All About Routers for Dummies

Shaping an edge with a fixed-base wood router

Pundits often call  the Millennial generation the "first fully digital generation." If that's the case, however, then more's the pity – because so many of them seem to know nothing about anything that isn't digital; not to mention that a lot of them don't seem to know much about what "digital" is... but enough of that. Today's DotD made a half-hearted attempt to answer what appears to be a millennial-type question, "What Does a Wood Router Do?"¹ for Leaf's niche site OurPastimes.com (that's as, apparently, opposed to the routers made by Cisco). Philosophy student turned freelancer Evan Kubitschek bravely accepted the assignment, even though he had probably never seen one of the tools... and it shows.

Says Kubitschek of the weird tool-thingies he's assigned to write about,

"Wood routers are woodworking tools used to cut and shape wood by routing or hollowing out an area..." ...which, our house word-person pointed out, is circular: Evan says that "routers rout"? Well, that sure explains it! Never mind that routing does not necessarily mean "hollowing out," nor are those who use routers typically concerned with an "area." The key words one must use when defining a router and what it does are "bits" and "shape." Good, old Evan used those... but not well. Some of Evan's other bushwa statements include:

• "Wood routers are used on flat pieces of wood to trace designs, often held in place with clamps...": Huh? plunge work is only some of how routers are used; and frankly isn't their most important function.
• "Wood routers originally began as hand-powered tools, but have evolved steadily into the electronically-powered spinning routers of today...": Utter bull: Kubitschek conflates electrically-powered routers with router planes, which are an entirely different thing (and could never be used "on flat pieces of wood to trace designs").
• "Wood routers have made recreating exact replicas in furniture easy, and have revolutionized cabinetmaking, edging and scroll work, and precise cutting...": We sure wish "recreating exact replicas in furniture" were "easy," and also note that scrollwork isn't likely to be created with a router, either.

What do we have here? We have some college boy turned online marketing specialist who may have never even used a saw attempting to describe a router. He doesn't mention any of the basic cuts (dado, rabbet, tongue-and-groove), doesn't mention router tables, and concentrates only on plunge routers. In other words, he obviously knows nothing about what wood routers do. Heck, we suspect that our Dumbass of the Day doesn't even know what a Linksys router does, digital generation or not!

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/facts_5022279_wood-router.html

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