“Suso,” doing business as Paoson Luthier, is an instrument maker and woodworker in Galiza, Spain. Besides being known for his impressive instrument-making skills, he’s also known for making the cleverly-designed router tables, table saws, and belt sanders that he uses in his woodworking.
Paoson Luthier’s most recent project is a handmade wooden 3D router table. Suso writes of his motivation behind the build:
The idea arose after dealing with the difficulties and loss of time in preparing for certain CNC jobs. Sometimes I spent more time preparing for the CNC than the work itself. With this manual router, you can make holes or mill very fast. A universal 43mm collet makes it very versatile and you can change the milling tool to drill very fast.
On the Paoson Luthier website, Suso has a page with all of the videos he did documenting the entire router table build. He also sells a set of plans for 15.00€ (under $18). The plans have templates for all of the parts, either to be scaled up or at actual size.
There are certainly lots of wooden router table and CNC router plans floating around in cyberspace. What makes this project noteworthy are the feature set and the cleverness of how it’s all put together and designed for maximum versatility.
The Paoson Luthier router table can be used as a 3-axis drill press, sanding station, a 2D router, and you can do 3D milling via a reference model. Using a series of accessories, you can also cut circles, straight-cut squares, and cut to a 2D reference model.
It definitely doesn’t look like an easy build. You probably need serious woodworking chops and decent shop equipment to successfully complete this project. But imagine how much pride you would have while doing projects on a set of fairly sophisticated tools that you made yourself.
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