A little help here? !! Keyholes.....

[Frank & Renee]

Greetings All!

I am attempting to rout two keyholes on the back of a shaker shelf to hang the shelf with. Its a flush mount shelf so I thought metal hangars would look unsightly. I am a novice and have never tried this....I tried a few practice attemps, but trying to balance the router, plunge the bit, and draw it back to an exact point so the keyholes are the exact same length on each side to make the shelf hang straight. This has me scratching my head and thinking about assembling some type of MDF jig to give the router a flat surface to lay on, and some sort of stop block to ensure the keyholes are the exact same length on each side. The shelf is fully assembled.....has anyone ever done something like this or made a jig along those lines?

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!!

Thanks,

Frank (the newbie)

[Dave Balderstone]

Jigs are good. Jigs are your friend.

I've never made one specific to the task you're talking about, but it's not unusual for me to spend 2 to 10 X the time making a jig as it takes to complete the task the jig is designed to assist.

It's worth it to do it right.

Of course, I now have a pile of jigs I will likely never use again, but can't bear to discard.

;-)

djb

[Leon]

If! you have a router table set the fence several inches, the distance that you want to have the tops of the holes, back from the bit. With the router on, set the piece on top of the spinning bit about 1/2" away form the fence and plunge until the piece is setting on the table. The push the piece back until it contacts the fence. The fence will insure that the tops of the slots are all the same distance from the top. Alternatively and this is how I now do it, draw a line at the top point and free hand until you see the small piece of the bit come in contact with that line.

[Leon]

A PS here. After making the cuts, always turn the router off before trying to remove the bit or back out of the cut.

[Keith]

This is the one I found. only used it a few times but works fine for non-production work.

pyro22

[Frank & Renee]

Thanks for all the suggestions!!

this is a very helpful group for a novice woodworker!! ;-)

[Robatoy]

You know the rule: discard it, and you will need it again. Never fails.

A dentist designed a stainless l-shaped disposal-trough/sink to be undermounted to a countertop. After successful completion of the job, I looked at the weird template and cut it into strips..."I'll never use that again..."

6 months later, he called for 4 more. 2 for a new office, 2 for a friend of his. Said dentist is 120 km from my shop...of course....

That jig I made to cut a slot into a countertop so that continuous feed paper could go through it to a printer???? "Nobody uses that any more!" 'Cept that JiffyLube joint...brand new dot-matrix printers...they want some green Staron countertops..... you know the rest....

[Mark & Juanita]

... snip

Solved that problem with my most recent jig. I built a cutoff jig that allows one to cut crown molding without using compound angles. It worked great. Unfortunately, I wound up cutting it in half while using it -- made it easy to discard after I was done with it. :-)

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ The absence of accidents does not mean the presence of safety Army General Richard Cody +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

[Prometheus]

The only keyholes I've cut were on my old router table ( a single piece of 3/4" ply that was somewhat less than flat) and I found that the easiest way to do it was to set up the fence for the beginning of the cut, and then clamp a stop block behind the piece to determine the length of the keyhole. Never did it freehand, but making a quick and dirty router "table" is pretty easy if you just trace the base of the router onto a piece of ply and then rout the sucker out so that it's thin enough to screw the router directly to it (with a hole for the bit, of course.) A fence can be any piece of flat stock that you can clamp to the top. That system worked fine for me for over a year, anyhow- and it sure was easy to use for the abovementioned keyholes. Aut inveniam viam aut faciam