Para tallar letras y hacer bonitos letreros de madera hay varios métodos: desde tallarlas a pulso; pasando por la utilización de plantillas para fresadora; hasta máquinas más o menos complicadas (desde un pantógrafo hasta una fresadora cnc). Yo en este caso tan solo quería tallar unas letras sencillas en un colgador de ropa que estaba haciendo para casa, y el único método que tenía a mano era el de fresar las letras a pulso.<
Routing letters in wood with a plunge router
Before routing the final letters, I made a routing test on a piece of wood to get an idea of the result I could get. And, although I am far from making perfect letters in wood, I found the result to be quite decent. It wasn’t the time to try to make some complicated letters, so I drew some simple letters on the wall coat rack wooden board, measuring to make them the same width and height, and with the same spacing between all the letters. Carving uneven, off-center letters with different spacing between them would spoil the result more than the shaky line resulting from routing them freehand with the router machine.
To carve the letters, I used a V grooving router bit. I adjusted the height so that it protruded only a few millimeters below the base of the plunge router. I clamped the workpiece with the clamps and routed the letters in parts, routing a straight line, lifting the plunge router and continuing with another straight line. Tracing the curves is more complicated, and even more in wood such as this pine wood, with a continuous alternation between hard and soft grain. So the “O” was even “weirder” than the other letters I was routing.
If we look at the vertical lines of the letters, for example in the E, we can see that when routing the letters freehand, in the hard grain (the dark ones) the router tends to move to the right. If we take into account the direction in which I move the plunge router (downwards) and the direction of rotation of the router bit (clockwise), we can see how when passing the soft grain and entering the hard grain, it seems that the router bit grabs that grain harder and tries to run along the hard grain and pushes the plunge router to the right. And as soon as I leave the hard grain and enter the soft one, the plunge router moves to the left during that little moment in witch I still keep doing the extra effort with which I compensate for the tendency of the plunge router to move to the right.
