A lot of you have asked whether we could show how to make the poor man's router
so this will be a very fast short video for you
I've got a piece of pretty rough
three inch wide material, it's an inch and a quarter thick it could be
thinner
this is just three coarse it depends on how much you're going to use it for a
particular task we used it on the workbench and that's where the request
has come most from so I'm going to take this piece of wood
I'm doing it sideways normally I would put it in the vice this way and bore
through but I'm going to go this way so that you can see what we're trying to do
I need a brace and bit but I could just as easily use a drill driver, a screw gun
or whatever, now I'm going to use a half inch chisel for this, which is this one
here so I'm going to use a half inch chisel
so I'm going to make my whole three-eighths of an inch and that will
give me enough bite on the walls of the hole to hold the chisel securely in the
wooden stock, so now here we want to bore a hole somewhere in the middle like this
and roughly the angle needs to be between somewhere between 30 degrees
35 degrees and 45 degrees so if you want to you can set something on here that's
45 so I would get my position that way so I'm just under 45 and then I bore
my hole, but I'm going to start higher up like this just to get my brace
boring in position there, now I've got in the middle of a knot here so that slowing
me down a bit
so somewhere under 45 will work and don't worry about it breaking through on
the other side you're going to have to go all the way through
this is very boring if you're not doing it
pull the shavings back out with the auger
now we're going to take this chisel and we're going to tap this into the hole so
like this
eyeball, you can go anywhere between the sixteenth of an eighth and an eighth wider and
then just eyeball it as you go so that you're going down the center of the
hole, look at it from the other side you don't want to hammer in to your bench
almost certain it's going to break out on this on the side is most likely going
to break out
I'm through and that I usually just break off this area here with a second
chisel
but don't run into your other chisel just take off those high spots there
this is coming in behind the chisel so that doesn't really matter too much and
I've got a piece of work that I've been working on here but we can set this
now to the depth, once it's gone through the hole is
usually quite easy to adjust
so I'm not quite down to the hole so I tap here
keep going till you got the depth set pretty close
and there is my poor man's router fully, fully functioning and it works as well
as any router and if I want to adjust this I tap here like this, that
retracts the cutting iron of a chisel
so here's another one and it gives a very nice finish on the bottom of this
hole and they can go into the corner here and just chisel this out like this
So that's a poor man's router
that's how you make one