 What the heck is the first router you should get? Hola Woodwork, here's Paul Carlson here, a small workshop guy. Let's suppose you're just getting into the woodworking hobby, or you're just starting to add to your tools and you haven't bought a router yet, and you're wondering which router should you buy first. I'll give you my answer right away, but only if you promise if you're going to bail out you'll give me a like, a comment, and a subscription. For your first router I would recommend you go ahead and start big. Get yourself over a two horsepower router of some sort with a plunge base with the ability to handle both one quarter inch and one half inch size of shafts or bits, what we call collets and get yourself an edge guide. With that and with the right set of bits you can do almost everything and if you're young enough and you can handle the weight then you'll get by with that for a while. My second recommendation would be after you have this is to add the one on the other extreme which is a little bitty palm router or a little trim router, one that you can hold in one hand and go around with a round over bit and do some roundovers, roundover bit doing roundovers, how about that? Or you can trim lamination and things of that nature. What I did as a beginner was I made several mistakes. First I went to Home Depot and I think this Ryobi router was $69. Now as big it's heavy, that one had a fixed base and it had a quarter inch collet. I didn't know the difference, I didn't know one thing from another, why would I want anything different so I knew that I liked $69 better than $200 or $250. So that's what I got, totally useless, very difficult to adjust the height, don't like it at all and so I'll probably give it away to somebody. Then I figured well that's too big and too clumsy and it doesn't have a plunge base so I'd like something that I could use for trimming but also that would do other things including using the plunge base so I got a Bosch colt, that's small, it's a little over one horsepower but it does only have a quarter inch collet so that meant I was stuck with using just the bits that were not very substantial that had this small quarter inch shaft on them. I like it, it's cool but frankly I don't use it anymore and so that's why I recommend get yourself a big multi-use one, you can even put this one into your router table and get yourself a small handheld trim router. The key thing to remember is that the size of the shaft on the bits is critical. If you want some really substantial bits such as some longer bits and you're going to want them, longer bits then you need more strength down in that base. If you get a really long quarter inch bit that thing lobbler break off and that's the last thing you want to have happen when it's spinning at 28,000 rpm or whatever they spin at so you're going to want to use some bigger bits therefore make sure you get something with a half inch collet. Now these will both go onto this one router. Alright well that's it, that's as far as I'm going to go, these what the heck is videos are designed to be short, they're designed for beginners, they're not designed to go into too much depth and I hope you find them useful. Small workshop guy reminding you, you can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf. Stay safe in your workshop.