Jeff's Router and the End of the Project

 

Jeff over at From a Rocky Hillside asked about how often I use my router and knowing that he does some woodworking, I thought I would show him my setup in conjunction with finishing up my router bit cabinet. Above is my table saw which is what is considered a hybrid table saw. It has a lot of the same features at a stationary cabinet table saw but has a wheel system underneath that allows me to raise it up and move it around as needed. The right wing of the table saw came with just open space between the guides that hold the fence because it is expensive to fill it with materials that aren't really necessary in using the table saw. My router table at the time was nearly the same size as that opening and so I took off all the legs and attached it into the opening. This allows me to use my router at a comfortable height, use the fence on the table saw if needed, and provides a convenient way to store my router table out of the way when not in use. I just lower it down until the bit is below the surface of the table saw.

I built the cabinets underneath the wing holding the router to store wrenches needed for setting up the router in the upper right drawer and up until this project, the upper left drawer held my special router bits. The big lower drawer holds a couple more hand held routers that I use for mobile routing. Since I combined these two tools and built the cabinet, I have gotten lots of use out of my router where as before, it rarely got used at all because it was inconvenient to bring out, set up, tear down and put away.

With my doors for the router bit storage case made, I needed to route a rabbet to accept the plexiglass much like one does with a picture frame. Above is my rabbet router bit chucked up into the router. The bearing on top can be swapped out with bigger or smaller bearings to adjust the size of the rabbet.

By lowering the bit to a specific height, I can route the rabbet on the back side of the door that will hold the plexiglass. As fortune would have it, when I built my greenhouse some years ago, I made some of my own windows and had some leftover plexiglass. So I dug out those scraps that I had saved all these years and cut a couple of them to size. I dug out my old kitchen cabinet door hardware saved from the previous kitchen that I have also stored for all these years and picked out some hinges for the door. I also had door handles but decided they were just two big for such small doors and so just made a couple of wooden door pulls out of a small scrap of walnut that otherwise would have been tossed or perhaps saved for Kelly's chessboard.

After some consideration of available wall space, I chose to mount the cabinet to the wall underneath my new hand tool cabinet that I recently built. It is accessible to get to when needed, yet out of the way too. You might be able to tell that there is an extra board to hold even more bits on the lower left side of the case so I have some room for expansion if necessary. On top of the board are a few allen wrenches used to adjust the bearings on various bits. I might drill a hole for them at some point if I'm feeling fancy but for now, I'm just ready to move onto something else. The weather is holding and I think I may have time for another small project that has been on my to do list for awhile and it will involve using a number of my router bits displayed above.