Making a Cart for my Pantorouter Machine | ToolsToday

Matt shows you how he made a shop cart for his PantoRouter machine using Amana Tool® industrial CNC router bits available on our website, toolstoday.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=shop-cart

How do you think of how this project turned out?

This machine makes traditional joinery fast and accurate with perfect fitting mortise and tenon joints. It does have a dust brush as well, that was removed for filming part of this video.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

I love using the PantoRouter but I want to make a cart for it to put it at a more comfortable height and store all the accessories. If you don't know what a PantoRouter is, it's a machine that makes doing many different types of traditional joinery like Mortise and tenon joints accurate, fast, and easy. But first, let me show you how it works. Everything is based off of center and you don't have to do any sort of measuring. I adjusted the template holder for the thickness of the material to ensure that the bit is centered on the board. The half-scale ruler makes it easy to find the center of the material as well.

I'm basing this cart on the plans from PantoRouter and used their cut list to first cut all of the material down to size. The red zero stops allow you a reference point to butt the material against and get it lined up with the edge of the table perfectly. I'm using some scrap off-cuts to act as a bridge to clamp the piece in place.

I brought the bit up until it touched the material and I'm able to set the depth I want to cut based on that. Now we can begin cutting the mortises with the Amana Tool 46106-K 1/2" up cut bit. There's a bearing that runs on the inside of the template on the template holder that allows me to accurately cut these out. The PantoRouter cuts at a 2:1 scale, so everything on the template holder is twice as large as what it will be when it's cut.

Once the mortise is cut, I can unclamp and clamp in a new one ensuring the face that I labeled bottom is always in contact with the table. For the most accurate possible joints, it's important to make sure that the bottom surface is always referencing the table to take any air out of the equation. I can now quickly batch out all of the mortises needed for this cart.

Using the PantoRouter without the dust hood is fairly messy, but luckily, PantoRouter has a great dust hood. And with that on there, it makes this a very clean machine and takes away the vast majority of the dust and chips that are created. So now we can do our mortises on the side of these pieces and we can get that set up just a little bit differently. And so we'll go through and get all of that cut. You can see how the scale moves down at the bottom as we're moving the PantoRouter into the cut. With all of the mortises done on the edges, we can now move to the mortises in the middle of the material, and for those, I simply line up the centerline of where the mortise needs to be with the centerline on the table.

After cutting all of the mortises out, it's time to work on the tenons. I moved the bearing to the outside of the template to begin cutting the tenons after installing the Swing-Stop. The Swing-Stop slides into the T-slot table and moves on a pivot allowing you to position the workpiece up against the stop and clamp it down then swing it out of the way before cutting.

For the first piece, I put the bit up to the end of the stock and set the depth gauge to the length that I want the tenon. I'll move the bearing around the tenon template to cut the tenon. The tenon was a little too large to fit into the mortise, but the PantoRouter templates have a slight taper to them, allowing you to adjust the fit of the tenons. So I moved the guide bearing slightly forward for a smaller tenon.

After removing more material, I have a perfect fitting mortise and tenon joint and don't have to adjust anything else to get this exact same fit for the rest of the 14 tenons that I need to cut. As I mentioned before, without the dust collection hood, it's a pretty dusty job, but with the hood, it works extremely well catching the vast majority of the dust and chips. You can see all of those chips all over me, but with that hood on there, it all goes right into the dust collection.

The Swing-Stop creates a quick workflow and you're able to batch out tenons with ease. I accidentally cut a mortise in the wrong spot on two of the pieces, so we're going to turn it into a bit of a decoration. I clamped down some walnut to create a tenon to fill the hole. The tenon was cut and I cut it off at the table saw. I added some glue to it and used a mallet to pound it into the mortise that I wanted to fill and it fit absolutely perfectly. This would normally be a really sketchy thing to try to flush trim, but the MicroJig GRR-RIPPER with the adjustable support makes holding this securely incredibly easy.

I used the 51420 1/4" flush trim bit on the SawStop router table to flush trim the tenon, and it worked perfectly and was made safe with the GRR-RIPPER. I then sanded it, and the PantoRouter provided an absolutely perfect fit and made my mistake into a decoration. With that out of the way, I can now glue up the sides of the cart. Assembly on this is made easy as all of the joints fit together perfectly and create perfectly square corners. I love seeing how these joints come together and seeing everything go into the exact place that we wanted it to.

With the sides in clamps, I wanted to add a bit of a round over to the drawer divider through tenons to soften the look. I locked the router in place using the depth stops at the right spot to give a nice even round over. Using the 49494 1/16" radius round over bit, I'm able to run the bearing of the router bit along the edge of the material to soften it. This is an operation that would be fairly dangerous done any other way, but the PantoRouter makes it easy.

We can now begin assembling the cart. I'm using Titebond III wood glue here for its longer open time allowing me a bit more time to get everything into clamps. The Bora parallel clamps worked great and really helped me get this all assembled and all of the joints fully seated. I let it sit overnight and removed the clamps the next day and gave the frame of the cart a bit of sanding.

