There was a time when every woodworker made all their own tools, or maybe you had a blacksmith help you with some of the metal parts ... roll forward about 5,000 years and woodworkers are still making their own tools, and this video is part of that.
I have talked about routers in the past, and that most woodworkers find that move than 805 of the wood router work they do involves a router table ... yet there are still tons of people with routers and no table. So, in this article and videos we will be building a very good quality wood router table that will serve most woodworkers well for decades of use ... and it's inexpensive to build.
Part one - The Stand
Yes, we need something to put our router top on so why no build our own sturdy stand. Our stand will have 4 legs (obviously) and all four legs will have a five degree - 2 angle. The reason I like this stand is it is very sturdy and stable. Unlike some square type stands, the ones with angled legs are very hard to push over making them ideal for router bases. If you want, you could make the deluxe stand like the one Norm Abrams designed, or which plans are available on the Internet, but we want to make a stand that could be weekend project in having your router table build and working in a weekend.
Our stand is constructed of construction grade lumber (hand picked) from the local lumber store. We picked up a quantity of 2 - 2" x 3" x 8ft boards, and 3 - 4" x 3/4" x 8ft boards.
The 2x3s would be for the legs, the 1x4s for the bracing and skirting ...
We started off by cutting our 2x3s at 36 " long to make them easier to handle. We then set up out table saw with a cross cut blade set to 5 degrees and our mitre gauge set also to 85 degrees. With this setting we trimmed the ends of 2 legs, then re-set the mitre gauge for 95 degrees to trim the other 2 legs.
We then clearly marked the legs front, back and sides so they would be easy to identify when it comes to assembly. The only other parts we needed to make were the braces. The fronts were 25" while the sides were 20".
Assembly was pretty easy, but we made sure that we glued all of the joints which made an extremely solid stand for the base of our router table.