Woodwork today. Started by making up an extendable hole-part for my drying rack system. These have a 15mm wide bit of wood in the middle, so to fix this to the holey 'ends' I thought I'd try my router-table-guide-thing I made last year to cut out a 15mm slot. It had a few problems. Firstly the 120mm bolts in the guide were not long enough to set correctly. The results were not great, and for the second recess I sawed by hand. The final drying rack part looked messy, but it was accurate and straight, so good enough for a drying rack, and all made from recycled scraps.
Then I bought full wood lengths for the 'Punishment Of The Sun' frame, a proper test of the router table. Alas I had no wood of this size to test, I'd have to test it on the actual wood. First I fitted longer bolts, some spare I'd made for my defunct painting carrying racks. I needed to cut a 10mm recess so thought I'd use a 16mm bit, reasoning that using the 'edge' of this would make the cut cleaner somehow. I positioned the guide so that the router cuts 'away' rather than towards the wood as I feed it... I thought that it might split if cutting towards... but the results were disastrous!
The wood was pulled away, the bit acting like a roller to pull it through. It pulled so violently that it ripped some of the guide wheels off my table, these were only glued, but should have been screwed too! I re-fitted them and screwed them. Tomorrow I'll try again, this time I'll use a 12mm bit, and make it cut towards the push direction.
