# My first ever use of a router...



## arnoldb (Apr 21, 2014)

Many, if not most of you might fall off your chairs laughing, but that's fine by me; there's always a first time of doing something or using a tool 

There's a bit of a story here, so I hope I don't bore you...

My main hobby is actually model engineering, and in November 2009 I set about building a small live steam O gauge locomotive. While living in Namibia has wonderful perks, one of the biggest drawbacks is being able to source things from overseas that are not available locally, and the hefty "royalties" exchange rates and import duties incurs.

I needed railway tracks to actually run the live steam loco on, and could not source it locally or from neighboring South Africa. I eventually found a supplier in another country that was willing to sell and ship me a basic oval railroad track set - at a premium, but I was willing to pay the price.

Six weeks after ordering, the goods finally arrived. Not the oval track set I ordered, but just a selection of four 45 degree corners and a cross-over. I had no recourse to get the correct goods, as the return policy period had expired after four weeks. I didn't have enough track to run the loco on, and I was out of pocket big time...

I can be a very determined little rascal if I want to be, and I WANTED to have tracks to run the locomotive on. But I was broke, so needed to hatch a plan to make tracks using whatever I had lying around and/or could source fairly cheaply locally...

A couple of months before this, my dad had given me his "old" router. I could, back then, do basic woodworking with hand tools and some other electrical wood-working machinery, but had never ever used a router. A plan was hatched to make tracks using aluminium L strips as the tracks, embedded into a bit of pressed wood I had left after some kitchen renovations:









Then, with shaking hands, I set up some markings, set up the router guide with it's pivot point and routed my first-ever curved slots:









Connecting up the straight bits was much easier, and after knocking in the aluminium strips after some perforating to make them "bendy", I had a railway track:









So, not a traditional use of a router, and nothing fancy, but that's how my first ever use of a router contributed to one of the best days of my life - seeing a live steam locomotive run for the first time :dance3:

Kind regards, Arnold


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## Semipro (Mar 22, 2013)

Well done Arnold,some times in life we must Grit our teeth and get it done you did fine job


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## herrwood (Apr 19, 2014)

Looks like you are headed down the right track


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## jw2170 (Jan 24, 2008)

Logical solution to a problem, I like it, Arnold.


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## Cherryville Chuck (Sep 28, 2010)

Nicely done Arnold. Necessity is often the mother-of-invention.


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## BCK (Feb 23, 2014)

right on...thx for sharing


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## Salty Dawg (Jan 24, 2014)

Looks good, that looks more than just a simple job. Where are the pics of the train on the tracks?


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## Wildwood (Aug 14, 2010)

Very well done Arnold - look forward to seeing the completed set-up
Rob in Wilderness


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## arnoldb (Apr 21, 2014)

Many thanks Gents.

Don & Rob, that was as far as the set-up went back then and it was just temporary...

I don't have photos of the train on those tracks; only a videoclip, but I'm still under "newcomers' rules" so can't post a link to it. If you do a search on YouTube for "arnoldb1000 fredfinal" you should be able to find it.

I didn't post pictures of the locomotive, as it might be a bit off topic. But I since remembered there is a bit of wood on it so here goes. It was entirely made from bar stock and plate. Even the rivets were made from plain copper wire. The only bits I didn't make was the name plates; a good friend in the UK CNC'd those and sent them on:


















The board track has since been replaced with a permanent layout on my front stoep; also only visible in a couple of videos, but here's a photo I took while doing the layout:









This is what I mostly get up to:









And lastly, the latest model I'm working on - I need to build a router sled to finish the Rhodesian Teak base:









That's enough O.T. for now.

Kind regards, Arnold


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## DaninVan (Jan 1, 2012)

Pretty impressive, especially as you haven't had any router experience!
And yes, we want to see the train; more pics, please.


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## papasombre (Sep 22, 2011)

Hi, Arnold.

It seems to me that your ¨shaking hands¨ made a great job for you. Congrats!!!


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## tlm724 (Mar 16, 2014)

heres the video, great job !

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN9riV4q3SM


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## arnoldb (Apr 21, 2014)

Thanks Dan, Alexis and Timmy.

Thanks for the link Timmy 

I made a start on the router skis; using whatever bits 'n bobs I have around. A part of it will also serve as a table-mount for my router.
Hopefully it will be finished soon; I'll post when it's done - didn't take any photos yet.

Kind regards, Arnold


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## AnvilJack (May 4, 2014)

Well done Arnold. 

Here you "prove" the old rule again: learning a skill set is best driven by having a real purpose for it. And it is amazing how often one application will lead to another.

So, I have quiet confidence you will be routing away at something else very soon.

Good one.


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## RainMan 2.0 (May 6, 2014)

I thought that was pretty cool actually . Have you ever watched Macgyver


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## arnoldb (Apr 21, 2014)

Thanks AnvilJack and Rick 

Rick, Macgyver is one of my child-hood hero's... - I never go anywhere without my trusty Victorinox pocket knife - and it sees a LOT of use. From cutting biltong at any time to sitting in a computer data center at 1 o'clock in the morning and manually shaving the brass earth prong on a 3 point plug to fit a UPS connection with a "shaved earth" plug so I can get a project done on time...

Earlier on I mentioned I'll be making a router sled - I ended up with a router ski instead.
It's not pretty, and contrary to most shown here on RouterForums, it's mainly made of metal - nearly all of it salvaged from the scrap pile.
My router can only take 8mm bars, and rigidity for these are a major limiting factor, so I basically had to build a cradle for it to mount it to a more sturdy ski construction. With some careful pot-luck design, the basic cradle will double as a table mount in future as well.



















