Can You Use A Router To Plane Wood

A benchtop jig for flattening rough sawn slabs with a router bit.

Can you use a router to plane wood. Paul prefers the thumb screw on the Stanley router plane compared to the Lie Nielsen knurled screw as it gives more purchase. Longer than the workpiece. Now use a chisel to defi ne the edges and chip out a little waste at the stop end of the slot.

Instead youll take a light pass reset the depth and take another pass repeating as many times as necessary. Mount an oversized base plate on your router and screw the base plate to a pair of stiff straight stretchers Make your stretchers at least twice as long as the width of the workpiece plus 8 in. A bigger concern is the fact that painted and therefore used lumber is notorious for hiding metal fasteners that can ruin your planer blades and seriously damage your planer.

Plowing a groove to a consistent depth even in curved stock and flattening the recess for a hinge mortise once youve chiseled away most of the waste. Going on till you reach on your marking line. If you are really attached to certain pieces of painted lumber a set of dull blades may not be a huge issue.

If you cannot find these the Lie Nielsen is also a good new option. So put your new router plane to use right now. You can use the router on both a push and a pull stroke.

No matter which way you feed the wood youre planing with the grain part of the time and against it the other part. If you have a beautiful thick piece of timber that is too wide to use your Planer you can get the face of the wood parallel and smooth using a router and a jig. Clamp a scrap of 2 x 4 thats 1 long in your bench vise.

This is a hand router that helps with cutting housings dados tenons and other recesses. Heres how you can use your router with a straight bit to plane wide material. I didnt think this possible at first but it turns out you can also plane and thickness wood with a router tool.