I love routers and I love the act of routering! I've got 2 PC's; one in
a Woodpecker table with the Precision Router Lift, a marvelous tool, and
one for the occasional free routering job! The router table does a
great job on anything I've thrown at it. It's fun to feed a piece of
wood into it and get a shaped, useful part out the other side. I don't
care to labor over things excessively or obsessively. I just want to
get the job down with a minimum of fuss, and a maximum of enjoyment.
For me that would only include a minimum of "Neandering", as I don't
like wasting time. I like the "building" of things, but not to the
extent that some guys carry things to the extreme by doing EVERYTHING by
hand. By that I mean jointing, rabetting, dovetails, everything done by
hand. That's just not my bag. Neanders are surely more talented than
I, but then again, I'm not comparing myself to anyone. All I care about
is the end result, having fun doing it, and not wasting time. (I know, I
know, I said that before.)

I DO cut my crown molding with a coping saw! That should count as my
concession to Neandering. Mill file, rattail file, sanding block: all
Neander stuff. Then when I put the crown up, I use my PC finish nailer!
Back to the modern world.

I carry a small plane; not a router in my pocket...


dave

Silvan wrote:

Lots of folks here have a router in their pocket, a router on their tool
belt, a router in their backpack, a router in the table, and a spare router
under the bench.

Many of you just seem to absolutely *love* these things.

I just cut my first dovetails today. I did them by hand, with an X-acto
razor saw. They came out pretty well, considering it was my first try, and
it occurs to me that I have no desire to buy the jig and the bit and futz
around with the setup in order to save myself time by doing these with a
machine some day.

I'm finding the more I do with chisels and hand planes, the less I'm
interested in using a router to do things. I've never used my router for
much anyway. It's a bad router, granted, but even if it didn't have the
problems it does, I don't think I'd like it. Seems like you have to spend
forever changing bits, changing depths, changing bases, setting up
templates or jigs or hold-downs or fences or some damn thing in order to
use the thing for three minutes and save yourself a little physical labor.

True, I do this all the time on the drill press. I spend 15 minutes
changing the setup to make one hole in one piece sometimes, then turn
around and do it again. I love playing with my drill press, and I don't
mind the setup time. Yet when faced with the same problem on another
machine, I can rarely be bothered to get it out and futz with it. My
router table usually serves as a temporary holding area for stuff I need to
put away. It's totally paradoxical.

Am I nuts? How is it that this most marvelous and alluring tool does not
excite me?

Just wondering if I'm the only one, I guess.

I think I'm turning into a Neander.