Preventing Router Blowout

We’ve all experienced moments when a blowout happens while routing wood and the expletives fly as ferociously as the wood chunks. It’s not fun, and most of the time it is avoidable. Here, master craftsman Jess De Geest offers two bits of advice: First, read the grain. He offers a brief tutorial on how to do this, illustrated with Douglas fir. The second, and perhaps most important, is to back-mill—a process in which you run the router in the opposite direction and make a shallow cut. As De Geest points out, sometimes larger bits and profiles require one to two passes in this direction. Check out the video to learn more.