
Next Wave Router Table
George VondriskaDescription
The fob
You’ll see a fob, or pendant, attached to the router table in the video. This is the brain of the system. Use it to manually move the fence and change the height of the bit, within .001”, or use the preprogrammed info to really simplify your work.
A number of joints are already set up, via a wizard, within the fob. Box joints, dados, fluting, even lock miters. A great aspect of that is that if you THINK you’re done making a joint or cut, then realize later you need to duplicate it, you can easily hit all the same settings by using the wizard.
Touch plate
Tim from Next Wave CNC refers to a touch plate. This is common in the CNC world. A touch plate is used to find a zero point for the depth of the router bit and the location of the fence, relative to the bit. Once the fob has this information it’s easy to set the fence position and bit height.
Their CNC machines
Next Wave’s Piranha is one of the first products of theirs I looked at. Since then the family has grown, a lot, with many different sizes of CNC routers available today.
Here at Next Wave with Tim, CNC technology has met a router table and they had a love child that's amazing. So show us what's going on here. Okay. This is the RS 1000 Pro. So it's specifically designed to take just about all of the setup time to zero, as simple as you can do with a touch plate, which would be on normal CNC.
I can know the height and the edge of the bit with a simple touch off. So from this, you have simple, if you were just using it as a normal router table, it removes all the nudging, all the things that you would normally have to do. Well, and trying to stick a ruler in here and determine my position and- Try to figure out the height, try to figure out the fence. And there's no blocking there's no anything like that. Within 1/1000th of an inch, I can actually put in specifics and have it moved to wherever I wanted to do.
I can do slight nudging. And all of that capability is there which greatly enhances a router table where you would use a tool rather than saying I got a 20 minute setup. But where it really begins to shine, not only, and you have a setup of 20 different positions, but the apps and wizards of normal operations are built into the unit. So this is cool, 'cause box joint. That's a very common router table application.
You've got so much stuff pre-programmed into the machine already. Correct. So if you're trying to do a box joint if you're trying to do dados, which is one of my favorites. If you're doing a dovetail, sliding dovetail, key holes, biscuits, there's a key, lock miter are all done in the thing. And that's the big one 'cause lock miters make smoke come out of people's ears.
It's an easy set up, all you have to do is measure the width of the board and it will automatically set itself. Everything else is built in. All right. It will literally set itself up in a couple of seconds. For the, if you're doing something as simple as fluting, as an example, everything is shown as a visual representation.
And then it just asks you to give a few simple pieces of information, groove count. And then I say, go ahead and run the wizard. And the unit will then set itself up. And this is a miter on it. We would of course take this off 'cause we're not using it for fluting.
Yeah, we're running long ways. Yep. And so it would run through, I would say next position. It's already done the math for the next groove and you keep running it through. So two or three times, however many grooves you have.
And then once I could check the product if it was off or I wanted to have it a little bit deeper, I could just adjust the bit height a little bit more and then just re-run the exact program and put it right back The repeatability aspect is crazy cool that it- who doesn't make a mistake every once in a while, so You ran out out of the board with you, you may cut a wrong board or anything and you can get right back there. And two, if I change, like, I think I'm done, but I'm not. It turns out I need to run one more piece. Everything is already here. Yes.
So I'm gonna get an identical piece without trying to figure that out again. Exactly. That's very cool. And one of the things I really like is for perfectly sized dados, 'cause like plywood is never really three quarters of an inch. Yes.
So we could cut those dados with a half inch. Use this technology once it knows the bit diameter to get a 0.72 dado instead of a 0.75 if we needed to. Yes. And it, you would end up passing it through three times but then you would have an exact match. There's no going to a table saw, everything as long as it's within the parameters.
You can actually fit it on the table. That's very cool. That's no more head scratching. My folding ruler is gonna go away. You can't use it anymore.
Excellent. I've always thought router tables are one of the most universal tools you can put in your shop. There's so much you can do on these. With the addition of electronics like this. Oh my gosh.
Does that make fence positioning and setting height easy.
I want one. So far I've not found anyone who actually has it available.
HOW MUCH?
This new CNC makes the old ones look like something from the backyard! This is more than awesome, it is the future of woodworking. This has me blown away!