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Are you looking for a hand-held router or are you looking to get a router table / shaper table? I am a part-time furniture builder and I have two hand held routers, both Porter-Cable, and I think they work great. Porter-Cable seems to be the big name in routers, I guess. The Porter-Cable 693 sells for about $150. Other manufacturers are Bosch, DeWalt, Ryobi, Hitachi. Check out www.toolcribofthenorth.com. I have a home-built router table with a Bosch router mounted in it that also serves me very well. This is much more useful and stable than the small sheet-metal router table sold by sears for around $40, and not too hard to build. You can buy the router-mount insert from most woodworking catalogs or specialty stores and the table does not need to be very complicated. You can use the same router for mounting to the table and for hand work. If you have an interest in the specifics of a router table, I can talk more about it. A shaper table is a bit more of a heavy-duty machine, kind of a step-up from a router table into a more industrial atmosphere (more horsepower, etc). These will run into the $500 – $3000 range and are made by companies like Grizzly, Lobo, Jet, etc. They are used generally by production shops, not usually by the hobbyist woodworker.
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Are you looking for a hand-held router or are you looking to get a router table / shaper table? I am a part-time furniture builder and I have two hand held routers, both Porter-Cable, and I think they work great. Porter-Cable seems to be the big name in routers, I guess. The Porter-Cable 693 sells for about $150. Other manufacturers are Bosch, DeWalt, Ryobi, Hitachi. Check out http://www.toolcribofthenorth.com. I have a home-built router table with a Bosch router mounted in it that also serves me very well. This is much more useful and stable than the small sheet-metal router table sold by sears for around $40, and not too hard to build. You can buy the router-mount insert from most woodworking catalogs or specialty stores and the table does not need to be very complicated. You can use the same router for mounting to the table and for hand work. If you have an interest in the specifics of a router table, I can talk more about it. A shaper table is a bit more of a heavy-duty machine, kind of a step-up from a router table into a more industrial atmosphere (more horsepower, etc). These will run into the $500 - $3000 range and are made by companies like Grizzly, Lobo, Jet, etc. They are used generally by production shops, not usually by the hobbyist woodworker.
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Thinking of buying a Craftsman shaper/router for some light work around the shop. Any comments about alternatives or who makes these?
Thanks