Routing Cherry

[Andy Garello]

Hi Folks,
I am new to the site and a novice wood worker. I have been making my own door moulding for quite a while out of 3-3/4 inch cherry with a Roman Ogee edge, 2 complex grooves and a 1/4 roundover-so about 6-7 passes per board for the 4 cuts to keep the wood from splintering.

Now I'm molding 5" cherry base boards using a base cap router bit on a 1/2 shank on an 8' router table (home made) I stand the board up and mold the 1 1/4" x 3/4 base cap into the edge. It has worked well for 2 boards, but very finicky about pull outs. I'm once again passing each board several times. (1/8" per pass)
Has anyone suggestions about lowering router speed for cherry or any other remarks?

[JohnT Fitzgerald]

andy - are you running a backer board behind the piece you are routing?

[Andy Garello]

I have a 4 inch plywood fence that runs the full 8 ft lengt of the table.
The board is held tight against the fence (standing up) with finger boards the fence is screwed securely to an eight foot base forming an "L" fence which is adjustable by a large bolt on each end and slots in the router table.

Andy

[JohnT Fitzgerald]

Andy - that sounds look a good fence. What I meant was a backer board - it's a board you push through the router bit right behind the piece that you want to route. This board will "support" the training part of the main board, and possible help prevent chip out. The backer board will probably get chipout as *it* goes through, but it's sacrificial....it's meant to get beat up so the real board you're routing goes through cleanly.

[Andy Garello]

I am thinking you mean a board to aleivate the chip out on the down side edge as the board is leaving the router, such as a drawer side that you do not want chipped out on the butt end. I am talking about pull out from the continuous face cut on an eight or 10 foot baseboard. So if you start the baseboard through the router, you get a splinter or pull out every 1 or 2 feet. Some times I don't get any. It seems to depend a lot on the grain of the wood, but I havn't figured out how to read the wood. Sometimes it doesn't matter because you may only have one choice which side to route.
I've seen these pull outs on professionally made cherry base cap which I have paid good money for, but I'm pretty sure that they just go one pass.
Andy

[Mike Tidd]

Andy

I had some similar problems with some oak recently, kept tearing out no matter what I tried. Finally, what I did was feed the wood thru from the other side of the router bit. obviously reversing the feather boards ( kept them tighter than normal) , keep the cuts as you are at about 1/8", most important was maintaining a controlled slow feed rate.
Turned out about 50 board ft without any chipout whatsoever.

I'm not sure if this will work for you, I would experiment on scrap first if you decide to give it a go. Remember, the woods gonna want to fly thru unless you take precautions to slow it down!!!

Good luck

[Glen Butler]

I am with Mike. Climb cutting would be my first suggestion. Well my first would be to buy a molder, but that is a little ridiculous.

[Kent A Bathurst]

I am with Mike. Climb cutting would be my first suggestion.

Me too. Climb cutting is the ticket for difficult grain + tearout. Thin passes - it will want to fly, as noted above. In fact, when I am doing minor hand-held routing (like 1/4" radius on edges) I generally climb-cut, because I am at the final steps, and don't want to take the risk.

[Richard Dragin]

I figured this would be about burning, not tear out.

[Jacob Mac]

You might be encontering a dirty/dull/cheap bit as well. I know that I have more problems with tearout if I am using a dull bit, or one that just is not very good.

[Andy Garello]

I tried the climb cutting once and the board took off on me, so I figured that this was not the way to go, but I could try tightening the feather boards and give it another go.

Another gentleman suggested that I use a "backer board". I couldnt get it thru my head what he was talking about, but on another forum they showed getting a piece of polyethelyne about the size of the fence and carefully cutting a profile of the cutter thru it. You then place this against the fence and slide your material down it. The tight profile prevents the wood from chipping.

Is this what you (Mr. Fitzgerald) had in mind?, because putting a sacrificial board the whole length wouldn't be an option(too much wood-too deep-too big)

[Lee Schierer]

Some cherry, with curly grain can easily chip out along the face. While an 1/8" cut doesn't sound like a lot, in curly wood it is. I would suggest the last two passes be made with 1/16" material removal or even less and more passes in cherry or curly wood of any type. If the chip out is large and you can find the piece that chipped out you can glue it back in place and then use a chisel or hand plane to remove the bulk of the material and do a final pass or two removing 1/32" of material.