some magic?

I'm impressed with so little saw dust. I don't have a lower vacuum adapter on my Hitachi router so I can understand your improvement there but the shopsmith vacuum system on the top leaves a lot to be desired or was it done with the jessem fence you have on?

Ed

[BuckeyeDennis]

The standalone OPR had one other design flaw, albeit one that is shared with the majority of router tables on the market. Simply put, the table is made of melamine-covered particle board, and there is a huge hole cut out of the middle of it for the router plate. There isn't a lot of beef left in the middle of the table, and that's an invitation to sag over time.

My OPR is 1990 vintage, which makes it 25-odd years old. So while the table was otherwise in almost perfect condition, it had sagged about 1/32" in the middle. Now mind you, I'm one of those guys who enjoys driving Charlese nuts by insisting on working to 0.005" or better. So 1/32" of sag wasn't even close to acceptable to me. After cutting T&G in 250 feet of hardwood, I'll be danged if I want to spend the next month or so sanding all the adjoining boards flush with one another.

But again, the solution was pretty simple. Some angle iron from Ace hardware (painted with red-oxide primer and then some SS touch-up paint), some judiciously-placed mounting holes, and some masking-tape shims under the angle iron got that vintage table flat to within +0", -0.002" in pretty short order. If I ever bought a brand-new table made of anything other than metal, I'd install similar stiffeners up front, before it ever had a chance to sag.

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Definition (1) of "judiciously placed mounting holes": The front angle-iron stiffener was mounted by replacing two of the front T-track woodscrews with stainless machine screws, through the table and angle iron. Virtually impossible to detect from above.

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Definition (2) of "judiciously placed mounting holes": After experimenting with threaded fasteners in particle board, i concluded that the stuff was really suitable for compression loading only. And so to mount the rear angle-iron stiffener, I eventually decided to counter-bore the top for through carriage bolts. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a nice shiny carriage-bolt head, in a counterbore colored black with an felt-tip marker, looked as if it had belonged there all along.

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One other point about rehabbing a 25-year old OPR. When I bought it off of CL, it was missing the pin insert and all of the pins, plus the leg booties were worn through. But the Mother Ship still had all of this stuff in stock, at what I considered very reasonable prices. So I bought replacements plus spares of everything, plus a blank plate for mounting the big Triton router, for less than $50 total, IIRC. Simply amazing. The only thing the MS couldn't help me with was the missing leg braces, which would have been a pretty simple fix even if I hadn't lucked into the cheap/rusty OPR for replacement parts.

That's all for tonight, guys. Later, I'll review the Triton router, the Jessem fence & guides, and hopefully a cool inlay jig that I'm building to repair the Sycamore board splits with inlaid butterfly joints.

[BuckeyeDennis]

Nice!!!!!!

Like the stop collar idea, I have an order I'm working on for some stop collars and I'll add one in the correct size for my machiine.

Looks like the JessEm fence works well with the side mounting hardware, is that true or did you have to work some magic?

I'm impressed with so little saw dust. I don't have a lower vacuum adapter on my Hitachi router so I can understand your improvement there but the shopsmith vacuum system on the top leaves a lot to be desired or was it done with the jessem fence you have on?

Ed

No magic on mounting the Jessem fence (unless you count the magic of Google, to find a compatible fence ). It fits with no fuss at all.

The T&G work was all done with the under-table Triton router and the Jessem fence (and it's dust port).

The tongue cutter was somewhat messier, being that the cuts are on the outside edges of the board. But I'd estimate that dust collection still got 99% of the large chips, and 99.9% of the fine sawdust. I was also running a JET air filtration system overhead, and never felt the slightest need to wear a mask or respirator.

The butterfly inlay work will be all overarm-router duty. I'll be very interested to see how efficient the dust collection is in that mode.

[Mike907]

Just beautiful, Dennis. You've given me something to aspire to with my OPR table.

Thanks,

Mike

P.S. Your lumber pile is something to aspire to, also.

[nuhobby]

Yeah!! Yeah!!! This is all right!

When I've posted on another hand-tool forum, the one power tool that has drawn envy is the overarm router I have from Shopsmith.

Looking forward to seeing that sycamore when it's done.

Chris