How to Use Profiling Router Bits

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Kevin, and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you how to use some profiling bits, and when to use them. Here's some examples of profiling bits, and we've got three of them here, well actually four of them, that are roundovers. And what happens is this bearing rides along the workpiece, and then this little cutter head here makes this profile, which is called a roundover. So the wood goes from square to round on the edge of the board. And then this is a chamfer bit. Same thing, it rides on the wood here, but instead of creating a circle, it just creates an angle. And where you would want to use these is on drawer fronts, on tables, to soften the edges. Maybe if you've got kids you want to put a bigger roundover so there's not a hard edge for the kids to run into and possibly cut themselves, but, a softer, roundover for that. And it's just gentler to the touch, it creates a specific look, and so it really is just going to depend on what look and what you're trying to achieve, but essentially they all work the same. They all ride on this bearing, and re-establish a new surface on the edge of the workpiece to create a look or a feel of the wood that you desire for your particular project. Okay, as you can see here, we've got the square edge, and this is where the roundover starts. So you can see it creates like a nice little, about an 1/8", 1/4" roundover the size of the quarter inch, and a nice smooth round-over. So it softens the edge, gives it a specific look, and just makes it so that it's harder, that if something were to run into this, it would be a lot harder to chip a piece off than it would right here, as you can see, when something dies out to a perfect square, it's been chipped off here. So when the wood is dying down there's just nothing, it makes it more fragile. But this actually strengthens it up, it's more one solid piece as opposed to dying out to nothing, so it actually makes it a lot harder to damage the furniture if you've got a roundover like this on it."