louisworld.ca

Although I did have (and still do) a router, I didn’t have a router table. I had been looking to buy one for while now and I was also toying with the idea of building my own. Well that what I did, with some help from Lee Valley Tools. While doing my regular perusing of the catalog, I saw a table insert specifically made to make your own router table. The insert, is a phenolic plastic disc of 9″ in diameter by 1/4″ thick. The kit comes with the tools to fix the base plate to your your base and one of the major advantages is that you drill the holes yourself so your base plate doesn’t look like Swiss cheese.

The kit also contains instructions on how to make the table top for the router table. Very easy to do and it works like a charm! The only other items you need to have in order to create your table is a 3/16″ drill bit, a 1/2″ drill bit (for wood) and a 1/2″ straight router bit. The countersink bit to drill the base plate is included with the kit. The instructions are accurate and easy to follow.

For my own table I bought a 1/2″ MDF 24″x48″ sheet but they recommend (and so do I) a thicker one. I resawed the MDF sheet to 24×36 which gives me a nice surface to work on. I might go buy another sheet of 1/2″ (the closest hardware store seems to only carry that thickness…) and glue them together to have a stiffer, thicker table top. I reused the stand I had built for my miter saw so that that stand can now serve with two tools. I just removed the miter saw for router use and just make the router bit is below the surface before putting back the miter saw back on it when I need it. Space saving and effective!

More detailed infor about the Veritas Base plate/Table insert on their website.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 7:34 and is filed under Outils. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.