Unfortunately, I can’t get any new projects started at this time. Work and getting my house renovations finished are using up nearly all of my time. Neither of these fully capture my imagination though, so I’m left to dream about future projects.

I’ve been considering a new router lift for a while that uses a flexible drive to transfer horizontal rotation to vertical lift. This action was done with an inclined plane in my most recent router table project. While it does work very well, I feel it is a little more complex than it needs to be, and really not well suited to making plans for, since it is more for a complete table than a stand-alone lift.

I originally thought to use vinyl tubing for the flex drive but then tried steel cable. The cable makes for a much tighter radius and, in turn, a smaller transmission.

My preliminary design shown here in a very short video:

The drawing was made prior to changing to the cable drive, but fairly accurately depicts how I want the lift to be. This was put together a piece at a time, whenever I had some spare time or found myself thinking about it, and still needs a lot of work.

I want to stress test the cable by running this transmission constantly for a few hours with my drill press, to see how well the cable holds up. I think it will be fine, but better to take the time to find out for certain, before moving forward.

When finished, the lift will replace the gear drive lift in my original router table and will have the up / down crank and locking lever on the outside of the cabinet, like my newer one.

New clamp… yeah, another one! Didn’t someone say you can never have too many? How about too many homemade varieties? This design takes the lessons learned from the mistakes I made on my previous model and puts them to good use: the notches are not as deep and they are on the back, rather than the front. The bar is wider and thicker as well, 5/8″ where the others were 1/2″. Overall, this clamp is larger, beefier and better suited to serious clamping and I think it’ll be a real workhorse in the shop.

It locks in place in pretty much the same way and I have changed the pad construction to use jam nuts and a single t-nut in the moving jaw.

Still have some details to iron out and a prototype to build. Should be a very capable clamp.