Peter Quinn
04-05-2009, 7:34 PM
Today I finally made a threshhold/reducer for my bathroom entry, its been several years since I renovated the bathroom and I'm getting ready to hang a new door and finish the trim around the tub. Wife says I'm a procrastinator, I claim I'm just a really methodical designer!:D
Anyway, the reducer is a 3/4" X 6" piece with a deep cove on the low side. I like the big soft cove better than a chamfer visually, so I make them with a panel raising bit. The floor in the bathroom is a ceramic tile that is a dead ringer for quarter sawn Wenge! So I made the reducer out of actual wenge to match. For those that aren't familiar with wenge, it is very HARD.
When I put the room together and hung the temporary door, I made a prototype reducer from wenge using the router table because I had the cove panel raiser and did not want to buy a shaper cutter for one piece of wood. The first two attempts simply blew up at some stage of routing even though I was taking VERY light passes. Bad switch backs in the grain that the router bit wouldn't tolerate (as is typical of wenge). I couldn't get rid of the chatter, I still had chip out, I sanded till long after the cows came home to reach a place I would call marginal. I put a finish on it but was never really happy with the results. This was a nearly brand new Freud 2X2 panel raiser that did fine in other material. But not wenge.
Well, I have since purchased the Freud RP2000 kit, which has numerous profiles for the shaper one of which is a cove. In three light passes I had a cove that required about three swipes with a sanding sponge to reach that mill mark free and smooth as a babies bottom place. Just perfect.
Much like the evening news I'm not sure exactly what the point of this notification is, but I can tell you that in careful testing with the same species in a controlled environment (or nearly controlled?) that the shaper KICKED the routers butt hard on this project.
Not to belittle the router table, the last step was to put relief cuts in the bottom of the reducer such as you see in flooring, and at this the shaper was of little help. So I chucked up a 1/2" core box bit and made the reliefs in minutes that would have been much more difficult on the shaper. Perhaps the title should have been "Shaper and router, GOOG GOOD friends!:D I fear that soon my shaper, router table and molder may enter into a menage a trois that will make the tabloids.:rolleyes:
Anyway, the reducer is a 3/4" X 6" piece with a deep cove on the low side. I like the big soft cove better than a chamfer visually, so I make them with a panel raising bit. The floor in the bathroom is a ceramic tile that is a dead ringer for quarter sawn Wenge! So I made the reducer out of actual wenge to match. For those that aren't familiar with wenge, it is very HARD.
When I put the room together and hung the temporary door, I made a prototype reducer from wenge using the router table because I had the cove panel raiser and did not want to buy a shaper cutter for one piece of wood. The first two attempts simply blew up at some stage of routing even though I was taking VERY light passes. Bad switch backs in the grain that the router bit wouldn't tolerate (as is typical of wenge). I couldn't get rid of the chatter, I still had chip out, I sanded till long after the cows came home to reach a place I would call marginal. I put a finish on it but was never really happy with the results. This was a nearly brand new Freud 2X2 panel raiser that did fine in other material. But not wenge.
Well, I have since purchased the Freud RP2000 kit, which has numerous profiles for the shaper one of which is a cove. In three light passes I had a cove that required about three swipes with a sanding sponge to reach that mill mark free and smooth as a babies bottom place. Just perfect.
Much like the evening news I'm not sure exactly what the point of this notification is, but I can tell you that in careful testing with the same species in a controlled environment (or nearly controlled?) that the shaper KICKED the routers butt hard on this project.
Not to belittle the router table, the last step was to put relief cuts in the bottom of the reducer such as you see in flooring, and at this the shaper was of little help. So I chucked up a 1/2" core box bit and made the reliefs in minutes that would have been much more difficult on the shaper. Perhaps the title should have been "Shaper and router, GOOG GOOD friends!:D I fear that soon my shaper, router table and molder may enter into a menage a trois that will make the tabloids.:rolleyes: