What are Router Rabbeting Bits?

Video transcription

Hi, my name is Kevin, and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you how to use a rabbeting bit. A rabbeting bit is a bit that has a cutter head here and a bearing up here, so once again, the bearing is going to ride on our surface that we want to keep, and this is going to cut away what we don't want. And the application that you would use this for is if you were going to cut a rabbet on the back of a cabinet for a back to go into, or an application we're going to use today, a really good one for it, is cutting a groove in the back of a picture frame for the glass or the actual artwork to fit right into. And so what it's going to do, is it's going to cut a channel here and then we're going to come around here and cut it here, so that there's still wood left on the front, but there's this channel all the way around the back for the glass, or whatever you'd be, plastic, or whatever you'd be putting into the frame to rest onto after you've glued it up. So it makes it a convenient just one-step process as opposed to setting up a table saw and doing this before hand and doing multiple stop set-ups. This would be just one pass on all the corners, but we just have one corner that we'll be doing to show you. Okay, as you can see we've made the cut, we've established that channel around here. If you're putting in a square piece of glass, all you're going to want to do here is just take a straight edge and extend these lines out and just clean up that round corner with a chisel to make it nice and square for it to fit in there. So that's just a real quick easy thing to do to get this to fit square pieces if you're not able to roundover whatever piece is going to go in here. But we made our cut, it rides on the bearing nice and easy, going left to right, make sure you always keep a good, firm grip on it, and just make the cut. And in a bigger frame, you would just keep going all the way around until you're done.