After that, I made an auxiliary table for the PantoRouter to do the cuts for my drawer parts. I got everything centered with the table and brought the bit forward before tightening down. I used the center location on the template holder to lock the router into this location so it doesn't move while routing. I put my stock in place and brought the bit up against it so that I could find my zero position. I brought one of the stop blocks up and was able to use the scale to set the depth of cut that I wanted.

I set the bit height by adjusting the height of the template holder and tightened it down once I had the height needed. I can then run my stock through referencing off of the fence to keep things nice and square. The MicroJig GRR-RIP BLOCK helped me push things through nice and safely. This is the dado for the drawer bottoms. I ran the rest of the pieces through off camera and I changed my setup a bit to route the rabbets on the side, and we have our drawer parts fitting really nicely. With all of the drawer parts cut, I'll assemble them using some Titebond II wood glue and brad nails.

I'm using a square I cut and clamped to the table to help with the assembly. The rabbets and dados make assembling the drawers quick and easy. There are tons of different drawer joinery methods, but for shop projects like this, I really like this method as it makes a quick strong drawer that will hold up to many years of use. The drawer bottom just slides into that dado that we cut and then we can get the final piece of the drawer installed and brad nailed in place. We did that for all seven drawers that we had and everything turned out nice and square.

I can then install the slides onto the drawers. I made a little jig to help with giving me a reference to butt the slide up against and used a self-centering drill bit to drill out the holes in the right location. I aligned all the slides based on the center of the drawer so I was able to pre-install the slides onto the side panels of the cart as well using the same self-centering drill bit using a guide to ensure they go on square. The drawer fronts were then cut down to final size over at the table saw.

After sanding, they're ready for finishing with some Rubio Monocoat. This drawer front has incredible curl in it and it's always amazing to see it all pop when the finish is applied. I then put finish on the remaining drawer fronts and off-camera, prefinished the sides and frame of the cart buffing the excess finish off after it has time to soak in. While the finish is drying. I'll get the top of the cart all glued up. I used the 18" and 24" Bora parallel clamps with Titebond II wood glue for this. I glued the top up in two sections so that they would be able to fit through my JET 13" helical head planer. I sent both pieces through the planer until they were planed down smooth and glued them back together off-camera to create the top.

With the finish all dry, I can install the sides of the cart. It's a nice tight fit and I can screw it into the frame of the cart to hold it securely in place and do the same thing on the opposite side. I installed some casters to the bottom of the cart to allow me to easily roll this around the shop. With that done, the drawers are now able to be installed. Those just slot right into the pre-installed slides on the sides of the cart and they work and fit and great. With finish pre-applied to the top, I can now get that installed. I'm using some Z-clips to hold the top to the frame and also allow for wood movement.

To install the drawer fronts, first, I'll install a temporary drawer pull with some painter's tape so that I can still get the drawer open. I set the drawer face and use playing cards to help set my spacing. I put as many as I could fit to make it tight. Then I take the number of cards and divide it in half so that I can get equal spacing all around the drawer front. I'm gonna be using double-sided tape to help with installing these, but I need to make the drawer sit just a little further out.

I put a washer in the drawer slide to stop it from moving back any further so the drawer front can sit flush with the drawer. I'm using two strips of XFasten brand double-sided tape, available on our website, to stick the drawer front to the drawer. This tape is super thin and holds extremely well. It's perfect for applications like this. I laid out my cards to get equal spacing, set the drawer front end, and pushed it against the double-sided tape. The temporary pull allows me to open the drawer, add a Piher quick clamp, and drive in a couple of screws on the backside to hold it in place. These drawer fronts are all done and we can move on to adding the handles.

To do that, I'll make a quick jig to install them. I started by cutting a couple of pieces of scrap down to size on the SawStop table saw, using some Starbond medium CA glue and accelerator to attach everything together. It's perfect for jigs like this as it is a stronghold and bonds almost instantly. I measured out and drilled the holes for the handle over on the drill press. With that done, I aligned the centers and again, used the Starbond CA glue and accelerator to hold everything together. I put the jig on the drawer front and added a Piher-Quick clamp to hold it in place while drilling my holes.

I can then remove the jig and install the drawer handle. This jig definitely made short work of getting everything perfectly lined up and I was able to use the exact same jig for the remaining drawers and got all of the drawer handles all perfectly lined up. I really like the way that these handles look. I think they fit the cart well and will hold up to many years of use in the shop. With that, the cart is now finished, and it is at the perfect height to use the PantoRouter and keeps everything off of my workbench. I absolutely love how this project turned out and really like the three tenons poking through. It definitely adds a different look to it. It truly looks like a piece of furniture in the shop, and to me, that is inspiring as this project has given me a ton of ideas for furniture for the house that I want to use the PantoRouter to make.

The PantoRouter is an incredible machine that's very versatile. We will have videos in the future showing some of the other joints it's able to create. All of the tools used in this video are available on our website. Be sure to check it out there. Hopefully, you enjoyed this one. Have a great day, everyone.

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