I must admit to feeling pretty grumpy at the moment and I have asked your editor to substitute my smiling and cheerful photograph for the grumpy and serious one. I am not usually grumpy and serious, but when I am, it's advisable to keep out of the way. I suppose it's a bit like a storm warning. I go careering around the workshop waving my arms and shouting, generally making people unhappy and doing a lot of damage until finally, exhausted, I go and sit in a corner to recover.

There are a lot of things that have got me fed up so I might as well get them off my chest. The first of them is routers. Have you ever experienced the "Dropped Router Bit Syndrome"? This is when you set up a job, say a moulding around the edge of a piece of work, you choose your router cutter and fit it to the router of your choice, you Set up the height of the cutter properly, start the router and begin cutting the moulding. Everything is fine, you are working away happily until the router cutter drops, ruining the moulding you are cutting.

I bet most of you out there who use routers regularly in your work will be nodding your heads in sympathy and thinking, "yes, that's happened to me as well". Either that or we are an exceptionally unlucky workshop and I can't really believe that. We must have more than a dozen routers buzzing around this workshop and the dropped router bit syndrome is something that seems to be happening to some poor soul every month or so. The most recent occurrence, and the reason for my thunderous countenance, was when Graeme

was routing a nosing around the edge of a Walnut and Pearwood occasional table. I suppose it is my own fault as, in fact, many of my designs have a soft nosing around their extremities. It is a soft, sympathetic moulding that is finger friendly and is relatively easily achieved using either a router or a spindle moulder. It does, however, make us very prone to "Dropped Router Bit Syndrome".

So, the question must be, what causes it and how do we get around it? I think the answer to the first question of what causes it lies in the problem itself. When a router bit comes loose in the collet and digs its merry way into you precious cabinet the natural human reaction is, "it's my fault, I didn't tighten it up enough" and this may well be true. However, it is a widely held belief and certainly good workshop practice that when fitting a router bit into a router one should not over tighten the collet. You will see this sentence written in various instruction manuals, usually in bold type: DO NOT OVER TIGHTEN THE ROUTER BIT IN THE COLLET. Routers are usually supplied with little stubby spanners so great oafs like you can't swing on them and do untold damage but it is very tempting isn't it when you are tightening up the router bit to just give it that little extra squeeze. This I think is the problem. Time goes on, the collet into which your router bit is fitted loses it's capacity to grip the cutter efficiently, by squeezing it and squeezing it you take out a degree of spring and resilience, rendering it less effective. At least that is my theory!

How do you avoid the dreaded syndrome? Well, I would suggest the following precaution might help. Firstly, never let anybody else use your

router. Secondly, keep the collet of the router bit meticulously clean and, periodically, clean and check the shafts of all router bits you use with the router — they should be clean and free of any burrs. Thirdly, only use the short handled spanner supplied with the router for this job. Finally, should you experience the dreaded dropped router bit syndrome, replace the collet as soon as possible. This, however, is fine advice and it is easy to give but difficult to practice, for if it were easy to practice, we would have done and totally eliminated the problem.

The second thing that has given me the grumps is the attitude of some British manufacturers to complaints. Some months ago I complained in these pages about the design of a piece of woodworking machinery. When that article appeared I got the most fearful rollicking from the managing director of the company concerned saying how I should have come to him first, how my references to his product were aiding his competitors, how I was threatening the jobs of his employees, how... oh, I could go on for half an hour as he did. The upshot of it was that he asked me to send him in writing a list of the defects we have found with the machine and he would give them his attention. The thing that makes me grumpy is the fact that several months have passed and I have yet to receive a reply to that letter. British spindle moulders are no better or no worse than machines made in other countries. However, the management of some British companies is far worse than those run by Italians or Germans or Swiss. I am sure that had this been a German company they would have had a team of technicians sat on my workshop doorstep the following morning saying, "Mr Savage, I think you have em problem, maybe the "mark two" spindle moulder will solve it". As it is we

bought British and we are lumbered with the "mark one" spindle moulder complete with problems and, to add insult to injury, our complaints have been totally ignored. I won't mention this company's name again for I do feel for the poor devils who work there. However, I would suggest that if you are looking for a reason why British manufacturing industry is in decline, then this kind of attitude amongst British sales orientated management has a lot to answer for.

Craft of cabinet making series by David Savage first published in "The Woodworker" magazine

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