It has taken slightly longer than I expected (9 1/2 weeks or so all told (sure there’s a movie reference in there somewhere 😉 ) but finally I have the machined router wing back in my hands.
I’ve had a couple of operations performed on it, one quite high risk, so it will be interesting to see if it really survived. The first was flattening the rounded front edge, so I can butt a couple of the wings against each other. That was ok, and without particular drama.
The second was removing a large portion of the centre of the wing so it could fit a Woodpeckers Router Lift. The amount of material removed allowed a lot of stresses in the metal to be released, causing quite a lot of cupping of the top. However, by bolting through the top into a couple of metal bars to act as brackets to pull the top back into alignment seems to have done the trick.
CI Router top in its new form
The underside
So there we are. Nex job will involve finally bolting it all together to form the ultimate router top, and fit something like the LS 17 from Incra to it. Build a real base, and then we might be done before taking it for a spin.
Filed under: Tools | Tagged: Cast Iron, CI, Router, Router Table |
Stu's Shed 
Hi Stu,
I’ve been watching your router table experiments with interest, I’ve been wrestling with various options for my own table, since I sold off my Triton…
I finally settled (for the time being) for one built into my saw table, the end wing was made of laminate covered chip board, which I replaced with that concrete form work ply stuff coated with the slippy stuff – Phenol, I think. Anyway I’m happy with it so far.
I like the idea of using the Magswitch jigs etc., so was wondering of you’d thought of insetting a (fairly substantial) cast iron, or simillar, slab into a plywood top. It wouldn’t have to be very big, would it?
Hope you know what I mean