Very Useful Trim_Palm Router Jigs.

Recently, we were doing a little spring cleaning. I know it probably doesn't look like it. And I found an old router jig that I haven't used in a while and I forgot about. And I realized, I was like, man, I should use that more because it's so useful. And what's useful about it is that you can make it all sorts of different ways. You just have to make a bunch of blanks for your routers and then you can cut it. Here's some of the ones that I use that I find most useful for shapes. But the reason they're great is trim routers are really easy to use, one-handed or two-handed. So they solve a lot of problems when you get into situations where you may find something difficult to do, but they really excel at things like flush trimming or circle cutting. And I'm gonna show you how to make those in a minute, but let's go over kind of some of the things it could do. But the possibilities are endless. You could really make these to do lots and lots of different things. So in the comments below, give me some ideas of what you see that, you know, would be some other great uses for this. Let's come on in the bench and let me show you what they can do. So we're starting to get a lot of trim routers here. And I think that may be leading to a really cool tools day for trim routers. But here are three of the ones I made. These are some shapes I've used in the past that I really like. This one I'll show you in a second. It's really great for trimming joinery, proud joinery. This is a great plug trimmer because it sort of pulls the plug into the right. So even if you're off by a little bit, it's really easy to find. This is a great all-around shape that I'll use for doing butterfly keys because it's a little bit wider, so you can cover more area, but these are great little things. I put some handles on them. Those are definitely not necessary. You could make your own wooden handles, but I will link these down below because they're pretty cool. And it's always great to keep a quarter 20 tap on hand because lots of woodworking jig hardware is quarter 20. So let me give you some examples of what these can do. All right, so what you do with all of these, and I show you here during the making of, is you want to set these bits as flush as you can. What this shape I really, really like for is for trimming proud joinery, especially like box joints. Now, these flush trim saws that I have on my website are great, but when you have to do a lot of stuff, it can be very tedious. And also, the more you do, the more chance you have of really scratching your piece. So the reason this shape is great, especially with joinery, is if it, like the other one you saw, if it came on both sides, it's really tough to get in anywhere, especially if you have a really long box. So this one's great because you can kind of come in from the side and work your way through. Let me show you how this works. So as you can see, I mean, that's just about perfectly flush. Hit that with a piece of sandpaper. That's gonna be perfect. Super quick. I was going slow for the camera, but I can knock these out really, really fast. You have a good bit. That's the down cut quarter inch from Bits and Bits that I love to use. It just does a bang up job. No tear out. Looks really good. All right, so let me show you the one that I use for trimming plugs. So this one I really like for doing plugs because of the shape. These are those cool Miller dowels I used on that step stool I made. I'll link that in the corner. That was a pretty fun build. So the reason I like this, and I leave this a little bit longer because sometimes when you're doing plugs, you need to go a little bit slower to avoid any tear out. So let me show you how this works. So as you can see, they come out perfect. And with a little bit of sanding, they're just absolutely perfect. That's only 120 grit too. With higher grits, you're gonna get a nice smooth finish. All right, let me show you the wider one that works better for like things like butterfly keys. So don't make fun of this butterfly key. I was testing to see if I could do them on the CNC and the answer was no. So it doesn't fit very well, but it's a great example of how to use this. This is a little bit of a longer one because I find when you're doing bigger work, sometimes it's better to have a nice flat surface to hold on to. And this one's great. I'll show you in a second. It also doubles as a circle jig. I didn't realize I had the bits at about a millimeter deep, but that probably just come out with some sanding. Oh yeah, it's perfect. Yeah, don't make fun of my butterfly key. Fits partially good. So as a circle jig, this is great too. If you need to cut out a circle that you're gonna use. So if you're doing an inside diameter circle, you would measure to the outside of your bit. And you know, this is gonna work for anything up to a 16 inch circle, I guess, or a little bit less. And again, you'll see it when I make these, you can make these any size. But if you wanted to just do a five inch interior diameter circle, and if you're doing an outside diameter circle, you wanna measure from the inside of your bit. But you could make a mark anywhere from the outside. Well, let's just say five inches here. And then we would just drill a hole. You could sink a screw. And then this works as a great circle cutting jig. So as you can see, you put a circle anywhere. One of the great things to know is it really doesn't matter where you drill the hole because as long as it's the right measurement from your bit, it's gonna be in a circle. Cause that's a straight line. You get a perfect circle. So let's head over to the table saw and let me show you how to make these awesome jigs. All right, we're gonna start by ripping our plywood down to width. The little not so well hidden secret is that there's only really four tool companies. So these are all basically the same. They're all exactly three and a half inches wide. So we're gonna rip to probably three and three quarters. You wanna have some meat for those screws to go into. You don't wanna be putting your screws so close to the side that they blow out when you screw them in tight. I like to use half inch Baltic birch or plywood if that's what you have. You can only go