Router Sled Kits
Woodworkers, carpenters, and hobbyists know that electric or battery-operated wood routers are an excellent tool for shaping edges, cutting mortises, making cutouts and grooves, creating decorative surface patterns, and much more. Indeed, there are some jobs that only a wood router can do.
The first concern when using a router should be personal safety. That means wearing eye and ear protection, keeping hands a reasonable distance from the moving parts, avoiding kickbacks, and making full use of all the tool’s built-in safety features.
A secondary concern is to be as precise as possible in the cuts you make with the router. With a motor that can spin large bits over 20,000 rpm and deliver surprisingly high horsepower, controlling the movement of the router across the stock is of paramount importance. Our versatile router sled kits are designed to help you achieve maximum precision in your cuts.
Why Would You Need a Router Sled?
One of the primary purposes of a wood router sled is to allow you to flatten lumber and boards that are too big for a jointer or a planer. (This is why a router sled is sometimes also called a “slab-flattening jig.”) A dedicated machine to accomplish that feat would take up a huge amount of space in a woodworking shop, would not be easily portable, and might cost upward of $20,000. At a fraction of that cost, clearly Framing Tech’s router sled kits are a much more economical solution.
Choosing Your Router Bits
Routers are extremely versatile tools, and you can choose from literally hundreds of types of bits of different sizes, shanks, purpose, and decorative design. Depending on the router bit chosen, you can do flush-trimming, chamfer-cutting, round-over cutting, rabbeting, dovetail, and cove cutting, among other techniques. Most of the time, woodworkers purchase bits for specific purposes, as they need them.
Setting Up your Router Sled
Each kit consists primarily of a pair of extruded aluminum profiles, to be attached in parallel to the workspace, so that the router sled itself, set on cross-bars, will move very smoothly back and forth along these linear rails. Besides the aluminum extrusions, each kit includes:
- Hardware to mount rails to table top
- Hardware for mounting sled-kit to extrusion
- Locking/positioning handles and knobs
- End caps
Our standard router sled kits come in two sizes, based on the workspace to be covered:
- 72″ × 36″
- 96″ × 48″
Be aware that the router sled itself is not included in the kit, and must be purchased separately from TOT (TakeOneToo.com). Their website has many instructional videos illustrating how the router can be attached to the rails and effectively operated.