Also the router can be fixed to a table or connected to radial arms which can be controlled more easily.
This dust is a respiratory hazard, even in benign materials. The cutter edge angle is blunt, approaching 90°, and so a Type III chip forms, with waste material produced as fine dust. Owing to inertia at these high speeds, the normal wood cutting mechanism of Type I chips cannot take place. As these materials are weak in small sections, routers can run at extremely high speeds, so even a small router may cut rapidly. Routing is properly applied to relatively weak and brittle materials, typically wood.
Chip formation is different, so the optimal tool geometry is different. Routing and milling are conceptually similar, and end mills can be used in routers, but routing wood is different from milling metal in terms of the mechanics. Modern plunge router showing dust extraction tube Routing is a high speed process of cutting, trimming, and shaping wood, metal, plastic, and a variety of other materials. Modern routers are often used in place of traditional moulding planes or spindle moulder machines for edge decoration (moulding) of timber. įurther refinement produced the plunge router, invented by ELU (now part of DeWalt) in Germany around 1949. Carter, and marketed an 18000 RPM electric hand router similar to modern routers.
In the 1930s, Stanley Works acquired a line of portable routers from Roy L. In 1915 Oscar and Rudy Onsrud produced an air-powered router, which they referred to as a Jet Motor Hand Router. The early electric routers were quite heavy, and only nominally "portable".
The first portable power router was patented in 1906 by George Kelley and marketed by the Kelley Electric Machine Company. Barnes patented a reversible rotary cutting head in 1889. 6 Features of the modern spindle routerīefore power routers existed, the router plane was often used for the same purpose.Īn incremental step toward modern power routers was the foot-pedal operated router, such as the Barnes Former/Shaper, available in 1877.