A router is a tool used to rout out (hollow out) an area in the face of a relatively hard workpiece, typically of wood or plastic. The main application of routers is in woodworking, especially cabinetry.

It was a tool particularly used by pattern makers and staircase makers and consisted of a broad-based wooden hand plane with a narrow blade projecting well beyond its base plate gaining it the nickname Old Woman's Tooth. Although the original hand tool has a few advantages over the power tool equivalent and retains favour with some workers, since about 1960, it has all but been replaced by the modern spindle router, which was designed for the same work, although the first electric hand routers appeared in the years just after World War I.

Further refinement produced the plunge router, invented by ELU (now part of DeWalt) in Germany in the late 1940s. This is even better adapted for many types of work. Today, traditional hand-powered routers are often called router planes. Some workers consider it to be the single most versatile woodworking power tool. Modern routers are often used in place of traditional moulding planes or spindle moulder machines for edge decoration (moulding) of timber.

Jeremy Broun is a British furniture designer maker, writer, film maker and musician. Descended from Scottish gentry, one of his ancestors was the piano maker to King George 3 and another rowed the boat to Napoleon's surrender. His mother died in his childbirth and father died when he was seventeen. He is the nephew of the late St Andrews and St Ives painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. He was educated at Abbotsholme school and for a short while taught at Millfield.

Broun's furniture is innovative in the use of technique and form. His Caterpillar Rocking Chair in 1984 'is visually stunning, a good combination of colour, structure and practicality... and has the advantage of being a truly original idea : just as Saarinen and his pedestal chairs converted four chairlegs into one' (An Encyclopedia of Chairs - The Apple Press).

He won a Winston Churchill Travel Scholarship to Sweden, Finland and Italy in 1979 and in the same year was elected a Fellow of The Society of Designer Craftsmen, the original Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society founded by William Morris. Since 1980 he has been a member of the Crafts Council Index of Selected Makers.