The standalone OPR had one other design flaw, albeit one that is shared with the majority of router tables on the market. Simply put, the table is made of melamine-covered particle board, and there is a huge hole cut out of the middle of it for the router plate. There isn't a lot of beef left in the middle of the table, and that's an invitation to sag over time.
My OPR is 1990 vintage, which makes it 25-odd years old. So while the table was otherwise in almost perfect condition, it had sagged about 1/32" in the middle. Now mind you, I'm one of those guys who enjoys driving Charlese nuts by insisting on working to 0.005" or better.
![Big Grin :D](./images/smilies/biggrin.gif)
So 1/32" of sag wasn't even close to acceptable to me. After cutting T&G in 250 feet of hardwood, I'll be danged if I want to spend the next month or so sanding all the adjoining boards flush with one another.
But again, the solution was pretty simple. Some angle iron from Ace hardware (painted with red-oxide primer and then some SS touch-up paint), some judiciously-placed mounting holes, and some masking-tape shims under the angle iron got that vintage table flat to within +0", -0.002" in pretty short order. If I ever bought a brand-new table made of anything other than metal, I'd install similar stiffeners up front, before it ever had a chance to sag.
![2016-04-23 13.29.11.JPG](./download/file.php?id=34263&sid=df4841e9f9e8804d6973fc0ecf8de4db)
- 2016-04-23 13.29.11.JPG (588.1 KiB) Viewed 45568 times
Definition (1) of "judiciously placed mounting holes": The front angle-iron stiffener was mounted by replacing two of the front T-track woodscrews with stainless machine screws, through the table and angle iron. Virtually impossible to detect from above.
![2016-04-17 18.04.56.JPG](./download/file.php?id=34264&sid=df4841e9f9e8804d6973fc0ecf8de4db)
- 2016-04-17 18.04.56.JPG (569.69 KiB) Viewed 45568 times
Definition (2) of "judiciously placed mounting holes": After experimenting with threaded fasteners in particle board, i concluded that the stuff was really suitable for compression loading only. And so to mount the rear angle-iron stiffener, I eventually decided to counter-bore the top for through carriage bolts. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a nice shiny carriage-bolt head, in a counterbore colored black with an felt-tip marker, looked as if it had belonged there all along.
![2016-04-17 18.04.44.JPG](./download/file.php?id=34265&sid=df4841e9f9e8804d6973fc0ecf8de4db)
- 2016-04-17 18.04.44.JPG (544.12 KiB) Viewed 45568 times
One other point about rehabbing a 25-year old OPR. When I bought it off of CL, it was missing the pin insert and all of the pins, plus the leg booties were worn through. But the Mother Ship still had all of this stuff in stock, at what I considered very reasonable prices. So I bought replacements plus spares of everything, plus a blank plate for mounting the big Triton router, for less than $50 total, IIRC. Simply amazing. The only thing the MS couldn't help me with was the missing leg braces, which would have been a pretty simple fix even if I hadn't lucked into the cheap/rusty OPR for replacement parts.
That's all for tonight, guys. Later, I'll review the Triton router, the Jessem fence & guides, and hopefully a cool inlay jig that I'm building to repair the Sycamore board splits with inlaid butterfly joints.
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/smile.gif)