# Anyone made their own lathe router jigs with success?



## Thorn495 (Feb 28, 2014)

I do a lot of hollow forms on the lathe and recently got a variety of wood carving chisels to try out. I tried making a leaf design on one and my fingers are still sore from playing with them. I was thinking of making a something for my router to rough carve designs on pieces vised/indexed on the lathe before going to the hand carving chisels. I think it'd make a good combo. Anyone else mixed their lathe with a router for certain projects? 

I've seen lots of video/pictures of a router used horizontally (stuff like this: http://woodgears.ca/lathe/kerr01-b.jpg) with the lathe, but I was thinking of making some rails with space wide enough for the router above the wood held in the lathe.. and definitely not while the wood is turning, just cutting out the basic shapes of things and then detailing with carving gouges seems like a good idea for me.


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## saculnhoj (May 18, 2015)

I use the router a lot on the lathe. I simply make a table to fit on my tool rest. then the router rides on this. I simply clamp a guide that is shaped like the turning so the router follows this. Then I can adjust some screws for the depth of cut. Normally I use an index wheel so I can cut equallly spaced grooves but it have also rotated the wood by hand to sort of lower all the surface except areas I want to carve. I'll post a photo of part of my rig. I have separate bases for the router holding jig. One has 2 screws space apart to act as guides against the fence. This is for convex surfaces. I have another base with only one screw for concave objects. You have to hold the bit perpendicular to the surface buy eye if you use this one. 
One of the photos is an older jig that fits on the lathe bed. I have a brand new one I just built that has a screw feed for the depth of cut and can swing with angle adjustments for routing a tapered cut on platters and my hand mirrors. I'll try to shoot a photo of it later today.
One photo shows my router mounted at 45 degrees. I use a straight bit to cut V grooves. It cuts cleaner than using a 90 degree routing bit mounted at 90 degrees.


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## saculnhoj (May 18, 2015)

Here are photos of 2 of my jigs. The first one shows a view of the new one I just built. It slides in 2 directions, can be mounted 2 ways. can be rotates about 20 degrees either way and has a screw thread adjustment for the depth of cut. Just started using it and it works great. A little hassle to set up but is much more precise than the other ways I worked. 
The other one shows how I route to follow hollow vessel shapes. I simply use a pencil vertically to trace the shape of the vessel and then cut out that shape. My router has 2 screws on the bottom of the plate that follow this shape. I can adjust them to make the cut a hair deeper or shallower. Normally I use this to make index type cuts in a piece but I did a vase a few years ago where I set the router to cut 1/4" deep. Then I drew flowers on the vase. by moving the router left and right and rotating it by hand I was able to lower all the surfaces but the flowers 1/4". Much faster than carving that away by hand. You still had to carve up the flowers themselves by hand but most of the wood was gone.


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