Today I’m going to show you how I made this router table jig to make routing finger holds and cutting
boards much much easier and much safer. We do have the plans available for this on our website so be
sure to check those out in the description down below. Without further ado, let's get into it.
It's time to get started making a jig for making cutting finger holds on the router
table for cutting boards quite a bit easier. We do sell the plans for this on our website,
so definitely check that out there. I started out by applying some Oramask
to a piece of Baltic birch plywood. Then I picked up the 45624-k 60 Spectra-coated V-bit with the
StepCraft M.1000 CNC machine. We're going to use this to go through and make the ruler for
this jig, and it's just going to go through that Oramask making a really nice clean cut,
and then we're going to be painting over the numbers to make the ruler a bit easier to see.
Surprisingly, designing out this ruler is not particularly easy. It was definitely way more
difficult to do than I ever thought it would be but we did get that done. So I’m going to
get that pulled off and painted using some General Finishes Lamp Black milk paint and
then we'll use the auto tool changer to pick up the 46176-k 1/8th inch compression bit.
So I used a compression bit here for the entire design but it's not meant for everything. This is
a really shallow pocket that I’m doing here and you can see that it tears out the Oramask quite
a bit. That's because the upcut portion is the only portion touching the material. So I could
have used a down cut bit here but I wanted to show that a compression bit isn't necessarily
great for everything it's really great for through cuts but you need to make sure that your first
pass is below that up cut portion of the bit. So I used the compression bit basically to save
time, so that we weren't using another bit, and for this it worked out perfectly as there's going
to be very minimal sanding, but you can see when we're going through here doing full-depth
cuts it leaves a nice clean top and bottom surface that requires absolutely no sanding.
So the amount of sanding maybe 15-20 seconds of sanding I had to do on those star knobs
wasn't worth the time to change out the bit. If you love this type of content, be sure to
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Holding it in place while I drive a screw in. So this is done. These will be the side supports,
and now I did the exact same thing on the other side, and I’m just cutting a piece of walnut
scrap down to size and we're going to drill out a hole in the middle to accept a threaded insert.
So this will allow me to have a little clamping pressure on the cutting board to keep it held
nice and tight up against the fence. So we'll just insert in that threaded insert, and we can screw
in a bolt to hold it in place. So you can see attaching it here, we'll do so on both sides, and
we have a adjustable height here that will allow me to put that pressure on the cutting board.
So then we'll get the T-nuts hammered into the star knobs so that way we can get everything nice
and secure from the back side. We'll use some quarter 20 bolts - the entire thing is made out
of quarter 20 bolts - and then the star knobs will help secure everything here and will allow
us to slide this back and forth using the ruler as our guide to get everything set correctly.
Then I’ll use some bolts and some T-slot nuts to slide into the fence on the router table.
Worked out really well and we can get that perfectly centered just using
a V-bit to align everything perfectly centered with that zero mark on the actual jig.
So now we can get everything bolted down now that we have it aligned correctly,
and then we can adjust the fence back here on the back side to whatever measurement you want.
This will set the length of the finger hold on the side of the cutting board, and it definitely
makes it quite a bit safer here having a nice vertical stop like this and a nice big back
support piece to make sure that your cutting board doesn't tip while sitting on the router table.
So we can get the 45916 5/16 radius half inch shank core box bit set and then I’ll
adjust the fence back so that we're in the exact middle of the cutting board. Then I’ll adjust
the bottom support piece to ensure that it stays nice and tight up against the fence and we can
slide it back and forth here as you can see. We'll get the bit started. I’m going to take
this in two passes to get down to the full depth, and we'll just move it back and forth using those
fences as a stop. It works out perfectly having the nice tall fence and then we can just move it
back and forth to the opposite side we contact that fence and then pull it up and we're left
with a really nice clean cut on there. So that's just one pass that we're going
to be doing. We'll get it adjusted and raise the height of the router table
and get the second pass done the exact same way. So this back stop here; having it really
nice and tall allows you to put pressure on the back side there,
while the bottom part keeps it held nice and snug. It works out really well and you don't have
any sort of deflection like you can have using a smaller fence.
So I’m going to raise the bit just a teeny tiny bit to do one final cleanup pass;
as you can with cherry move a little bit too slow and cause some burning.
We didn't have too much of that issue here but I just wanted to do one final
pass to clean everything up and we're left with a perfectly clean finger hold
on this cutting board which is definitely something that's not typically easy to do
without a setup like this on the router table. Be sure to check out those plans on our website.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. Have a great day, everybody.
Thank you guys so much for watching. If you love this type of content be
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