Ok, what IS that thing? Well, it is one of the things that makes my life easy in my cedar strip canoe building class. It's basically the first version of a router table that we use to cut the cove-and-bead features on the cedar strips used to build the canoes. Above the hole in the middle of the picture is a router with the cove cutter and below the table is another router with the bead cutter. Featherboards hold the strips down to the table and against the fence.
I hear the crowd going "Yeah, so?"
This thing saves a HUGE amount of time. It cuts the cove and bead at the same time and can be adjusted to fit narrow or wide strips. For each boat built, about 1/4 mile of linear strips get cut. You can do it in about an hour. That's pretty good.
We have found a few down-sides after using it for 3 years:
- need better dust collection
- chips have actually worn away the plywood
- need a fool-proof (idiot-proof?) way to avoid the cutters coming together
- dovetails on the coarse adjustment are set too wide and jam
- both cutters need better fine adjustment
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1 comment:
Yes! publish, post, document, and share! This is going to be a great help to me, and I gather to others doing the same thing. I wanted to make a dual router setup and your mounting one under and the other on top keeps the cutting of the strips "going the right way". cool.
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