Comparing Portable Router Tables

Portable router tables are a great way to save space in your shop. We're taking a look at the different options available and laying out the differences between them.

- Willie Sandry

Router tables are a mainstay in any serious shop, and sooner or later in your woodworking journey, you'll need a way to mount a router in a table. However, if you don't have the floor space for a full-size router station, you might want to look at the current crop of portable router tables. They're full of space-saving innovations that approach the performance of their larger counterparts. Plus—most of the portable router tables featured here can handle common accessories like featherboards, stock guides, and miter gauges to help control the cut. Some models even offer two dust ports for greatly improved dust collection. Beyond showcasing the features of each table setup, our aim was to quantify the precision and build quality by measuring table, fence, and insert plate flatness.

This was done with a precision straightedge and feeler gauges. However, measuring fence out-of-square with a feeler gauge tends to penalize models with taller fences, something we wanted to avoid. After all a relatively tall fence improves workpiece support and overall control. So instead, fences were visually checked for square and measured for out-of-square with a digital angle cube. The cube was simply zeroed on the table surface and the reference surface moved to the fence for measurements in several spots and recorded in the table on page 32. Finally, the entire router table was weighed, along with fence-only reading, using a digital scale with remote readout. Weight is a good indicator of how portable it might be on the jobsite, but also offers clues about how well it's built.