Routers Reviews

I have a number of videos on woodworking. These videos are among the best I have seen. Bob and his son provide simple ways of routing that work well. I highly recommend these videos. Many of the ways they use the router gigs are easy to make once you see the video.

The Router Workshop video collection is the entire third season of the show, un-cut and commercial free. The Rosendahls do a great job of showing how to use your router and get great results. They are geared more to router novices, but do get into some in depth projects. The workbook included in the package has fantastic still pictures from the show, and the text does a great job o amplifying what is shown. The projects are rated according to ability.

I love this series, and am glad to be able to watch the videos since the PBS stations in my area do not carry the current season.

This is a great accessory for plunge routers. It works perfectly in conjuction with a Woodrat machine, but it is also great for router tables and stand alone plunge routing. I was able to very quickly and easily install it onto my Dewalt 625 and it has worked flawlessly ever since. Put a touch of synthetic grease on the two points where the lower bar and upper bar touch and the action will be friction free and easy to control. A superb item and another wonderful innovation from a great company.

I work with a very dusty material and needed a good dust containment solution. One of the dustiest situations is routing inside the customer's kitchen. This dust collection base eliminated all of the dust. My customer was standing right by my side and he said "I don't see any dust". I couldn't believe my eyes. I couldn't be happier with this product.

What can you say about a router collet? It fits the router and it work very well. The only drawback with it is it won't get me a cold beer when I'm done working.

For handheld operations this is probably the most flexible guide, especially because it allows curved edging as well as straight. As well as making internal routing easier. It's solid and precise - as long as you take care to make sure everything is tightened down, and it doesn't get in the way. Works great with my 690.

It's the price that is the real drawback. There really isn't a good excuse for this to cost even more than the 42690 edge guide, but apparently Porter-Cable knows that this is the guide to own. Unfortunately, they are right. As I've mentioned in another edge guide review I don't often need a guide, but this one opens up some new possibilities.

I build cabinets part time and was looking for a better, quicker way to make cabinet face frames when I saw this pocket cutter on a T.V. show. I ordered it and was very surprised at what the pocket cutter consisted of: a rigid metal box, a heavy duty clamp and two porter cable router motors to be mounted inside of the box. A trim router plunges into the wood for the screw pilot hole, and a standard 1.5 hp router motor plunges in at an angle to cut the pocket. It makes quick, tight joints, but is only for use on 15/16" to around 3/4" material. If you plan to do a lot of this tye of work, I highly recommend this product.

In our business of hanging and repairing doors and jambs, the portabilty of tools is important to me. To not have cords in the way when cutting hinge mortises or cutting in lites really speeds up the process. Both the router and jig saw have the power and speed of their corded counterparts. Thanks Porter-Cable.

Ok, so I've been spoiled rotten. I used this saw in the shop at the university where I taught for several years, and when I moved, I had to buy one for myself. For a serious furniture maker like me, it's a great saw-- powerful, precise, heavy, and it turns out, easy to set up, if you have help. My husband and I put it together over the course of a day and a half, with very little disagreement or confusion. I suppose you could assemble it alone, but an extra pair of hands makes wrestling the hefty thing into place, alignments, and leveling a lot easier. There are five different instruction booklets and as many boxes and bags of hardware, but the directions, along with the pictures, are quite clear, and every nut and bolt is accounted for. This is the first time I've ever set up my own saw, and I really expected assembly to be far more difficult than it was.

The Rout-R-Lift is a worthwhile, space-saving addition, with clever, well-made hardware. The March/April 2002 issue of Fine Woodworking has a review of this router-table mechanism, along with some others, and they are quite complimentary about it as well.

I have only a few reservations about the whole package, all fairly minor. The first is that this tablesaw requires you to jam a piece of wood into the blade in order to loosen the arbor nut. It would be so much better if there was some other mechanism that didn't endanger the blade, your fingers, and the arbor nut. I hope Powermatic (now owned by Jet) will address this in subsequent models. I'm also not crazy about the splitter and blade guard, which seem clunky and distracting. I plan to replace them with a Biesemeier removable splitter, but I haven't decided what to do about the guard. Seems as if being able to keep an eye on the blade and your fingers' relationship to it might be the best kind of safety device, although I know there are others who would disagree. My second reservation is that the legs on the cabinet, while easily assembled and adjustable, are made of plastic, and only plastic! I think I might eventually replace them with something a little more substantial. They are set up rather strangely in the picture above, by the way. All the legs go on the cabinet, not right up against the tablesaw. If you want to put the entire thing on a mobile base, or set up the cabinet and router lift separate from the tablesaw, they have instructions for doing that as well. One other helpful thing about set-up that is mentioned in Ian Kirby's tablesaw book is that you should be sure to clean off the thick gunky grease that is slathered on the movable parts for shipping and storage (mineral spirits will take care of this) and replace it with some light machine oil, or the sawdust will collect in it and eventually bog the mechanism down.

