Making a Router Table

While handheld plunge routers are fine for light usage and small pieces, if you want to move on to routing longer lengths of wood a router table is pretty much essential. But a good router table can often cost more than the router itself, so I decided to make my own. Like many of my projects, there was a bit of scope creep as I developed the design. The finished item contains a Triton JOF001 router mounted upside down in an oak cabinet I made from, essentially, a larger oak cabinet. It has an adjustable fence with homemade featherboards. There is space on top for my sliding mitre saw (Evolution Rage 3-S), a cupboard containing the router and a wet & dry vacuum cleaner (Titan TTB350VAC), a shelf for router bits and accessories, and three drawers. The drawers were upcycled from another source. The whole unit is mounted on locking castors so I can move it about easily.

MAKING THE CARCASS
The material I used was mostly rescued from a vintage oak cabinet or sideboard that I got via Freecycle. It was probably made in the first half of the 20th century and is plain and unadorned. The craftsmanship is superb. At some point a recess has been (crudely) cut out of the back of the unit so it would fit around a wall pier. The unit was about 2 metres long and the front of it comprised 2 doors. I was able to cut each of these doors in half to make the sides and centre divider for my router table, and the door for the cupboard.

The bottom of my unit was cut from the bottom of the original one, but the top was more problematic because it needed to overhang the ends and front of the cabinet. I couldn't salvage enough material in one piece to make the size of top I wanted, so I had to dowel together 3 pieces from the original top. Also, the top, sides and cupboard door were a bit too narrow for what I wanted, so I had to extend them by dowel-fixing a strip of oak of the right size.

PREPPING THE TIMBER
The original cabinet was finished in a dark brown varnish. Before assembling anything, I stripped this off using varnish remover, then coated all surfaces with domestic bleach to lighten the oak a little.

FITTING THE DRAWERS
I bought 3 pairs of drawer runners from a DIY store that was closing down. They turned out to be a bit too short to allow the drawers to open fully. This is the first time I've ever installed drawer runners - it was a bit tricky to work out how to do it, but I managed it in the end.

INSTALLING THE ROUTER
I've never used a router table before, or even seen one in the flesh, so it was a bit of a challenge for me to work out what was needed from the various cack-handed videos I watched on YouTube. Essentially, with the Triton router, you need a hole in the router tabletop that is the same diameter as the hole in the router's baseplate. You also need 3 holes for machine screws to fit into the router base, and a hole for the winding handle. I decided I wanted to have a 3D printed plastic inset cover plate to make the centre hole as small as possible, so I had to rout a kind of ledge for it to sit on,
Some points to note:
1) The thickness of the tabletop where you mount the router should not be more than 15mm - mine was 22mm, and I had to rout a recess in the underside so the router would operate properly. It's all to do with the automatic collet lock and the safety on/off switch.
2) The holes for fixing the router to the table are not the same as those for fixing the plastic baseplate to the router - they are a different depth and thread pitch. I made a paper template to enable me to position the fixing holes through the tabletop.

Triton's routers are designed to be used with router tables, but they don't give you any information on how to do this (I guess you need to buy their router table). But here's what I did.
1) Remove the plastic baseplate from the router.
2) Unscrew the knob from the top of the turret.
3) Remove the stepped height stop at the bottom of the turret.

ELECTRICS
It is impractical and unsafe to try to operate your table-mounted router using the on-off switch. You need to keep the switch on all the time, connect the router to a switched power outlet - I have a 4-gang switched powerstrip mounted on the front of my router table. I switch it on there, and at the same time I can switch on the extraction unit. One slight problem with the Triton router is that when you want to change the bit, you need to wind the spindle up as high as it will go so that the collet lock engages. This will not happen if the safety switch is set to 'on'. You need to switch it to 'off' and slide the switch cover closed.

TO BE CONTINUED...