Joinery Machines

Joinery machines are much more than one-trick ponies. Here's an intro, and why you should consider adding one in your shop.

- Logan Wittmer

There are several machines that come up as "shop necessities". Table saws, jointers, planers, and band saws are the most common ones. In my opinion, there's a new class of machine that needs to be talked about more than it is, and that is joinery machines. These are machines that are designed to help you cut joinery in your shop, generally powered by a router.

1 Joinery machines look like a slot-mortiser on steroids. They make mortise as of nearly any size very quickly, and more accurately than other methods.

In this article, I'm going to focus on two different machines-the PantoRouter (PantoRouter) and the Multi-Router (Woodpeckers). One could argue that the Shaper Origin is a similar tool, and I wouldn't disagree. However, I believe that's in a separate class, and am not going to look at that here. I also want to point out that I'm not directly comparing pros and cons of each of these machines. Instead, I want to give you the broad-strokes of what they can do, and where each one excels. It's worth keeping in mind that they both are within the same price range.

2 Once you start to understand the versatility of a joinery machine, only then will you realize how valuable one of these machines is.

Why Have a Joinery Machine?

The idea behind a dedicated joinery machine is that they are a machine that you can rely on to produce repeatable joinery cuts day-in and day-out. Sure, you can do similar tasks on other machines, but the idea is that this machine is set up just to do joinery. Let's take your table saw for example. Instead of switching your blade out for a dado stack, you can leave it set up for accurate cuts. Likewise with your router tableit's great for cutting profiles and routing grooves. However, tearing that down to set up box joints is probably not the best use of time.