I am thrilled to have this machine. It is expensive, but I expect to still be using it when I am an old lady, many years from now.

This is an update-- I've now had the chance to use this machine for several months. I still love it, but some of the things I thought were problems are not, and a couple others are that I hadn't really noticed before. Here goes... Plastic legs-- not a problem, I don't even notice them anymore. Blade changing? Also not a problem-- I got one of those plastic things you fit over it to protect the blade and it works fine. The router mechanism is great, very easy to set up, change bits, etc. The only problem I've had with it is that I don't yet have my dust collection system in place, and ALL the dust from the router ends up IN THE CABINET! Yuck. I think this will improve once I connect the dust collection, but in the meantime, the cabinet is virtually useless. The other problem is that on the Powermatic, anyway, you apparently cannot use a Biesemeyer splitter with a Forrest blade-- they bump into one another. NOT GOOD. Powermatic and these other 2 companies need to get together and relocate their connectors, and they would be a great team. The splitter was great, while it was on my machine with another blade, but I like the Forrest blade even better than the splitter. So guess which one is in use?

I am very happy with this saw so far. It is a great upgrade from the 10" benchtop saw that I have used for the past 10 years. I ordered it from a local supplier. When the saw arrived they loaded the main box into the back of my pick-up truck with a fork lift. I bought the saw with the 30" table, router-lift and mobile base. I loaded the rest of the boxes and drove home. After unloading everything except the main box, I unloaded it by opening the box and taking everything out part by part and my son and I unloaded the saw.

The instructions are good. One interesting tidbit is that there is a hint at the beginning of the instructions that says not to remove the protective wax coating until the saw is assembled. Then immediately after this list of hints, before step one in the instructions, it says to remove the protective coating from the saw table. I removed it first so that I wouldn't be sticking my fingers in it during assembly. WD-40 works great to remove the wax coating. Spray it on, wait a couple of minutes and scrap it off lightly with a scraper and wipe with a paper towel. I used a plastic scraper just to be sure that I didn't scratch the table top.

One review mentioned that there was no information in the instructions on aligning the blade with the T-slots. There is information in my instructions about this. Mine came pretty well aligned, however, I think they need some fine tuning. I ordered an alignment tool and am waiting for that to arrive before I delve into making that adjustment. If I had had the alignment tool I would have done this when I first opened the box. Stand the saw up on its back or side, put a blade on the arbor and adjust it while you have easy access to the bottom and top of the table. If this process proves difficult I will check into the after market devices that you can put on the trunnion bolts to make small adjustments.

Others have mentioned the difficulty mounting the pulley cover on the motor. The pulley cover assembly sandwiches between the motor and the motor mount. When mine rubbed the belt, I loosened the motor mounting bolts and adjusted the postion of the pulley cover assembly and it works fine.

I attached the cast iron table extensions. On one side I had to use a couple of sheets of paper as a shim to flatten the extension with the main table surface.

I also bought the table extension with the Router-Lift insert. The extension is OK but could be of higher quality. I attached it by laying the tubular steel from the front T-Square rail across the back of the table and clamping it down and then clamping the extension table to it. I did the same with a piece of wood on the front of the table. I would drill and attach the rear of the table, then move the tubular steel to the front of the table and do the same. The extension table did not come with hardware for mounting it to the rails. I have no idea why this hardware is not included. That required a trip to the hardware store.

The T-Square rip fence is great with the exception of the plastic faces. There was a slight bulge in the fence just past the center screw. The fence face bulged out on both sides of the fence. I tried fixing it by adjusting the the screws and checking the steel behind the plastic face. It was flat. Since I didn't really like the plastic faces anyway, I replaced them. I went down to the home store and bought a half inch thick 36" x 6" high pressure laminate shelf with finished edges. I cut a 2" strip off each edge (using the T-Square without the plastic faces), drilled the holes and mounted it on the steel T-Square. It works great. It is flat and takes a pencil line much better than the plastic.