Thank you once again. I couldn't see a video though.
Sorry about that.
No idea what happened to the video. I've edited it back in to the post
I've read about hot melt glue and had I not needed to reposition the templates six times on each shelf, I may have done that.
Firstly as you are doing multiple shelves I'd have made up a single template to do
all the holes and the outside edge. This might well have meant making up an initial hole templete to make the production template. Secondly I'd probably have cut my shelf blanks a couple of millimetres larger all round than the finished item and trimmed to the outside in a couple of passes after I'd done the six recesses. That way your shelves are all consistent (not always achieveable if you are moving a template six times), it means you don't have to be super accurate with the shelf blanks so long as they are 2mm bigger that the jig and cut dead square, Routing it out in one shot and doing the rounder corner will be a darned sight easier. I would also whizz of the plastic sub-base and make-up my own larger sub base something like this:
They can be made up using 4 or 5mm acrylic, or polycarbonate, or even thin plywood or MDF (although they aren't as good because they are opaque). There's an article about how to do it
here. Fundamentally, it's a rectangle of material with a big enough hole drilled in the middle for the cutter to go through, some countersunk holes for fixing screws in the same places as the existing sub-base and is just screwed onto the base of the router in place of the (normally) black sub-base. You can often get offcuts of 4 to 6mm clear acrylic or polycarbonate from a local signmaking firm (I know one place where they will let me go skip diving - shop signs are often appropriate thickness acrylic or polycarbonate) but they will sometimes even sell you (or if you are lucky give you) an appropriate sized offcut. Another source is eBay where you can get an appropriate size piece of 4 or 5mm acrylic for a few quid. An enlarged sub-base can bridge the holes and far reduces the tendency to over rout (rout too deeply) or tip the router that can happen when you are trying to supported a router from one edge.
... hot glue cools very quickly when it makes contact with two wooden surfaces, so how do you get it flush all the way around?
Hot glue does set fast, but you only need a couple or maybe three very small of blobs of it, not a large amount, and that being the case if you have a template with a couple of locators on it it should be possible to get your glue blobbed and the template on before it sets off. This sort of template would work for what I am talking about:
Above: The jig used to produce the display shelf. The pink represents some form of sheet material, the brown is 2 x 1in (44 x 22mm) PAR softwood. The jig is made 44mm oversize in both ways to accommodate the 2 x 1 locating blocks which are used to locate the jig on the blank. This is assuming that the blanks are 25mm - the main thing is that the locating blocks are thinner than the material, so anything you have will do, Templates can also be assembled with hot melt glue. In a real world situation I'd possibly make up a jig with two holes in it then use that to make the six hole jig - this makes for a much more consistent end result
Below: The blank is cut slightly oversize and the template fixed on top. Material is shown in green. In reality I'd want to trim that corner back a bit with a jigsaw before routing to reduce the amount of work the router needs to do - because work = heat
Above: What the completed item should look like. I know this isn't exactly the same as yours, but I was setting out to demonstrate the principle only
When you are finished routing the jig and material can be broken apart and cleaned-up with a sharp chisel
One of the things I did in the past was to run a production kitchen shop (for someone else) where we often had to make custom shelves and timber corbels. Our wood machinist wasn't the greatest, so I used to set-up and run all the stuff like this, especially as every set of corbels we seemed to make was unique
