Fluting Burn?

[alex grams]

Anyone know a good way to sand out a little burn at the end of flute? I set the router speed as low as reasonable for fluting some wood, but still got a little burnout at the termination points on the flutes. Any neat tricks or tools to sand down the burn at the ends?

Thanks in advance.

[Lee Schierer]

What I have done is to unplug the router and put the router back over the groove and rotate the bit by hand with the cutting edge against the end of the flute so it works like a scraper. It is a little tedious but a lot faster than sanding and it doesn't distort the end of the flute.

I've also found that by putting a stop block to stop the router so I can't cut a flute too far helps so that I can reverse direction as soon as I hit the stop and not leave the fluting bit sitting still at any time in the groove leaves much less f a burn mark.

[Ryan Baker]

Yes. A scraper works 1000x better than trying to sand it out. Almost anything will work: a card scraper, knife blade, whatever you have around that will fit.

[Jim Heffner]

I read something about that same problem a while back. The writer of the article suggested one should make a scraper for the flutes out of an old,
re-shaped piece of a hacksaw blade made to fit into the flutes, claims it works really well.Be sure and wrap the handle end of the tool with some
tape to prevent injury to user's hand. I made one a couple of years ago for a project I was
working on at the time, and it worked ok for me.