I gave it a bit of a try-out on some very rough-cut, dust-ingrained and weathered teak:









This is the other side of the same piece of teak - I forgot to take a photo before starting, but it gives an idea of the sorry state the wood was in initially:









All the fasteners used for the ski are M6 - I pretty much standardize on that for my mostly metal working shop as far as possible and sensible, and as a result I have 6mm Allen Keys and 10mm spanners (wrenches to those in the USA) literally littering the shop; it's very convenient. The initial trial run did highlight some points though; using an Allen key to set the ski height is fine; that's done once and the router's own plunge travel takes care of fine-tuning, but it was inconvenient to adjust the cross-travel with the Allen key...

To address the problem, I dug through the scrap bin - a couple of year ago I made my own gear cutter and tested it on aluminium stock (it's cheap) to make some gears to test things. The needed gears were then made from bronze, and the aluminium gears with 6mm holes dumped in the scrap bin. An M6 cap screw's head measures out to about 9.9mm, so I drilled the "gears" to 9.8mm and pressed M6 cap screws into that to transform the "gears" into knurled thumb screws:








You might have noticed the "double" holes where the lock screw mounts... No; that wasn't a mistake; the hole closer to the "center" of the stock was there already. That's what one gets from re-using stuff off the scrap pile...

The basic "cradle" consists of two pieces of 8mm stainless steel rod that was turned down and threaded M6 both ends, two bits of salvaged 16x25mm rectangular tubing drilled to match the router bar-mounting size, and two quick and dirty blocks of steel to clamp to 1/2" square tubing. The four screws at the extreme ends of the 16x25 serves as guides on the ski rails, and will double up as mounting holes to table-mount the router:









The ski frame consists of two bits of 1/2" (12mm) square tubing, welded to some heavy duty (5mm thick) 25mm angle iron at each end, and threaded for M6 mounting screws to the uprights:









The skid uprights are just some bits of pine I slotted (on the milling machine, as that was convenient LOL) and mounted with M6 cap screws and body washers:









So it's a really rough and crude-looking jig, but it works quite well. One thing that bothered me was how to override the "dead-man's switch" on my router, but I actually found it quite easy to manipulate the contraption with my right hand on the router and operating the switch, and left hand on the left skid.

In fact, I found it so convenient to operate that I started routing down the under-side of the mounting base for the steam engine I showed earlier in the thread:









If anyone's interested, I'll post some more photos of that once I get around to some more work on it.

Kind regards, Arnold


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## papasombre (Sep 22, 2011)

arnoldb said:


> Thanks AnvilJack and Rick :
> 
> If anyone's interested, I'll post some more photos of that once I get around to some more work on it.
> 
> Kind regards, Arnold


Hi, Arnold.

I am very interested so please, post plenty of pictures.


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## AnvilJack (May 4, 2014)

Thanks for showing us your skid.

That milling machine: metalwork mill? And two flute end mills for blind slots?


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## arnoldb (Apr 21, 2014)

Thanks Alexis and AnvilJack.

Apologies for the late reply; been a bit hectic of late.

AnvilJack, yes - metalworking mill with ordinary 2-flute HSS mills, running at the machine's maximum speed (1200RPM). Not great quality mills either - I get these cheap from Hong Kong - so for work in wood I just use a new one so that it's fairly sharp, otherwise it tears a lot at the wood.

Alexis asked for lots of photos :laugh:

Just to put things in perspective, here's how the engine base I routed down started out. Some bits off a rough bit of teak sawed up:









Hand-planed an edge of each down - played havoc with the plane blade as there was a lot of dust ingrained in the edges, and I ended having to re-sharpen the plane blade a couple of times:









Glued the two pieces up and clamped together:









Then surface-planed that lot down with the hand plane:








It was about that point that I started looking for an alternative to the hand-plane - it' was a serious amount of work!

The board came out OK though:









The bottom of that glued-together bit of wood was still in very rough condition. The difference in colour between the last two photos is between the fluorescent lighting in my shop (first photo) and natural daylight outside the shop on the step in the next one. 

Later on in the engine build, I drilled the mounting holes:









Then mounted it on the metal milling machine:









And milled out the gap for the flywheel:

















At this point I took a break from the actual model engine build and built the router ski as shown in earlier posts.

After the engine base was routed flat with the router ski, I also routed the edges to a nice shape, and sanded the lot down - first with an orbital sander, and then by hand for a final finish:









Then I added a couple of layers of furniture wax, but not polishing it up to a high shine; I want a more "subdued" look on it:









The base needs to be elevated on whatever it stands on, so I made six bronze feet for it:









This is what the base and feet looks like with the engine partially assembled on it:









I haven't seen this done too often, but for fitting some pipe work in a through-hole, I tapped the wood with a normal M8 tap after drilling the hole through:









Surprisingly, tapping the teak was very easy and it threaded cleanly - without any tearing or anything. It gave a similar "feeling" to tapping brass, but just a lot easier to turn the tap.

In the next photo, the brass ferrule I turned up to fit the above hole is visible at the bottom of the down-pipe:









All the woodwork for the project is done now; I'm busy with final finishing on all the engine parts and assembly. This project's kept me busy for hundreds of hours, so my apologies if I'm coming over a bit over-enthusiastic with only a couple of weeks to go...

Kind regards, Arnold


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