How to Trim Edge Banding on the Routing Table

On European style cabinets, typically you have an edge band on the front, not a face frame. So, I've got the edge band glued on to this piece and when I put edge band on, I put it on so it's too big. So, my edge band here is projecting pass this face. Now, what I need is an easy way to trim every piece in the carcass so that the edge band is perfectly flush. Let me show you a great technique for taking care of that on the router table. What it calls for is the addition of this tall fence here on the router table. Where we’re going with this is that I've got a bit in the table itself. I'm going to take this piece and I'm going to ride it passed that bit allowing this face to run against the face of the fence so that the bit takes off the excess down here on the bottom. So, let’s take a second and talk about the cutter.

For this application, any straight bit will work. Now, what some people ask about is couldn’t I just use a flush trim bit to make this happen? And it's not going to work for you because for one thing, if we try to just do it with a handheld router, you would never be able to balance the handheld router on the edge of your material and use a flush trim cutter without tipping it and probably screw up your edge band. The flush trim bit here in the router table, we would still need a tall fence on here because you have to have this little undercut. There has to be a place for the excess on the edge band you can tuck under the fence and then be trimmed off.

So, any straight bit will do it. I actually prefer a spiral cutter like this one. The reason is that the spiral bit is going to do a nicer work, a nicer job on that edge band, less chance of chipping. At this point, we’re in so deep the last thing we want to do is put a big chip in that edge band. It’ll be really hard to repair. So, the spiral bit and the router table is going to do a nicer job.

Let me show you this setup on this. It's going to take a little bit of movement to the fence in order to get everything just right. I've got a test board here that I work with. What we want to do is have the fence in a position where as I slide the test board past, it does not bump into the cutter. So if I come back here, the edge of the bit is actually sticking past the face of the fence. Obviously now, if I made a cut it would take the edge banding off but it would also cut way into the face of this. That’s what we don’t want.

So, I want to bring the fence forward pivoting on that end until I feel my test board slip past then I'll lock this end down. The test cuts are a series of working with an edge banded piece then a non-edge banded piece. What we’re trying to do is get it to where it skins off the edge band but it does not cut into the face of the piece. So now, I'm ready to plug this in. we can go ahead and run our edge banded piece past it because we know at this stage, we’re not hitting the face of this one.

[Demonstration]

Now, with that cut being done, I still got edge banding sticking past the face of the piece. I still got glue beads on this edge that hasn’t come off. The bit needs to take those off. So, that tells me that my fence is too far this way. I'm not taking enough material off yet.

So, I'm going to move the fence back just a little bit than we try our test piece to make sure we’re not nicking the face then we do our edge banded piece. Keep staggering back and forth between those two.

[Demonstration]

So, I moved the fence back too far and this is the symptom of that is, the bit is actually cut into the melamine face. That’s why we do a test piece. If this has been my edge banded piece, I just screwed up a piece of my cabinet carcass. So, I moved the fence too far, I've got to bring it back forward just a little bit. Try another cut on this one.

[Demonstration]

Now with that trimmed, we took the edge banding off, just a little bit of glue residue left on here. That will come off easily with a chisel. We can go ahead and run this other face. Get that edge banding trimmed up and then of course every piece, it's in the project that has edge banding on it needs the same thing. So, let me go ahead and run this other face and this piece will be done.

[Demonstration]

Once we get through the slightly fuzzy setup, this really works well and in fact it's got another function too. You see I've got these extra lines cut on here. Well, here is what happened on this project to me. I resize in my dados and I grabbed a piece of melamine out of my bin, sized my dados, have a piece of melamine dropped right in perfectly. Cut all the dados. It turns out, that piece of melamine was not from this project. It was a left over from something else. So, when I went to put this piece into its dado to test the fit, this one was a little bit fatter so it wouldn’t go into the dados.

Well, I came right back to this setup and I trimmed that off by running this piece, lowered the bit in the table. Ran the piece just like that, that allowed me to skin just a little bit off the back of that melamine so that piece would drop right into the dado. So, in addition to trimming my edge banding, this kind of saved my bacon because you really can't sand melamine like you can in plywood. So, it allowed me to trim off just enough. The dados are going to hide that little bit of raw wood because it's going to drop right in there. So, it turned out to really earn its keep on this project.