Our Design Tools | Articles | About Us | Contact Us
Home

What is a template?

Untitled Page

Back to start page

About templates

Templates in woodworking help to make joints and construction repeatable and accurate. If you are making more than one joint, or you want to reduce the chance of a mistake ruining your workpiece then making a template first is a very good idea. Common situations to use a template include:

Mortising with a router. A mortise template will control the width and length of the mortise. Once you've made the template you can make mortises in minutes.

Ensuring cabinet parts fit together. A template helps makes individual parts square and that they are the same size in relation to each other.

Fitting cabinet hardware. You will get better accuracy with a template. Additionally a template makes it easy to do a dry run on scrap material first.

See the list of available templates

How to make a router template

Templates, Templates Plans and Jigs

Templates by numbers helps you to design a template plan. You can use that template plan on paper directly or use it to make a 'hard' template or jig.

Using the paper template directly
Some tools work well with the paper template directly. For example cutting a dovetail with handtools or mortising with a dedicated mortiser. In these cases the template shows the exact position for the cut.

Making a hard template
Many of our templates include construction lines to help you make a 'hard' template (out of MDF for example) from the paper template. In this mortise example scrap straight edges aligned on the construction lines means a hard template can be made using a router collar and specified cutter.

More information on outlines

Making a jig

A jig is a template with additional adornments that help position or clamp the workpiece. For example our dovetail template offers construction lines that you can use to make a dovetail routing jig.
Using the 'router collar' lines on the dovetail template plan, you can create the jig shown. In fact our dovetail template also includes an Autocad compatible DXF file so the cutouts for this jig can be routed by a CNC router.

Material choice for making templates

Templates are best made from dimensionally stable, smooth materials of uniform thickness.

Man-made materials like plywood or MDF are good choices.

Whatever material is used, the template thickness needs to be sufficient to clear the depth of the guide bush.
Conversely, the template thickness should not be so great that it compromises the maximum cutting depth too much of the chosen router bit. In practice a template thickness of 9-18mm works well.

The template surface should be smooth and free of nails.

A smooth surface ensures the router can move freely leading to a steady cut without judder or burning. If nails are used to fix the template be sure to drive the nail head below the surface of the template. Routers usually have bases made a composite material that is slick but scratches relatively easily.

About router collar and router cutter accuracy

If you measure the diameter of a 10mm router cutter using an accurate measuring tool such as a vernier caliper, you may well find that it is in the range 9.8 to 10.2mm i.e. a deviation of 0.5mm between cutters is possible.

The same applies to router collars (guide bushes) and in fact the deviation can be more due to the cruder manufacturing process which is often stamping out the shape from sheet steel.

If the deviations could impact your work then you can compensate by measuring the diameters of your router cutters and collars rather than relying on the printed values. Then use those measured diameters when you make template plans in Templates by numbers.

Concentricity

A trickier problem to deal with is the possibility that the centre of your router bit may not coincide with the centre of your router collar. In the case of a mortise template this could manifest itself as one side of a mortise is further from the centre than the other.

If concentricity is a problem for your router and the work you want to do with it, then bearing guided cutters provide a solution. Since the bearing shares the same axis as the router cutter, concentricity is assured. In templates by numbers you would specify the bearing diameter rather than the collar diameter.

Another solution is to fit an alternative base and template mounting system. A system such as Trend's includes an adjustable setup to guarantee concentricity (centering the bit exactly).