A planer stand is a wheeled table or mobile base that holds a portable thickness planer at a fixed working height, gives you somewhere to bolt the machine down, and keeps blades, dust bags and accessories off the floor. Almost every benchtop planer on the market weighs somewhere between 55 and 100 lb, and a … Read more
A drawer is the most honest test of a dovetail jig. One proud pin on a decorative box is a blemish; one proud pin on a drawer front is a drawer that rocks and a box that racks. That is why searching for the best dovetail jigs for drawer joinery is a narrower question than … Read more
A router lift is a crank-driven mounting plate that clamps your router motor inside a router table, so you can raise, lower, and swap bits from above the tabletop instead of crawling underneath it with a speed wrench. That single change is why the best router lifts for router tables show up in almost every … Read more
Choosing the best CNC routers for woodworking hobbyists comes down to one honest question: what is your first real project, and how big is it? We lined up 12 machines you can actually buy in , from a 300 x 180 mm desktop kit to a ball-screw 6040 frame, and the gap between them is … Read more
Standing in front of the wall of router bits in a hardware store for the first time is a genuinely disorienting experience. There are hundreds of shapes, most of them in the wrong shank size for the router sitting in your cart, and nothing on the box tells you which four you actually need. Most … Read more
A router table is a flat, fence-equipped work surface with a hole in the middle. Your router clamps upside down underneath the table, the bit projects up through a removable insert plate, and you push the workpiece across the top against the fence instead of chasing the tool across the wood with both hands on … Read more
Laminate does not forgive a bad edge. You cannot sand a chipped melamine face back to a clean line the way you can feather a solid wood edge, so the whole job rides on one cut with a sharp bit, a steady fence, and a router light enough to hold true along a long run. … Read more
If you have never owned a router, the specification sheet is the least helpful place to start. Terms like plunge travel, rack and pinion, micro-fine depth ring and collet shank all sound like they need a machinist background. They do not. What matters for a first plunge router is whether the depth adjustment is obvious, … Read more
A zero clearance insert is a replacement throat plate machined so the opening hugs your saw blade with almost no gap. That gap is what lets wood fibers fall away as the blade exits, so shrinking it to match the kerf supports the workpiece to the last tooth and keeps the back of the cut … Read more
For crosscutting plywood, the answer is a 60 to 80 tooth blade with a Hi-ATB grind in a 10 inch diameter with a 5/8 inch arbor. The dense tooth pattern shears the outer veneers instead of plucking them, and that grind is why the edges come out sand-free. Our pick at the top of the … Read more