Routing a Kitchen Draining Board

It's been about  two years since we did the kitchen. Since then my mental to do list has had on it "Route some drainage grooves in to the worktop. For various reasons (mostly that I didn't have the balls to) I've been putting this off until now. Eyes right and you'll see I managed to get it done.

At first I'd thought I'd need a jig to do this. The only one I could find was on Screwfix and cost £90. For something I'm only going to use once I couldn't bring myself to spend that much and have been looking for a cheaper alternative ever since.

Having not found one I decided there was only one thing left for it - take the advice given to me in this USENET post and make my own jig. Turns out it wasn't all that hard and was also fun to boot!

Here it is:

You can probably tell that it's made out of a piece of door frame casing I had left over. The two pieces are set apart by the exact width of my router and then were clamped and screwed and glued together with the bits of wood you see at each end.

On the under-side it looks like this:

 

The bits of plastic you see are joist spacers and are colour-coded by size. The red ones are 5mm high. The blues are 3mm and the yellow 1mm. The are spaced so as to give an even rise of 5mm over the 500mm length of the groove.

I'd setup the router beforehand so that at the far end of each groove it just touched the worktop. This means the grooves go from being 5mm deep to a nice flush finished where it come out at the other end.

In the photo above you can see Karen is standing on the other end. As we could only work in-situ this was my only way of "clamping" both ends.

Here's the work in progress:

Note that I'd worked out beforehand how to space them all and had started on the centre one before working outward in each direction.

All that was left to do was a light sanding and a few coats of Danish oil before it looked like this:

In a few months the sun will have darkened it to the match the surrounding wood and all we be good.

I write this blog post for a few reasons:

1. It's been way too long since the last entry and high time I started posting regular updates.
2. I want to show-off at what a clever boy I've been.
3. To help others. This is the main reason why and the reason I write most of what I write on the web. In doing this I couldn't find any other guide (no matter how short) on doing this. So, by writing this I hope somebody else will Google it one day it will give them the courage to do it for themselves. If I can do it, so can you.

Obviously this is a short entry and doesn't cover everything I did. What I should mention I did (and strongly advise you do) is practice. Practice, practice and then practice some more. I had an off-cut of the worktop that I could mess about with.

Do not try your jig out on your worktop until you're happy with it!

Good luck. Any questions, let me know.