Festool OF1400 on rails - I don't see the point

[luvmytoolz]

Please can you explain what this means, I'm confused.

Thanks
Bob

I bought a double bearing 55mm x 30mm spiral insert router bit from CSP Tooling, and use it to square up the edge of timber ready for gluing, I use a known dead straight bar for the top bearing to ride against, giving me a perfect result.

Makes for extremely fast jointing without needing to get all the crap off my jointer first!

 

[bobtskutter]

@luvmytoolz thank you. I've often wondered about doing something like that.

Regards
Bob

 

[luvmytoolz]

@bobtskutter It's been an absolute game changer for me, I do have a planer/thickie combo but it's usually buried in timber, and is a pain to set it up to just "quickly edge a couple boards".

So long as the reference board or guide is dead straight, I get perfect results every time without any effort. And the spiral cutter is a godsend, absolutely amazing bit of kit.

 

[friedchicken]

I was just checking the TSO products page and saw exactly this lol:

 

[Coen]

I don't even know how to respond to this. Are you the normal police?

No surprise so far. Fits in the profile.

when the real world comes knocking I'll take a known straight board and ride it up against that. The alignment marks on the router base should make the process relatively trivial. It's my understanding you do not want to go against that cut out flat section of the base.

But if you then rotate it by accident and get the flat part against you know straight... you still depart from the planned route.

Also; if I remember right, the OF-1400 was never made to any tolerance on fitting the center of the circular parts of the base in the center of the spindle.

And if you ride the rounded part against whatever... you will eventually get wear marks on there. The guide rail stop has pads that take the wear.

You already know the guide rail is straight and as others have already said; you can adjust the distance from rail to 'cut' with the guide rail adapter and it's micro adjust. Not so easy to do the same with a random piece of straight whatever.

there is a little support that is lowered onto the workpiece to make up the height difference the track makes

Yeah but honestly that thing kinda sucks because it doesn't lock that well and is too short and narrow (both in the horizontal plane). For the OF-2200 they make a special base with the offset on half the base, for the 1010 and 1400 it's left to DIY that.

Please can you explain what this means, I'm confused.

Thanks
Bob

That it doesn't matter if the router wanders off, because it can only wander off in a direction was was to be routed away anyway.

I was just checking the TSO products page and saw exactly this lol:

View attachment 379542

Note that they are using the flat part of the base to ride against the straight edge.

 

[Jim_in_PA]

The most simple answer I can give is that it's the exact same advantage that using a track saw brings...it takes a lot of the risk for human hands away from positioning the cut so that it stays absolutely accurate. You can't assume that a router moving away from a clamped down "something" isn't going to mess something up in a big way, especially on a "one and done" cut that's exactly the width of the tooling in the router. (I have an adapter for the Trion jigsaw, too, which while rarely ever been used, has been employed for trimming the ends of large slabs that would have been impossible to do with my track saw due to thickness)

 

[bobtskutter]

This seems to be turning into a somewhat academic argument but...
I have an OF1400, and guide rails and the guide rail adapter.
Trying to run the flat edge of the router base along a straight edge means any rotation in the router body will act as a leaver and pivot the whole router at one end of the flat face. The result is the cutter gets "levered" into the work piece.
Running the round edge of the router base along a straight edge means any rotation of the router body wont have the same leaver effect, because a circle only touches the straight edge at one point (the straight edge is a tangent to the circle). If the center point of the cutter is not at the same center point as the circular edge there will be a very small leaver effect on the cutter but the effect will be much less than using the flat face of the router body.
So, long story short, don't free hand run the flat face of the router body along a straight edge.

Bob

 

[luvmytoolz]

I was just checking the TSO products page and saw exactly this lol:

View attachment 379542

Aside from the fact the cutters raised high and not even spinning, there's no way you're doing that depth in a single pass as the pics suggests by simply running the router base along a straight edge!

You'd have to do so many light passes to stop the router running away on the climb cut side.

 

[grmaxx]

"Why do it simple if it can be done complicated" - All Germans making any decision ever

Here's what I'm talking about:

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pvK7czh9MDw

Why not simply run the router against a piece of wood or even just against the track?

It provides stability and moves in only one direction, with no chance of shifting out of line when the rails are clamped.