I soon noticed that the fence for my Dewalt 625EK router isn't quite deep enough. After routing down by about 30mm. the fence would no longer have a proper face to run against. Can you get deeper shoes/plates for them?
Yes, in short a joiners answer (i.e. mine
) would be: Remove the plastic fence plates and add your own plates made from plywood, hardwood, Tufnol, UHMW plastic, etc....
I did consider running the fence on the other side of the sill- but the bars are too short
The fence rods on deWalt DW624/DW625/DWE625/Trend T10/T11/T12/T14/Elu MOF177 are all 10mm diameter (and the fences are interchangeable between all these models) - get some ground silver steel bar off eBay or from a local metal warehouse (mail order up to 1m - local supplier probably up to 2m). BTW the deWalt DW613/DW615/DW621/DW622/Trend T5/Elu MOF69/MOF96/OF97/Makita RP1110 fence rods are all 8mm diameter (and the fences are interchangeable between all these models as well as a number of other routers includingh some by Virutex, Perles and at least one older AEG model - the OF50)
I then decided to switch over to a thinner fluted bit but it was too short. Someone had recently given me a router extension but that made it too long.
It isn't particularly safe to use a collet extender freehand, so maybe not a bad idea to skip that
I toyed with the idea of using my biscuit cutter bit in the extension bit, unit I noticed that the collet was a half inch where as the biscuit cutter bit is a quarter of an inch. The collet in the extension bit is much shorter than the quarter inch collet provided with the router. I was not confident that swapping collets was either possible or safe.
Probably a different collet design, so not safe, I agree. Collets really aren't "universal"
You probably already think I'm a smarmy git for saying that, so I'll now tell you how I tackle these sorts of jobs:-
(i) You need to set-up a
sticking board to hold your material firmly and provide enough support surface for the base of a router whilst making the cuts (more about this later)
(ii) Make a physical template on a piece of cardboard (used cornflake packets are ideal!) and mark the profile on the ends of the timbers being profiled:
Also make up a counter profile (mirror image) template. This will be used later on to check against the completed profile. Note that this isn't meant to be any profile in particular, just one which is something like your sketch above so i can demonstrate the principles (so my crummy SketchUp version...
)
(iii) Work the round-over at the top first with a round-over cutter:
(iii) Then turn the piece over and fix it between several scrap pieces of the same height - these will form your
sticking board (highlighted in pink). Now work the big rebate at the bottom - several passes with a decent deep fence and a straight cutter will suffice (try getting a
big straight cutter, something like a 20mm diameter if you intend to do a lot of these as it is (a) faster and (b) smoother because it
takes less passes):
(iv) Rough out the bottom of the cove (underside) cut with the straight cutter to somewhere near by making multiple close passes:
If the router base isn't fully supported you may need to make-up an elongated sub-base which replaced the standard sub-base, to support the router on the sticking board (see next post for details - I've run out of photos on this one)
(v) Smooth the bottom (radiused/coved/convex) face of the material. I generally use a narrow shoulder plane to start with, but TBH a piece of large diameter dowel (e.g a piece of broom handle) with some P40 grit sandpaper wrapped around it cuts quite fast as well. Different radii can be created from 12mm and 18mm MDF by hand planing ("thrupenny bits" again) then sanding an edge to a radiused with very course grit sandpaper to the required radius, and then wrapping bits of sandpaper around the resulting sanding board. You can get the same result using offcuts of commercial dowel rod, quadrant beading, etc. The counter profile template (cardboard) is run along the moulding from time to time to check progress and gauge where you are. Outside curves (convex/bull nose/beaded) are best worked using a shoulder plane or small block plane to get the "thrupenny bit" profile quite near:
which is then hand sanded the get the finished profile:
As before, use a course grit to get yourself near to the required profile then work up through the grits to take the scratches out (i.e. P40 - P60 - P80 - P120, etc)
OK, so being an old hand I'd maybe have used a more traditional way for part of the time by using a half set of rounds and hollow planes (18 planes in total) to form hollowed and radiused edges and maybe side bead planes to make the bull nose sections:
Above: (Left) a boxed side beading plane, (right) two "pairs" of rounds and hollows. The biggest generally available planes cut a radius of 1-1/2 to 1-3/4in. Note - no metric, these are Imperial only
but the sticking board still gets used and I still rough away a lot of the waste using a router, straight cutter and fence or just a rebate plane before the moulding planes go anywhere near the work (they take so long to resharpen that you always try do the maximum amount of work with rebate planes or badger planes, and the bare minimum of work with moulding planes - AFAIK this was always the case).
For anyone interested moulding planes are the traditional approach, but do bear in mind if you want to buy some of these, that the majority most of them will be more than 100 years old and they have probably not been well looked after or properly stored since maybe WWII or even earlier when the original owner(s) died; manufacturing of wooden moulding planes ceased in the mid-1960s, but they really went out of favour in a big way in the 1920s and 30s with only a hand full of firms left making them by the beginning of WWII (1939). Quite apart from dealing with woodworm, which is not unknown in old wooden planes, it can take quite a bit of fettling to get them working again (reprofiling and resharpening the cutters, possibly dealing with wedges which are missing, the wrong one or have shrunk over time), with some plane bodies so warped or twisted that they will never work again. They don't need to be far out of whack to make them into nothing more than wall ornamants - and believe me, I've bought my fair share of those over the years!. But seriously, unless you are already into hand planes in a big way and can sharpen a block plane so that it will take an almost transparent gosammer-thin shaving off a piece of wood - I really wouldn't bother with moulding planes because without the basic skills, only frustration awaits
Above: Not a brilliant photo, but an example of replacement moulding repairs done in the field. The mouldings at the tops of the pillasters to the left and right of the opening needed to be remade, using a piece of moulding from elsewhere in the building as a template. In fact this repair required a quarter round, a square piece, an ogee with a quirk and a beaded piece to be produced - the corridor opening was blocked off with a hardwood frame glazed with 15mm pyro (fire-proof) glass - this meant that the mouldings around the tops of the pillasters needed to be removed and cut to accommodate the glazed light frame, then reinstalled either side of the frame. Quite a bit of the original mouldings had simply disappeared over the years, or was damaged (split, etc), hence the need to make about 4 or 5 feet of a built-up moulding. Note the copious quantities of pins and fillers! You can also see a plaster moulding repair where the left side has been repaired, but the right side isn't yet done (using a zinc plate template to run the plaster in situ)