Offering a multitude of advantages, both the drill press and the router is the best pieces of equipment to add any woodworker’s shop. Woodworks have become more accessible than before due to these tools.
When a drill press provides flexibility, control, and perfection in the drilling operation, a router helps you to finish fine cuts, shaping woods, and more.
However, you may need to know more details when you can use which tool. Let’s have a closer look through our article about when you need using a drill press and when to go for a router.
When to Use a Drill Press?
While working on your wood projects, you need to perform certain tasks by using a drill press. Some of those tasks are as follow:
To Get Accuracy
Woodworkers prefer drill press to get accuracy. Though you can use a handheld drill, drill press creates identical holes in a better way. It comes with a depth stop. So with it, you can set the depth, the width, and angle of the holes.
Speed and Control
Drill press provides better speed, so recreating several and different holes will save some of your time too. Maintaining the same constant drilling speed is difficult in a normal drill. Whereas the drill press has a fixed handle, and you can control the speed too.
Drill Wider Holes
Drill press comes with a powerful motor. For this reason, the user does not need to use much of his energy in drilling. Additionally, you can fit the drill head with wider bits to make wider holes even with accuracy.
For Mortising
If you do not have a chisel, you can use a drill press for necessary mortising. Some manufacturers provide mortising attachments. These are useful in case you want to mortise a rectangle or square on your working wood piece. You can easily get such perfect mortises with the help of drill press.
To Sand
After drilling, sometimes, the outer part of the working piece remains rough. In that case, polishing becomes essential. A drill press has different sanding attachments. You can add one of those attachments inside the chuck. It will create a sanding tool that is best for polishing rounded cuts or the surface of freshly done drills.
For Deburring
Often, drill leaves the exterior surface of the material chipped or uneven. You can easily lessen or overcome this by using a deburring tool attachment. This attachment is also available with a drill press.
When to Use a Router?
If you need to do the below-mentioned tasks for your wood projects, you better use a router than the spindle molder.
Building Boxes and Drawers
With the flourish of the power tool in the woodworking sector boxes, drawers and joints have been crafted with the wood router. In making drawers, advance the grain direction from side to side so that it presses the drawer sides out.
However, if you intend to make one wooden board box using your wood router, you need to route out the cavities in cutting several passes. These cuts of the passes should not be more than ⅛ inch unless you reach the inclined depth.
Routing the Edges
Shaping the edges is another important task in woodworking as they provide an outline of the project. It also enhances the design. Using a wood router makes routing the edges much easier. You are likely to have the most perfect edged if you use a router with a sharp bit.
To Cut Dados
Dados is a square framed and flat bottomed channel which is used as the strongest support of the cabinet side. To cut a dado, you need to cut across the wood grain. But if you are having trouble to cut it, you better do it with a router.
To Cut Rabbet
Cutting a rabbet is too easy and effective if you are using a router. With a simple rabbeting bit, you can cut out different sizes of the rabbet. Your rabbeting job will be faster with it even if you own a dado set or table saw.
When you use a router, you can avoid the trouble of setting up another machine for your task. However, you can also think of the best router table to small rabbet pieces. Just use a straight bit to cut out a rabbet while using a router table.
Inlaying Banding
If you want to decorate the wood surface by shallow mortises and fill those with inlaying other things like epoxy, slabs of pearl, or wire, choose a router. These decorative inlaid objects are tiny and need to shape intricately.
The shape should have accurate depth and correct size. A wood router is one of the best tools for serving this purpose.
Creating Dovetails
Woodworkers make dovetail as an addition to the dados to make the joints much solid. You will need a power tool to create a dovetail. There are half-blind, sliding, and through dovetails, and surprisingly, a wood router can make all of them.
Final Words
That is all for knowing when to use a drill press and when you can pick a wood router to perform your woodwork with efficiency. Both the tools are useful and versatile enough to complete wood oriented tasks.
Thank you for reading.