Router: 2.5; Me: 1

So Santa has been EXTREMELY generous to me with the early Christmas presents this year. So far I've been given a laser sighted miter saw, a random orbital sander AND a wood router and bit set. ROCK ON!!

Well today was my first experiments using the router. Its a different thing to do it yourself rather than watching my father and grandfather use it from several feet away. Don't get me wrong the router was VERY easy to use. I'm extremely pleased with it but, and this might sound really obvious, the dust is dramatically worse up close than it is from a few feet away.

As in I dramatically underestimated the vision protection required to use this tool. I knew the dust would be bad and came prepared with a really high grade particle mask that I use when sawing or enameling but I just grabbed my good old safety glasses that I use for all my previous wood work.

Ha hahahaha hahaha ha.

Yeah I figured the dust would hit the front of the glasses and just bounce off like it does when I saw.

NOT.

More like it just laughs at my feeble efforts to not get saw dust in my eyes and proceeds to coat both the front AND back of the lenses, my eye lashes, eye brows and finally my eye balls.

At which point I had to stop, grab the hose and spend some quality time very gently washing my face and eyes out. *sigh*

THEN I remembered that I'd bought some chemical grade safety goggles for my book shelf project (I'll post about that soon), so I went and grabbed those.

Those were MUCH much better. Absolutely no dust made it in with those. The problem tho? I was wearing my glasses (was afraid saw dust + contact lenses = BAD), and they promptly fogged up so bad I had drops of condensation running down my lenses before I was finished with my task.

Thankfully I could kinda see around the edges (and where the drops ran down the lenses and cleared the condensation temporarily) and with the edge router bit I don't so much have to SEE exactly what my path is I just gently push it against the edge until it stops and then go forward.

So I got the job done and I am TOTALLY thrilled with the results. (I'm working on Christmas presents so I don't want to give things away) but I totally got pawned in the eye department by the router. Twice. BUT I got the job done.

The router gets another half a point tho for abusing the paper cut on my finger. Today's hot tip: put a frickin bandaid on ANY and all small cuts on  your fingers before routing b/c scrubbing that super fine dust out of the cut later is NOT fun.

And ya know I really should have known better. I watched a bunch of how-to videos on YouTube before we got the router and most of them just used the basic glasses and mask like I tried the first time but this one dude busted out this full face shield and like respirator/gas mask lookin' thing. I was like "Wow OVERKILL". And now I'm like "I gotta get me one of THOSE!"