Step 6: Remove your completed project from the fixture, attach a new workpiece blank and repeat steps 4, 5 and 6.
NOTE
•Apply a coating of furniture PASTE wax to the Guide Pin, the bottom of your fix- ture and the insides of the grooves to ease the movement of the fixture through your cuts. Be sure to buff out the wax and not leave blobs in the grooves that could mix with sawdust and inhibit proper fix- ture movement.
•When guiding the fixture over the pin, always move in a counter-clockwise di- rection, against the rotation of the bit and maintain a steady force against the same groove wall (push in against the inner wall — or pull out against the outer wall) throughout your cut. Don’t let the fixture shift from wall-to-wall against the Guide Pin.
Routing over a pin with a clamp-in fixture
With a clamp-in fixture (See Fig 18), your workpiece is secured to the non-grooved (particleboard) side of the fixture by a mov- able clamp bar. The fixture is then flipped over and the grooves (in the shape of your intended finished piece) in the laminate side of the fixture are traced over the Guide Pin.
As with a screw-in fixture, this process trans- fers your design exactly to the workpiece you’ve mounted to the opposite (or particle- board) side of the fixture.
Clamp-in fixtures take longer to make than screw-down fixtures and function much like screw-down fixtures, except that the workpiece is clamped into rather than screwed to, the fixture. As a result, they of- fer the advantages of greatly reduced
Figure 18. A typical clamp-in fixture.
workpiece insertion and removal times and not damaging any surface of the workpiece.
Clamp-in fixtures are best for projects where only internal cuts are made and two oppos- ing sides of the workpiece can be left uncut and used to clamp against. (The clamp and fixture could be designed to follow a profile of a workpiece.)
Step 1: Screw the appropriate sized guide pin into the center hole of the Router Table Insert and align it with the same sized router bit, as explained previously.
Step 2: Drop the fixture groove over the Table Pin, turn on your router motor, and set your final depth-of-cut so the bit just barely breaks through the surface of the par- ticleboard side of your fixture. Turn off your router motor.
Step 3: Clamp your workpiece firmly to the fixture.