so deep with the bit. So you wanna use plywood that's rigid enough but still thinner. So you don't lose a full three quarters of depth. So let's go ahead and rip these. You saw the already the finished product. So you saw that we ripped them down to different lengths. You can start long. And then if you get a project where it won't fit where you need it to, you can always just trim it off. These are so easy to make that, you know they're pretty expendable. So rip it, we're gonna cross cut to different sizes. And then we're gonna head over to the drill. With the plate removed on these routers cause you're not gonna use it obviously once you have your jig attached. You actually can get quite a bit of meat of these screws into the router. So you don't have to drill down. So I'm gonna do about half the depth of the plywood. I'm gonna countersink them with a Forstner bit. And then you saw me center punching those. That's kind of tough to do and get them all very accurate with the center punch. Another great way to do this is find a drill bit that just fills up that hole and just take it while you hold down your base and just spin it a little bit. That'll give you a nice center point for your drill. One thing I would do is over drill the holes for your screws. Now, in my experience, screws for trim routers are almost always M4.7 thread. So you could probably do 9 64ths or 5 32nds. Then I'll give you enough wiggle room that if you didn't hit dead center on all four holes you'll still be able to attach it without any problem. So let's start drilling. Our next step is going to be finding our center hole and shaping these. All right, before we get into the next part I just want to show you the coolest little router trick I learned a long time ago. Now this works for CNC router table, trim router, big router. Are you tired of busting your knuckles when you loosen the collet to take a bit or change a bit? See how the wrenches have like an angle to them? Use that to your advantage. So you put on your bottom wrench with the angle facing to the left and then you put your top wrench on with the angle facing to the right. Now look where my hand is. And now to loosen it, you let the wrench go slack so it's going to hit this other wrench. And then boom, they click off each other. You don't bust your knuckles. And then it's nice and loose and easy to remove to change your bit. So there's a little trick. All right, let's talk about these guys. So you saw, I put this 45 degree bit. Any small bit would work. It's only for finding the center and it doesn't even really matter. So if you don't have a 90 degree bit like this, you could just use any bit and sort of mark it with pencil where it goes. Now there's a million ways you can shape these. I'm going to show you three shapes that I've used that I really like. This is going to be for the Makita. So we're going to drill a big center hole here with probably, you know, I'm probably almost always going to use a quarter inch bit. So I'll probably use a half inch Forstner and cut this. And then I'm going to cut it out like this. So we're going to be removing this hole. That part of the router is just going to be hanging over in space. And then this is my rigid here. I'm going to do the same thing. We're going to drill a half inch hole and then I'm going to leave all four holes, but cut it like this. That's going to be like, that's a pretty good shape for just trimming plugs all the time. And then this one, because I have more meat, we're going to drill a hole and actually cut it like this. And this is the one that I showed you could be used as a circle jig too. And that way, if we're cutting a circle, we can really see where the router bit is and all that. So these two will be hanging in space, but there'll be secured very well. And then you have a nice big flat reference area here. You could even do it like this to give yourself a little bit more meat for the router to rest on or just cut it straight across. There's a lot of ways, like I said, you can do anything. So let's shape these. We're going to drill a hole and shape these the way we want to. All right, so that's the jigs. You don't have to do the handles. The handles, I just have a ton of those sitting around for some other router jigs I made, but they're great. I'll link them down below, just 1-1-2 handles. You know, I find that it's great to just have a 1-1-2 tap in the shop, both a flat bottom and a through tap. I mean, they're like three bucks. So much woodworking hardware is 1-1-2. So good to have. The way that you set these, it's pretty simple. What I like to do is, it depends on what stage you are in your workpiece. You might not want to do this on your workpiece, but just bring it down to a piece of scrap till you feel it touch. I loosely lock it, and then I'll just take a ruler and you can like feel, I can feel, I'm just barely scraping it there. So you can just adjust it till you feel the ruler slip by. You'll like feel it when it's catching. It'll just barely slip by. You can lock it, and that should be flush to your surface. And of course, if you're doing some other operation, then it doesn't matter. You can adjust it however you need to. I find these are incredibly useful. And the point of this video is just to show you some of the ways I use it. I mean, there's like a million ways you could use something like this, and it would work for a full-size router as well. But when you're making blanks, you just make four or five of them, leave them on the shelf, sit there forever. You already have the holes drilled. And that way, when you run into a weird situation where it would be helpful to have your router elevated a little bit, like some of the stuff we showed at the beginning of the video, you just have a blank available and you can cut it and shape it any which way you want to suit your needs. So incredibly useful. I haven't used one of these in a while, and I found one when I was cleaning out a box. I said, oh yeah, you had a good idea in the past. You remember it now. Great stuff. I digress. So that's the video, guys. Thanks for watching. If you want to support the channel, head over to the Katzmoses store. Pick up a dovetail jig, a stop block, or an apron. Thanks for watching. Stay safe and be sharp.