Step one was to test drive the plunger function on the router. This was pretty simple once we managed to switch the router itself from the regular base to the plunger base. As you can imagine from the names, the latter allows you to punch holes into the middle of a piece of wood. With the regular base you start from the side and either go into the wood to carve a channel (as we did before) or to go around the outside of the wood to make a decorative edge.
The practice piece also told us that the center of the router bit is 2 3/4 from the end. Since we know that we want the hole to be in the center of the 1x1 stiles this meant we needed a 2 1/4-inch spacer (2 3/4 minus 1/2 an inch). With this as our calculation we set up a dummy piece of 1x1 to make sure that the spacing was right. We also had to experiment with different clamp positions to get one that held the stile perfectly vertical and still. As you can see in the picture, this is one reason why we made the piece that we brace the router against overhang the table's edge.
To get dead-center on the stile we drew diagonals and made the crossing point our target.
Then we routered.
And tested to see if our 1/4-inch dowel rod would fit.
To fully test the concept we dug holes in two pieces and linked them with a dowel rod, closely approximating the real project.
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