Make: Projects – Router Trammel

Woodworking
Make: Projects – Router Trammel

This attachment mounts in place of your router’s factory baseplate and is used for cutting circular disks from, or boring circular holes in, sheet stock. It pivots about a small pin rotating in a blind hole drilled in the center of the stock to be cut. This one is based on a design from Bill Hylton’s excellent book Router Magic.

As much as I like Hylton’s project, I wanted to design a DIY trammel that did not require any table-mounted tools or expensive router bits for its construction. My version is laminated from three layers of quarter-inch stock, and replaces Hylton’s custom-milled T-slot and matching arm with a short piece of aluminum 80/20 rail, which is inexpensively available. The arm can be reversed in the slot to cut small radii, and Hylton’s dimensions have been slightly modified to provide a continuous range of possible diameters of about 2-22″.

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6 thoughts on “Make: Projects – Router Trammel

  1. Halfvast Conspirator says:

    Put a tape measure (I have a drawer full of broken tapes, or use a fabric tape) on the rail and you can quickly adjust the diameter without having to do a lot of measuring. Don’t forget the bit radius when you set it!

  2. Justin Wadahara says:

    OOOO always wanted something like this!

    do you just lightly nail it in the middle?

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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