Raised Panels

[Don Welinsky]

While making some raised panel doors for a built-in I realized the difficulty of stablizing the door panel within a Rebel router table that I have use successfully in the past for all item except the "raised panel" which requires horizontial and vertical holddowns for an accuarate finished door. Given the diam. of the panel cutter of 3" I can not lower the cutter enough to take several passes in the panel. Consequently I have tried, unsuccessfully, to raise the table and minimize the individual cut. Better but still not acceptable. Any help would be appreciated. I read with interest the info. on router tables vs. shapers but this project requires only several doors and nothing of a similar nature in the horizon. The shop fox looks like a solution but the budget would not allows it.:cool:

[John Zee]

Back when I was in the cab shop had a power feeder on the shaper. Those panels really need to be held down for a good cut. Maybe a jig could be made with rubber caster wheels. I'd have to think about this one, but should be easy enough.

[keith ouellette]

When I did mine ( I don't have a lot of experience but my panels came out real nice) I didn't alter the height of the bit. I made multiple passes using the fence. I did three passes and just moved the fence back each time leaving the fence in front of the bearing by less than a 1/16th and then used the bearing on the fourth.
With the light passes it wasn't hard to hold the panel down by hand without feather boards.

[John Grossi]

Don, I use a raised panel set from Marc Sommerfelds. The raised panel cutter came with 2 bearings of different diameters. Start with the larger bearing and about half the profile is cut. I run all doors thru with this setup. It takes all of about 1 minute to change the bearing to the smaller size (the cutter never leaves the collet),then run all doors a second time. Another minute later I have the larger bearing on so I don't forget on the next job. Marc sells bearings on his site, www.marcsommerfeldtools.com (http://www.marcsommerfeldtools.com) . John

[Ed Peters]

but I employ the technique that Keith described. My panel raiser is about 5" in diameter and includes a back cutter because I use .8" thick material for my door parts. I have a shaper that is dedicated to this tool. The stationary fence mount is located at the point where the last cut is made without any spacers between it and the fence and the height of the too is set. I then install a stack (4) of .25" thick spacers on each side to begin the process. Run all the panels through and remove a spacer. Repeat till last cut is accomplished without spacers. One thing to note whether you use a shaper or router, do the cross grain cuts first and deburr the edge before moving on to the rip (with the grain) cuts. My process steps are: Cross grain cuts on both ends of all the panels. Deburr the edges and then do the rip cuts on all the panels at each stage. On the last stage, after all the spacers have been removed, I cut the cross grain and deburr. Then I cut all 4 sides (yess I recut the cross grain ends) to complete the process.

Ed