Router table with tilting router lift
The router table was built back in 2008 using plans from Norm Abrams' New Yankee workshop (www.newyankee.com). I had a router mounted in it and for a few years used the manual height adjustment built into the router. Always being difficult to use, the dream was a lift, but they are very expensive. Many other woodworkers have reached the same conclusion, Matthias Wandel (www.woodgears.ca) being one of them. He set about designing and building a few different lifts - in early 2013, I bought his tilting router lift plans to incorporate into my router table.
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Here is the original router table built from Norm's plans.
In the early table, the front panel is held in place via 4 magnetic catches, one on each corner. |
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As part of the original build, I added some nice dust collection. It's a 2 port design that extracts chips from underneath as well as from the fence. If you ever worked on a router table without good dust extraction, you'd appreciate a nice system like this...
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The front of the lift (upside down). A little aggressive sanding removed some of the plywood veneer on the big gear... I had a couple wingnuts and used those for the tilt lock on 3/8" allthread. The tilt had some rubber cut from an old bicycle inner tube between the tilt slide and base support, but after using it a couple times, it fouled so I removed it. Teflon tape wrapped around the screw used for the big gear axle is used to hold the nut in place - a nylock nut or locktite would have been fine. On the backside of the gear, there are 2 strips of UHMW tape to reduce friction.
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And here is the table with the lift. Note the hinges now on the front.
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