How to Make a Bowling Ball with a Table Saw

My Dad gave me an old router awhile back – it’s a wood router, not an internet router. (I have a couple of those, too.)

There’s a shop next to my house. I call it that, though it also serves as a home office and a storage unit. I recently decided that, to go along with the router, I needed a router table in the shop. I knew you can build one (if you have a shop) but I wasn’t sure how.

So I turned to YouTube.

I also knew that people put videos of themselves up on YouTube showing how to do things, but I didn’t really understand the extent of it. On YouTube you can learn how to do absolutely anything. I’m serious. I’m now addicted to YouTube woodworking videos. I watch at least a couple almost every day. (Most of them range from one minute to 20 minutes.)

One of the first router videos I encountered showed a special jig so that you could make a wooden ball with a drill and a router. It was by a guy who makes very exuberant woodworking videos, named Izzy Swan. Izzy’s a big guy, but his shop is pretty small – the backdrop for his videos is usually his garage door.

Believe it or not, truly spherical wooden balls are really hard to make (most people use a lathe). Izzy’s jig seems to work, and is very clever, though I can’t say the same for his, you know, ball jokes. The jig is kind of hard to explain, so you’ll have to find the video and watch it yourself.

When you finish a video on YouTube, you get suggestions for others. In my case they included another one by Izzy Swan: How to make a wooden bowling ball with a table saw. My first thought when I saw this video was that I hope Izzy has a good lawyer, because this looks really dangerous. This video has over 50,000 views, and if none of those folks has lost any body parts, I’ll be shocked. Of course, that number is small potatoes by YouTube standards.

But I’ll give Izzy credit; he’s made lots of videos, and most are clever while being a little less insane.

I found another woodworker guy (there are dozens and dozens of them on YouTube – and with only a couple of exceptions, they’re all guys) called Matthias Wandel. He’s a nerdy Canadian, and a prolific video maker. Many of Mathias’ videos are over the million-viewer mark. They run the gamut from how to make a screwdriver holder (a board with some holes drilled in it) to a thing he calls a “pantorouter.”

Mathias looks fairly young; I don’t know how he could have done half the stuff he shows in his videos. (Of course he also seems like he might not have a girlfriend.)

The pantorouter is based on the principle of a pantograph, which allows you copy a drawing at half scale. (Okay, again, you’ll need to Google it.) The pantorouter lets you make copies of things out of wood with a router. It’s very ingenious.

My favorite video by Mathias is one that shows how to attach a motor and wooden wheels to a scaffold so you can drive it around while you’re standing on it. That one has well over a million views, and I wonder how many of those people have broken their necks so far.

Meanwhile, I haven’t started on my router table yet.