Overview of the PantoRouter

Have you seen the Pantorouter? It’s a very cool tool, capable of precisely making a lot of different joints. Mortise and tenon joints are the real bread and butter of the Pantorouter, but it can do much more than that.

How it works

Have you ever used a pantograph? A stylus traces something, like a drawing, and a pen transfers the drawing to another piece of paper. You can scale the new drawing up or down, depending on how you set up the pantograph. The Pantorouter is similar. A stylus is used to trace a template, and that motion is transferred to a router and, of course, a router bit. The owner’s manual does a great job of helping you match the template, the stylus and the router bit in order to get the joint you want.

Customizing the fit

The approach used for fine tuning the fit is pretty clever. The templates have a slight angle to them. You can easily control where the stylus rides on the template; the wide part of the angle, or the narrow part of the angle. Because we’re transferring that motion to the cut, this slightly changes the dimensions of the part you’re cutting.

Angles?

Oh yeah, the Pantorouter allows you to cut angled mortise and tenon joints, too. Simple or compound, it’s no problem setting the Pantorouter up for the cuts.

Hand-held router techniques

Lots of woodworking is, of course, down with hand-held routers. Make sure you’re getting the most of your machine by learning how to use a router.

More info

Check out the Pantorouter web site for more information on this tool.