Thread: Raised Panel Router Bit Question

Greetings,

I am looking for some ideas & inspiration from those people experienced in using Raised Panel Router Bits ......

I have a couple of Raised Panel Bits, different styles, but all Whiteside brand from the USA. The older bits I bought while I was living in Canada, and the newest one (which I'm trying to use today) was bought for me by a friend in Canada and mailed out to me. I've used these raised panel bits on a number of projects before, and never had much of a problem with tear-out. In the past I've usually done do two passes - one with the bit raised 3/4 of the height required for a full cut, and a second pass at the full height of the cut.

So, roll on to today.

Today is the first time that I've tried to make Raised Panels in Qld Maple. Because the Qld Maple has some nice wild grain, I decided to vary my normal process and to make these raised panels doing four passes on the router - so 3mm depth of cut per pass. The following photo shows the tear-out that I'm got when cutting along the grain. The cross-grain cuts are acceptable, probably only because, purely by accident, the grain is a bit better behaved and almost straight at the top and bottom of each panel. The tear-out shown in the photograph occurred after the first 3mm deep cut, with the router speed set to minimum (I think that's 8,000 RPM on the big Triton)..

20150827_160230.jpg
As you can see, there are nasty amounts of tear-our on the surface of the cut, and large splinters of timber torn off the edges of the board. And this is after only the first 3mm deep cut 20150827_160147.jpgwith a brand new router bit.

The photo to the left shows the router bit that I'm using. It's a brand new Whiteside bit, and quite sharp (I can cut paper on the cutting edge). To make sure that it wasn't a faulty bit, I did some test cuts with a few scraps that were laying round the place. I tried; hoop pine, southern silky oak, fiji mahogany, and for a laugh a bit of Blood Wood with nice wild grain. All worked well. The Silky Oak had a little bit of 'fur' on the surface of the cut which would have been easy to sand off. The Blood Wood is as hard as nails, but fed slowly, the bit still produced an acceptable raised panel cut in four passes. I haven't bothered to photograph the test pieces because there was nothing but nice clean raised panel cuts to be seen.

So, it's obviously the wild and woolly grain in the Qld Maple that's the culprit. Where the grain in the Qld Maple is nice and straight (read 'bland') the Maple routes quite well. But wherever the grain gets a bit interesting, the panel raising bit definitely has problems.

I've thought about climb cutting, but I've always been told that climb cutting on a router table with a fence is a No No, and anyway that Panel Raising Bit is a monster, which is probably another reason not to try climb cutting.

I'm going to hold off doing any more work on the actual raised panels until I have a plan of attack that I've tested successfully on some Maple scraps.

On Friday, I'm going to try doing a sample cut on some figured maple, doing the cuts at 1.5mm depth per pass, instead of 3mm, in the hope that might help. After reading a comment on the Whiteside web site, I'll also make sure I'm feeding the workpiece very slowly - they suggest "about 1 inch per second maximum on highly figured hardwoods". That might work. My neighbour (also a Woodworker) has suggested moving the fence instead of raising and lowering the router bit. He thought that approach might result in less tear-out. It's not something I normally do, so I don't know whether that approach makes any difference. Can only give it a try on a test piece I guess.

I have also considered cutting the troublesome edges off the panels and gluing on some straight grain Maple for the edges, but I think that would look strange having figured boards next to plain grained boards in a panel glue-up.

So - do the experts have any ideas regarding how to successfully complete these Raised Panel cuts ?

Over to you.

Regards,

RoyG