Router Stabilizer

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When I was outfitting my shop some years ago, I built a bunch of frameless cabinets from 3⁄4"-thick hardwood plywood, gluing strips of solid wood to the edges to hide the plies. I made the strips about 7⁄8"-wide so I could use a flush-trim bit to rout their edges flush with the faces of the plywood after attachment. The only difficulty with this approach is that even a small router gets tipsy when riding on the edge of 3⁄4"-thick stock.

To solve the problem, I mounted my router to a stiff solid-wood board (about 5⁄16" thick) that was wide enough to accommodate the router and long enough to span the openings of the cabinets. The board then serves as a stabilizing outrigger that rides atop multiple cabinet edges to keep the router from tipping. This makes the whole operation fast, accurate, and free of white knuckles.

—Philip Houck, Boston, Massachusetts