How can I safely route a shelf bracket

[marida963]

Hello Everyone,

So, I made some pine shelves for a friend of mine and now I am making 4 shelf brackets. The brackets are 5" tall and 5" wide with a inside curve (pretty typical looking shelf bracket). I cut 5 brackets with an inside curve on the bandsaw. Now I want to put a nice edge on the inside curve with a ogee bit. I am using a router lift on the table saw. I set everything up, but almost took my pinky finger off when I tried to route the edge (on the practice piece). the book I read says to route clockwise and when I did, the router bit grabbed the starting point and snapped the top off the bracket very close to my fingers. So I did what anyone else would do; I STOPPED everything. Now I am wondering How can I safely put a nice edge on an inside curve shelf bracket?

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Mario

[PurpLev]

1. whatever you do - do not hold the piece with your fingers near the cutterhead. just incase something does happen - you want your fingers and the spinning metal to not come in contact.

2. I am assuming you are using a router bit with a bearing that the piece is riding on - this is similar to using a fence, not sure what book you are reading, but the feed direction should be counter-clockwise, or right-to-left as the otherway around would be climb cutting and will pull the piece away from your hands since you'll be feeding the piece in the direction of the router bit spin.

EDIT: you would change feed directions - if you were operating the router freehand - in which case, doing the inside or outside of a frame does require you to change feed direction. however, on a router table - it's always (unless you are climd cutting on purpose) right-to-left

3. use a starting pin (you didn't state that you were, so I assume you weren't), otherwise the material you are routing will come in contact with the cutting edge, before it gets to the bearing it's supposed to ride on, and theres a high chance of something happening - as you noticed.

4. going back to #1 - use a push pad when doing this sort of procedure - do NOT push material with your bare hands.

Be safe!

[DannyBoy]

Starting pin and push blocks. Or....can you attach the brackets to a larger piece of wood?

[Beechwood Chip]

Marc has a demo - you can jump to 5:45 if you are impatient.

[PaulMarcel]

+1 everything above.

If you have wooden clamps, I often use them to hold small parts on the router table. Then you get far from the piece, have more to hold, and actually have a lot more control cuz of the screw arms. Just in case it's not obvious, you'd use this clamp flat laying on its side.

(that one is from Rockler)

[marida963]

Thanks for your replies. very informative. I will definately use the push blocks. I will also let you know how everything turns out.

Mario