Prior to this week’s assignment, I had never used a router before. I didn’t quite know what to expect in terms of difficulty, but ultimately it was a pretty straightforward process, slowly ratcheting up the bit with each pass until the piece was finally done.
And I think it wound up looking pretty good. Take a little sandpaper to the edges, and I had a nice-looking little circle with a segment cut out of it.
And let’s just check it against the example in the project to be sure it looks right…
Oh.
Apparently, we were meant to be focusing on the outside part of the circle.
Which I didn’t quite understand until I saw the final segment of the assignment in which we were instructed to cut out the 1’x1’ square from the original piece of plywood. And this is a bit of an issue for me, given that as I was focused on the inside piece, I had let my router go a little way into the outside of my plywood.
Time for some coarse sandpaper!
So now I have a fairly nice looking circle segment, and a somewhat odd-looking part cutout of a 1’x1’ piece of plywood.
Ultimately this project taught two equally valuable lessons- the first being an intro to the router, and the second on the importance of understanding the assignment before starting on it.