Cutting Vinyl Strip
I needed to cut a piece of vinyl trim down to make an anti-chip edge for the rail on my track saw - the installed strip is shown in the first photo below. The strip now gets trimmed by the saw and provides both an indication of the cut line and an anti-chip feature.
Basically two simple operations - a pass on either side of the strip on the table saw to provide grooves for the vertical legs of the opening and then a pass on either side of the strip on the router table to reduce the thickness to fit the height of the groove.
All was going well until the first pass on the router table to reduce the thickness - ran the first strip through on both faces, looked at it and saw that the router had taken most of the thickness down to the bottom of the kerf. A second look at my set-up - the second photo - and I immediately saw what I'd done wrong. The feather boards are in the way, hiding the fact that I'd neglected to think what the feather board was going to do to the flexible (1-1/4" wide x 12 mm thick) strip of vinyl, which was to push it into the 2" dia. hole in the router plate. An hour later (I just knew that I had seen it somewhere) and I had found and installed the adapter ring made to accept P-C bushings, with a brass bushing to close up the clearance around the router bit. I thought that the original feather board set-up would be OK but, just to be sure, moved them to cover just the infeed part of the cut.
Haste makes waste.
I wanted to use my MagSwitch feather board assembly from the TS on the router table, but the cast iron plate was too small and the magnets didn't hit it. The MagSwitch set-up is one I made to cut edge grooves in door rails and stiles for plywood flat panels. I needed to be able to hold the parts against the fence and down on the table at the same time, and the standard MagSwith parts wouldn't let me so I came up with the idea of adding the four standoffs - normally use it with 2-1/4" wide rails on edge, bit it worked just as well with these thin strips.
Basically two simple operations - a pass on either side of the strip on the table saw to provide grooves for the vertical legs of the opening and then a pass on either side of the strip on the router table to reduce the thickness to fit the height of the groove.
All was going well until the first pass on the router table to reduce the thickness - ran the first strip through on both faces, looked at it and saw that the router had taken most of the thickness down to the bottom of the kerf. A second look at my set-up - the second photo - and I immediately saw what I'd done wrong. The feather boards are in the way, hiding the fact that I'd neglected to think what the feather board was going to do to the flexible (1-1/4" wide x 12 mm thick) strip of vinyl, which was to push it into the 2" dia. hole in the router plate. An hour later (I just knew that I had seen it somewhere) and I had found and installed the adapter ring made to accept P-C bushings, with a brass bushing to close up the clearance around the router bit. I thought that the original feather board set-up would be OK but, just to be sure, moved them to cover just the infeed part of the cut.
Haste makes waste.
I wanted to use my MagSwitch feather board assembly from the TS on the router table, but the cast iron plate was too small and the magnets didn't hit it. The MagSwitch set-up is one I made to cut edge grooves in door rails and stiles for plywood flat panels. I needed to be able to hold the parts against the fence and down on the table at the same time, and the standard MagSwith parts wouldn't let me so I came up with the idea of adding the four standoffs - normally use it with 2-1/4" wide rails on edge, bit it worked just as well with these thin strips.
