Freehanding a template

I'm not going to even attempt to summarize what happened here, but somewhere along the way I winded up with a bunch of pieces of romex dangling out of the frieze of my bookcase

Occupy archives: Note romex popping out on the four (4) common bookcases

In short, I have to use pancake boxes.

Surface mounting pancake boxes and trying to hide them under a fixture is pretty brutal.  And unless the fixture has a stamped cubic inch number inside it, I don't think its NEC that you can stuff more than one 14/2 wire in there.  All of mine are 12/2, and I also have two wires for three of the bookcases (they are daisy chained).

What's the solution? Fire up the router and plunge in 1/2" and try not to hit the romex.  The best way to do this is clamping a template to the frieze so that I can use a top-bearing flush cut router bit to trade out the 1/2" crater.

Its going to mess and hard (I have a cabinet grader router.. its 19 lbs).  Fun!

Let's move to the layout.

Easy enough, trace it

Now, set up a super ghetto work station out on the back slab.  All my sawhorses are spoken for doing other tasks lately.

That's it.  Now I just freehand the routing.  I waste about 1/8" of wood on each pass.  I'm simply using some 3/4" PPFJ because its what I had laying around and it was a good size for the task.

That was easy.

Test fit. Drops right through. Perfect.

Its hard to show in the picture, but this hole is less than a 1/16" of play on all sides.  The fixture I want to use has basically zero tolerance.

Let's test all four, because I don't trust that these terrible made pieces of junk are the same size.

They all fit.

Next up, routing the bookcase. Ugh.