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 vi...

We bought our son a beautiful print for Christmas, but not a frame. Maybe we thought we already had a frame we could re-use, I can't remember. But I do remember being in the man-cave, looking at a pile of gorgeous engineered oak flooring I'd got from Freecycle and wondering what amazing things I could do with it. I couldn't do anything as amazing as using it as actual flooring in even the smallest room because there's only 1.5 square metres of it. Inspiration struck and I decided to make a picture frame. I had about 5 days (actually, a couple of hours each day) before we were due to drive down to That London to deliver it, which I thought should be plenty of time. As it turned out, it was a close-run thing. My first attempt involved mitred corners, but I have neither the skill nor the tools to cut them accurately. I worked on it for 2 days before I abandoned it. The second attempt was much more successful, involving full-height stiles. Here's the video of me ...