Okay, now, we are going to take our template and we are going to use some double stick tape to attach it to the leg. The rough out leg and take it over the to the router table and use the flush trim bit to clean up all the excess material when it is all said and done we should be left with leg that has this exact shape and profile.
I used a double stick tape to attach the template. Then I adjust the height of the flush trim bit so the bearing is lined up with the template. Now it is the time to do the routing. I always use an indexing pin for this operation in order to avoid kick back.
Now that we are done with the routing it is time to remove the template. I will let you use a putty knife for this, because sometimes this stuff gets really, really sticky. That is exactly what we want it to, it holds it on there. Just pry it up. Now I did want to bring you attention to something very, very important. I do not have really the luxury of showing this to you while I was routing the pieces, because to tell you the truth, I was so focus on that job that I was very nervous about worrying about the camera at the same time.
What I want to bring your attention is to be the grain, okay? A lot of times you just see these things done on shows and stuff and they do exactly what I did. They show you two or three passes and it looks like it is easy. You take it home, you try it at home and you have, you know, disastrous results when your router bit hits an area and a whole of chunk of wood comes off because you run against the grain.
So, I want to really go over that in some detail over in the router and show you exactly what you need to look for and exactly how you can prevent that from becoming a disaster.
Now at the router table, this is a good time from me to show you some really close up details on what you need to be concerned with here. All this grain direction change, that really can be dangerous very, very dangerous so let us look at the router table and I could show some of the techniques and some of the tools that you going to need to do this safely.
First of all we have got a nice long router bit with a bearing at the top. It is very important that you keep your eye on the location of that bearing when you have got your template on here. I can honestly tell you that twice during this process, I have notice this bit razing a little bit and it was almost the full bearing height at one point above my template which means that was coming out.
And what do you think is going to happen when it comes all the way out. I do not know exactly what it was that was doing that, maybe my collate is old, but that is dangerous keep your eye on that absolutely the entire time that you are doing this process. If that happens, obviously crank down, tighten it down even more.
The other thing you want to pay attention to is this little index pin. Most decent router tables give you the option to connect one of this. The idea here is, when you are bringing your work piece into the spinning bit and there is no fence, no reference point. That is extremely dangerous to just put your work piece right into like that.
But if you pivot off of something that is stable and stationary like this, you have now got a lot of control over that and it will not pull the piece and run with it. Now, even all this in place you still have to be very careful about grain direction. Okay, now let me point out a few danger zones on this particular piece.
If the grain is running vertical on the leg, horizontal here, it is going to make things tricky for us. As we are coming around I start in this area and I am work my way around the bit and the other thing is paddles. I am using this all the time because I do not want my fingers anywhere near that bit, okay. So, I am coming around and I rotate in.
Now we are moving along, everything is happy, okay right here. The grain is going—I hope these shows up enough. But the grain is going in this direction; that means as the bit is spinning it will want to pull out full chunks of material right there. That is bad news, okay. The other danger zones as we go around; there are probably three to four of them here.
Okay, be careful, be careful. Here, we are okay because we are going with the grain. The blade comes around and chips it off this way. That is fine. But then we get over here and again, we have the same situation that we did there, another danger zone that you have to be careful with. So aside from showing you that those are the bad spots what would you do about them?
First of all, you want to get as much of that material off of there ahead of time as possible. So what I did was I run over to the isolating spindle sander and I worked that zone for few minutes just to make sure that I got it as close to the template as possible without touching it. So that way when I come here, I have got maybe a 16th of an inch of material to remove and that is it. Okay, that is the safest way to go about it.
Hit all those danger zones and you are going to find the whole thing goes a lot easier. Now what have you guys have been writing in and saying that we are not seeing enough Nicole. Now the girl works a real job. So it is little bit hard for me get her in here all the time. But occasionally we do have the luxury of having her hang around. So, I think it is time to take a well deserved Nicole break.
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