Router Planing Jig

I had bought a large piece of maple from my local wood supplier. this piece was warpped, craked, and cupped everywhere. I only have a planner that can handle wood up to 12 an a half inches. I was in need of a bigger planner. Instead of shelling out the 1500 to 2000 on an old 20 in planner i did a little bit of research and found out that i can plane my wood with my router. I searched the internet far and long for a simple yet practical jig to do this. Most of them were very well done and seemed really complex. i am on a limited bugget, i have more tools than i have money. So in my searching i gathered the ideas of others and the simple principles of the planning router jig and made one of my own. With simple parts and pieces that most people have laying arpund the shop. Thought this instuctable i will show you the steps to build your own. Thanks for reading and i hope that this will help someone with the same issues i found with this project.

The images above are not mine. i do not own the rights to them. They are only used as a guide that I went off of to build my own jig.

I wanted something simple, yet able to get the job done. Also i wanted to be able to store this jig in my small and limited shop space. Like i said earlier i found myself searching endlessly online to find something that i could do myself with the skills and material i have. what i found in my research was that it was actually quite simple to build a jig to plane your large wood with a router. In my searches i found a few other people that made smaller and simple jigs. This is where i got my idea from. I based most of my project from the pictures above.

You will need a large piece of wood to plane.

I happen to have 2- 2x2x8 pieces of pine that i used for the rails. You can use standerd 2x4s or anything that will act as a rail system. You just want the rails to be longer then the piece that you are planning.

2 picese of 1x6 pine the length of these pieces depend on how large your project is you and make them as long as you would like. I was going for room so i made the 26in , so that i can fit my slab in between, and not take up much room on my table.

You will need an assortment of screws

Miter saw

Screw gun

Router

For the router carage of the jig, you will need the following.

At least half inch plywood.

A few lengths of 1x2 pine and different lengths.

Rail constuction began by putting my two lengths of 2x2x8 on my 26x5x1 pieces of pine together. I did this on both sides to hold everything together. My slab was 2-1/2" thick so it sat above my rails and wouldnt allow me to rout the wood. I fixed this by shimming up my rails with a few pieced of pin all an inch thick and leveled all points of my rails. I screwed my shims to the rails and clamped everything in place.

I started out the router carriage by measuring my rail distance and cut board to length. I then centered my router on the plywood. I marked my center and cut out a strip where my router bit can sit in to move back and forth across the plywood. After this i set my router and bit on plywood and measured two pieces of 1x2 pine to hold my router from going front to back. Then added 2 more pieces of pine to the sideds of the plywood to act as holders to the rails. This allowed for movement along the rails and work piece.

And the fun begins. After you are level and set your router to you desired depth, i set mine to start at taking an 1/8 of an inch of and proceded to to my desired depth after many passes. This is a long slow process, but works very well. So with this let the chips fly.

Thanks for reading hope this helps someone. Please if you have any questions or ideas to make this work better, let me know. Thanks again