Building a router table

Router table with fence. Router insert not done yet

One of the things I wanted to get done quickly was to build a box for my circular saw. There are various box systems that you can buy. Makita has one, Festool has one and Bosch Professional have one (the blue Bosch). The green Bosch (DIY) don't seem to have anything for circular saws. You buy the saw and it comes in a cardboard box. You can't really take it anywhere. Given that the saw also has a guide, various blades and assorted bits and pieces, a box seemed a good idea.

The first thing that I got was 6mm plywood. That is strong enough to easily  hold the saw and any bits and pieces as wells. 6mm is not enough for dowels and screws though, so I decided to go with finger joints. They are strong as hell and in a different league to dowels and screws anyway.

Had to improvise a bit to get the router to cut circles

Plus I wanted to try out a couple of techniques to see which would give me the best joints. In Youtube there are a whole load of videos of americans cutting finger joints with dado blades. Easiest thing in the world - you can build a jig for it in minutes and get straight to making box joints. The only issue is that you are completely at the mercy of your dado blade. Your joint has to be the width of the dado blade. As well as that, dado blades are banned here - at least in the industrial carpentry, but because there is no market for them professionally, there is also no DIY market for them. The next best thing is a table for a router where you can turn the router upside down.

I started off with a chipboard wardrobe door that I found.It was coated in some kind of hard plastic lacque, which means that anything at all would slide across it easily without resistance. I cut it to length on the table saw. The next thing I needed was a fence. This is particularly useful for running long pieces of timber through - e.g. cutting a profile for skirting boards. I decided to let the fence run in four grooves. I put aluminium runners in the outer grooves. Threaded bars in the fence reach down into the profiles. With wing nuts you can tighten the fence down to the profiles so it can't move. I originally throught that that would be enough but there was too much play. I cut two more grooves parallel to the outer ones, towards the middle. On the underside of the fence I stuck pieces of the aluminium profile. They run in the corresponding grooves and keep the whole construction parallel.

A circle cut out of one of the Dieboldplatten with the router

At the moment I am busy trying to figure out how to actually fix the router to the bottom of the table. Obviously, I can't just screw it to the bottom of the chipboard table, because it is 20mm thick. With the router blade just hanging in to the router (which is highly dangerous), that would let me cut at the most about 5mm above the table (25mm total) and that wouldn't be worth the effort. So the objective was to find something as stiff as possible and as thin as possible. The answer is Dieboldplatten. These are sandwiches made of 2mm aluminium, 4mm plastic and then another 2mm aluminium. I stuck two of these together, giving me 10mm total. It is stiff as hell. Tomorrow I'm going to cut down 10mm into the chipboard so to rebate the Dieboldplatte. After that I'll still need to figure out how to safely fix the router to the Dieboldplatte.

Two Dieboldplatten stuck together