Faced with the prospect of milling 80 identical radiused corners on a run of restaurant tables, I came up with the “Corner King” jig shown in the sketch. It’s built from a square of 1/4-in. plywood, with fences attached to the bottom on two sides. A pivoting Plexiglas base was designed to allow a 1/2-in. router to swing through the proper radius (4 in. in this case). Adding stop blocks to the top limited the travel of the bit to 90¡.

A nice feature of the jig is that the first pass with the router cuts the jig’s base into a perfectly radiused pattern. In practice, I set the jig on a corner, traced the radius pattern directly off the base, removed the jig and trimmed the bulk of the waste with a jigsaw. Then, I screwed the jig to the tabletop and used the router to finish the corner.

Al Dorsa, St. Croix, Virgin Islands

Fine Woodworking Magazine, December 1988 No. 73

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