A Router Table for Woodworking Dummies

shop-built router table

A couple of times early in the Antisocial Network's crusade to stamp out greedy freelancer stupidity we ran across near-duplicate posts. We assumed that happened because of poor quality control at content farms like Seekyt and Bubblews, which is where we'd found previous duplicates.¹ We didn't expect to find such duplication at a site that prides itself on being a "source of unbiased, reliable, easy-to-understand answers and explanations of how the world actually works" – but there it was at HowStuffWorks.com. A post by an Anonymous "contributor" called "How to Build a Router Table."

The problem? It was a near-perfect replica of an older² Lacy Enderson post of exactly the same name...

At least this time, the contributor included a link to a reference... except that neither of anonymous' links included the bogus material that had been cribbed by both this contributor and Enderson. We did, however, find a post at DoItYourself.com with equally stupid instructions; a post we believe to be the source on which both authors (well, for all we know, Lacy wrote both of them) based their "information."

Anonymous started out badly enough with an eHow-like intro with this bogus information:

"The stand's main function is that the table top can turn, thus allowing the carpenter to cut different shapes without having to stop and rotate the wood by hand."

We're not real sure where that bogosity came from, since we cannot find a router stand or table with a rotating top. We do note that anonymous didn't include any instructions for a lazy susan mount in the instructions, though.

The similarities between the anonymous and Enderson versions of the plans are pretty significant, including such winners as,

"⅛ inch plywood"		"1/8-inch plywood, 3 by 2 feet"
"Glue the 3/8-inch pieces of wood on each side of the opening you just cut. This makes a ledge for the router table insert."		"Glue four scraps of wood 3/8 inch thick to the insides of each of the four sides of the cutout. This creates a ledge that your router table insert sits on."
"Make a groove 4 inches (10 centimeters) away from the hole, parallel to the 12-inch (30.5-centimeter) side of the hole in the plywood. The groove should extend from one end of the plywood to the other. Widen the groove with a router with a straight bit. Insert a miter track in the groove."		"Make a groove 4 inches in from one side to the other, along the long side of the plywood. Use a router with a straight bit and a straight edge guide. Insert your miter track in the groove."
"Make a T-track using the router. Make grooves parallel to the two shorter sides of the hole, also 4 inches (10 centimeters) from the hole. Insert the tracks for the fence to slide on"		"Cut out T-tracks also using a router. Make these grooves, one on each side of the shorter sides, also 4 inches in."
"Secure your router table to your workbench with clamps, or attach small legs to your router table"		"Attach the table top router to a workbench with clamps to hold it down, or secure it to table legs you make yourself."

Believe it or not, this anonymous idiot, like Enderson, somehow thinks you can make a router table top of 1⁄8-inch plywood (we had to look to see if there is such a thing) and cut dadoes in that thickness for a miter track and a couple of T tracks. What: the tracks are only about 1⁄16 inch deep? That's probably what you get for trying to base router table plans on a reference that starts out by defining a router table as, "...a woodworking table that holds a router saw." A what??? Nope, somewhere out there are not one, not two, but (at least) three people who have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to router tables. Oh, and we're giving that anonymous HowStuffWorks Contributor a Dumbass of the Day award to go along with Lacy's...

¹ We found one pair at the gone but not lamented Bubblews and the second at the almost-gone Seekyt.com
² According to the archive.org Wayback Machine, Enderson's post was first archived in April, 2009; the HSW post was first archived in May, 2011.

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