Hello fellow tinkerers, I recently needed to rabbet a thin groove into a piece of wood to sink a piece of glass into. On a straight cut this is a very simple task that can be achieved with a table saw or router, but in this case, the groove was on a swooping, curved piece and needed to track the outside edge of the wood perfectly. Here is a simple jig I devised for the task (note: I am by no means an experienced, “pro” woodworker so there may actually be a tool out there I don’t know about to do this exact task, but this is my quick-n-dirty method using tools I already have). It’s basically a peg sticking up out of a board, but spaced an exact distance away from the router blade so that it acts as a “round fence” that will let you swing your workpiece around it in order to get into those inside and outside curves.
I took a piece of 3/4″ scrap wood, drilled holes for the router blade and peg, countersunk a long bolt upward through the bottom, dropped a piece of aluminum tubing and a washer onto the bolt then tightened it down into the wood, letting the tubing bite into the wood slightly so it wouldn’t slide around. I drew a long horizontal line on the board to assist in “eyeballing” the cut as I made it. I then attached it to the router table using more countersunk bolts and was ready to do a test run. ALWAYS test things like this out on a piece of scrap first. As you can see in the first pic, the first cut came out very well. The trick to it is to try and swing your workpiece around the peg in such a way that the material is always parallel (or as parallel as you can get it) to the horizontal line on the jig.
And now for real…
Here is the actual piece I needed to cut (and now you can see where that piece of scrap came from). I’m very pleased with the results of this little jig and will certainly add it to my large collection of useful but annoyingly clunky custom contraptions that refuse to fit on any normal shelf in the DatCave. I should start hanging these things from the ceiling or something.
Anywho…that’s all for now! Happy tinkering!
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