Woodbutchering, New Year's style

After far too long, I got back to work on a few woodworking projects I'd let lie undisturbed in the dusty basement. The first was to fix a mistake I made on the first bookcase carcase . . . I'd forgotten to put in a rabbet at the back to hold the plywood back panel in place. This should have been an easy task with a dado stack on the table saw, but it needed to be done differently for the partially-assembled carcase.

The only way to do it, really, was to use a router and a rabbetting bit. This is a very useful bit . . . although this was only the second time I'd needed to use mine since I bought it. I needed to cut away about 1/4" of material, so I used the small rabbetting bit from Lee Valley.

I had to go fairly slowly, as the router can be unstable on thin edges, so I rigged an additional support along the sides so that the router didn't tip (which can gouge the wood and leave you with a repair job to do). Because the case was partially assembled, I could only support part of the way without the clamps holding the support interfering with the router. It took about five times as long to do the job this way as it would have if I'd done it right in the first place.

Then, of course, I realized I should have been using the large rabbetting bit instead!

This bit is big enough that I had to remove the baseplate from my router to insert the bit:

It may not look scary there, but when it's turning at umpteen thousand RPM, it's potentially very scary. Of course, while I thought the original job went well, the re-do with the larger bit didn't go quite as well:

That's where I got impatient and tried to use the router without properly supporting it. And the worst thing is that I knew I shouldn't have been trying the shortcut. Fortunately, it's not going to be visible in the finished bookcase.