Can anyone recommend a jig or template type arrangement for a 1/4" basic router? The immediate need is tight radiused corner edges on 9mm ply. Other things I can think of right now are small/large holes and edges, but I often come across potential uses but throw in the towel - I can do it by hand or use a lashed up guide of some sort but I usually make a mess of it.
Happy to try to DIY a solution, or spend a bit if necessary (maybe £50).
You can get (or make) corner templates which are basically the shape you want, with a couple of perpendicular lugs on the sides to locate against the sides of the material being cut. You then use either a cutter with a top bearing, or a template guide bush in the router base to follow the template. (using the guide bush will give a larger radius)
Search for "Router radius template"
Holes can depend a bit on the size. Small ones, you just need a hole in something to use as a template. Acrylic is nice since you can see through it, which helps positioning. You can make one easily with some sheet material and a hole saw.
Large ones using a trammel bar. Mine came with a point that could be added to the end of the bars the fence fits on. That lets you use it like a large pair of compasses. Or again you can make a long bar out of thin ply and fix it under the baseplate of the router.
You can also make large templates if you need. I needed a large ellipse for a coffee table once, so traced one onto some 1/2" shuttering ply, using a pen guided by loop of string stretched round the two foci. Then cut outside the line with a jigsaw, an sanded to the line. A bearing guided bit could then follow that:
It is worth making proper jigs, even though it might seem like a waste of time - you soon reclaim it in future uses.
Something like a routerboard[1] is really good for quickly cutting exact sized dados into things since it copies the size of whatever sample you use to set it:
Excellent, thanks very much. I'll have a go at making a couple of simple ones
- it's a bit Heath Robinson but a nail in a piece of wood served to do some quite accurate holes and rebates for some speaker baffles. Onwards . . .
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