As My Interest For Woodworking Was Taking Off

 As my interest for woodworking was taking off. I thought I needed some more tools. I thought I needed a router. This way I could rout out signs I saw people make. This would let me put nice profiles on the edges of wood.

I received a 2 ¼ hp router with a fixed & plunge base for my birthday. Boy I thought I was set now. Here I go I now had a router with no router bits. I went online and ordered a router bit set. By buying this router bit set I figured I would never need another router bit. I learned several years later this wasn't true. I had to replace router bits from the router bit set ass I hit brad nails while putting profiles. There are router bits in this set that I haven’t used. I am not sure I will ever use. Years later I purchased another router bits set. These router bit set have different sizes or should I say different radius of round over bits. This set of round over bits gets used alot. I now have 2 different shaft size roundover bit sets. I use the 1/2 shaft set in my router table. The 1/4 shaft bit set in my palm router.

Ok back to getting my first router. Now that I had a router I thought I would try some free hand sign making. so I grabbed a scrap piece of wood and started to do some free hand sign making.  Making signs freehand didn't go as I thought it would. It was a bit awkward as the router was a little bigger than it should be. So I decided to abandon the idea of freehand making signs as it didn't seem to be as easy as I thought it would be.  I found it very awkward and I didn't seem to have a steady hand to maneuver the router around the piece of wood.  I definitely didn't like the outcome.

I got the idea maybe if I bought a sign making template. Where I could insert letters and make words for the signs. Using this sign making kit It was good for smaller signs When I got into bigger signs it got a little complicated.  Eventually I banned the idea of using the sign making kit. It just didn't seem to look what I wanted it to look like and it was a bit complicated to use.

I started using the router to put roundovers on projects  that would require a round over.  Using a handheld router to put  the profile around over profile on the edge of a board. This was a bit awkward.  as the router was only riding on one side of the  router base.  I thought to myself there must be an easier way.