Jigs Gaffney SC

Once upon a time I had the brilliant idea to use a strip of hardwood to trim out the edge of a laminate countertop. And not just any laminate, either. This stuff was so expensive that if you asked how much it cost, the salesperson presumed you could not afford it. So scratching it during installation was not an option.

The challenge, I realized the moment the glue set upon the wood trim, was that I had to plane the top surface of the trim flush with the laminate without touching the laminate itself. If the blade touched the laminate, I would remove the thin layer that held the color, revealing the dull substrate (which the manufacturer thoughtfully made a flat white to provide maximum contrast and advertise my slip-up to the world).

I searched the 40 billion tool catalogs I receive each month (give or take), looking for something that would shave the wood without touching the laminate. I found nothing that would do the trick.

Now, we all know what happens when you have a perfectly good excuse to buy an expensive new tool and you can't find anything suitable – you buy something that's unsuitable and make it work. As a result, I bought a small laminate trimmer and built the jig shown here to turn it into a tool that I hoped would not mar the laminate.

Making a Router Cut Like a Hand Plane
What I made is sometimes called a "router plane," although it does something quite different from the hand tool of the same name.

An old-time router plane rides on the surface and reaches down into a recess to trim the bottom. This jig lets you adjust the depth of the router bit to cut adjacent surfaces flush to or higher than the surface on which the router is riding.

In my case, I wanted the tool to ride on the laminate and shave the top surface of the wood trim ever-so-slightly higher than the laminate it was attached to.

The first thing to do is to make a mounting plate from clear acrylic. (This lets you see what you are planing.) The plate should be rectangular and about twice as long as the laminate trimmer's base is wide.

Mount the router at one end of this plate, centered over a 1"-diameter opening for a bit. On the end of the plate, mount a 3/8"-thick wooden base and a handle, as shown in the drawing at right. The base rests on one surface and lets you cantilever the router over another surface that you want to shave parallel to the first.

The handle not only helps you control the router, it lets you counterbalance the router's weight and keep the base flat on the reference surface as you work.

The fasteners you use to assemble the plate, base and handle must not protrude below the bottom surface of the base – after all, you don't want metal hardware dragging over the surface you're trying not to cut.

Using the Jig
Mount a straight bit in the router. I commonly use a 3/4"-diameter bit, but ...