The router has become an important part of the woodworkers kit, I would recommend that it should be one of the first portable hand tools you buy. Once you’ve got a router it’s worth fitting it into a router table. This need not be expensive, the table can consist of an off cut kitchen worktop (ask a kitchen fitter for a piece) with a metal plate for fitting the router (Axminster and Trend sell them), this greatly increases the versatility of this already versatile tool. However it can also make it more dangerous.

Using machines with rotating cutters is all about balancing forces. The rotating cutters are imparting a force in one direction, you need to ensure that in feeding the work onto the cutters you are pushing in the opposite direction. If you and the machine are both trying to force the work in the same direction it may be pulled out of your hands and thrown across the workshop. Or worse still, if you don’t have adequate guarding, which, let’s face we sometimes don’t your fingers may be pulled onto the cutters. Please note that in all the pictures the guard has been removed for clarity.

In a router table the cutters will be rotating anticlockwise, if you feed with the fence on your left the force imparted by the cutters will be in the same direction as your are pushing, the forces will not be balanced and the workpiece will be grabbed by the cutter.

If you feed with the fence on your right the cutter force and the feed force will be balanced The only exception to this that I can think of is if you have cut a groove in a piece and are re-cutting it to widen the groove on the right hand side then the cutters will be forcing the wood away from you.

The balance of forces is also important when using the router hand held. This is not such an important safety consideration, but it does give you a better cut. The rotation of the cutter has an effect by pulling the router into or away from the work depending on feed direction. When hand held the rotation of the cutters is clockwise, if you feed the router with the piece on the left and the fence on the right the force of the cutter will pull the fence against the wood, making the cut much cleaner. If you push the machine over the piece in the opposite direction the forces will want to force the fence away from the work, giving a much less clean cut. So the work piece should always be on your left when using the hand held router.