Design of the Week

Back in the Late 80s I worked in a shop that made displays for conventions. It was a cool job for a woodworker especially one who was into art the way I was. It was like doing sets in a theater and like the theater building convention displays is mostly smoke and mirrors. We did get to do a lot of out of the box type of woodworking and with that came a lot of unique problem that we just couldn't run down to the hardware store and get a tool to solve, so we had to come up with some of our own solutions and time saving devices, one was a three stationed router that we keep set up just for making cabinet doors and another was a two station router for doing sliding dovetails, both the units in the shop we build were floor models.

The one in my design is a bench model that breaks down to three pieces, the two router table and larger table in the back that connect them plus the fences, however; it could be build as a one piece floor unit. The unit is meant to be set up with stick and cope bits for doors, or a 1/4 straight and a dovetail bits for a sliding dovetails, but can be set up with any combination of two piece router bit set so you don't have to keep switching out bits. Each table has enough clearance to run stock pass the next without interference, and at the angle that they are set to each other they don't take up much shop space from the wall and can still run 30" door stiles any longer and you might have to pull it away from the wall to get clearance. Now if you have the room in your shop and you don't need to sit it against a wall, you can sit it out in the middle, where all three sides are accessible, then add the third router on the back so it looks like a triangle, and you will have a nice production setup with a lot of versatility.


Well I hope that this gives you guys some new ideas to think about. I have been thinking about a horizontal router for the side of my table saw, maybe I will draw something like that next, I really like the idea of the router moving X,Y, Z like the one in Fine Woodworking
Joey