Router table and router combination?

[Spectric]

To the best of my knowledge it’s actually illegal to sell a router table with a router fitted if it DOES NOT stop within 10 seconds,

I am sure this does not apply to a home workshop and might be why commercial shops use spindles and not router tables. Also the larger mass of the spindle head will keep going compared to the router cutter.

When thinking about safety I believe it is not a good practice to say this machine is more or less dangerous than any other machine, you should just think all machinery has the potential to inflict injury and should be treated the same. In some ways the insignificant looking 1/4 chisel on your workbench can be lethal and cause life threatening injury so lets not differentiate safety levels.

The fact you have to take multiple passes on the router is a good point as you are just multiplying the time you are at risk from the hazzard and also often with smaller workpieces, at this rate I will have talked myself into a spindle moulder rather than the router table upgrade.

 

[johnnyb]

I strongly believe that safety comes from having appropriate machines in place totally depending on your ambitions re the work you undertake. So cutting a tiny sliver on a huge saw is folly. And vice versa. Now a door rebate that's 1/2 inch by 46mm seems fairly minor but I know in hardwood I prefer 2 passes to achieve it. Softwood it's OK but 2 is better. Doing that with a router is just bad for the router, yourself and the job finish. Using a spindle is all just machine setting. Really not exciting but productive. Using a router table is difficult even with appropriate size jobs. Big cutters on the router table are a bit scary and accuracy suffers because it's a hand fed jumpy affair.

 

[deema]

@Spectric It’s my understanding after looking into the subject that if it’s manually fed ‘machine’ as opposed to hand held machine, then any rotating woodworking manually fed machine has to stop within 10 seconds to be legally sold within the UK. So, selling a hand held router that doesn’t stop within 10 seconds is fine, but you cannot sell it fitted to a router table to either commercial or hobby consumers. Now as a home workshop, you can fit a router into a router table and use it happily, but commercially when you employ anyone, this setup would cause you a lot of issues if there was ever an accident.

The big cutters I’ve seen fitted to router tables take a long time to spin down, and that’s when hobby / commercial people get tired of waiting and do something silly creating an accident.

There are applications where a router table is the perfect solution, and I have knocked one up quickly for the job, however, and it may just be me, there are very few occasions where I’m dealing with very small stuff that a router table is the ideal solution. I think as soon as you start making things as large as cabinets your preferred machine is a spindle.