How to Cut a Straight Line with a Router

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Kevin, and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you how to use a router as a straight lining mechanism. If you're ever out on a job site, and you don't have a table saw, or a really big radial arm saw to your disposal and you need to make a cut this like and a skill saw is going to be too messy of a job, what you can do is use a router to do it. Or, if your machines are not working for whatever reason, you only have a router, what you can do is you take a straight edge like this, we've jointed this, we have a nice straight edge, and we're going to clamp this down and use it as a guide for the router. So what we need to do is find out from the edge of this, which the base will be running off of, to the outside, what the distance is. So, it is 2 3/4", so what we need to do is if we want to take off a 16th is do 2 11/16ths, just shy of 2 3/4 that we measure over on both sides, clamp this down, and then run it. So we have our two marks, so we position the straight edge across both of them, clamp it down here very, very tight, and the same over on this side. And now we'll take the router, and double check it, and it looks like it will just be cutting into the piece. So now what you do is you take this, you take the piece and run it all the way across. It will give you a nice straight edge, parallel to the one that's already there now, and perfectly perpendicular to both sides, because we measured the same distance on both sides."