I followed Ed's advice (Thanks!) and got a porter cable router. It's by far the best of all the routers I have seen today, and I can see why Ed would recommend it over the rest. The only other 'nice' ones were a DeWalt, a Milwaukee and a Bosch, but none of those would work as nice in this setup as the Porter Cable would. All the rest of them (cheaper, that's for sure, sometimes quite a bit) had plastic cases that would not fit the table and looked like they would last a couple of hours at most during heavy use. Typical Christmas gift stuff from people that don't know how to use tools themselves but give them to relatives. (and a whole list of stuff they want done with them
As Henry Ford said, if you don't buy the tools you need you'll end up paying for them anyway and you still don't have the tools... $250 Canadian later (it's only monopoly money anyway) and a couple of hours shopping later to find it.
Compared to the Black and Decker dinosaur this thing is greased lightning. Routers sure have come a long way in the last 30 years The Porter Cable will accept 1/2 inch shafts, which certainly feels a lot safer. Having anything spin 27000 RPM makes me feel a little queasy, and if it is cutting an inch or so in any kind of material 2" out from the attachment point and is supported by only a 1/4 " shaft I start looking for places to hide. It wouldn't be the first time I broke a bit, and that's an awful lot of energy. Routing by hand is nasty enough, routing with a machine is a lot nastier because it is so much easier to mess up and take a 2" cut by accident at 200" per minute or so. All it takes is one wrong Z setting just before a 'move' command and that's exactly what you get. And forget about reaching for the emergency shutoff, hit the deck instead and wait for the inevitable sound of impact (it usually doesn't take long).
Added bonus: The new router fit the cutter table with only minor changes to the tool clamp (I had to mill 4 little grooves into it to accomodate 4 pins that sick out of the router housing, these pins are used in the fixed base to give a depth setting by rotating the housing relative to the base, I didn't want to change the router body (it's brand new, no way Jose), so I spent some time milling out the little grooves).
After mouting it (with some copper shim stock around it to take up the slack wrt the old black and decker housing) it was time to fire it up and finish the job left uncompleted yesterday.
Finishing the front went ok, no problem there. As soon as I flipped the piece and ran the 'back' portion of the blade there was lots of trouble. The only thing I got for all that work was a blade shaped hole in my 2x8... Go figure. Back to the drawing board.
I was pretty sure I had the registering worked out ok, so the problem had to be somewhere else. Since none of this stuff is bought, but all homemade I can't call up some supplier and start yelling at them, which at times like this would be a nice way to vent my frustration The problem with homebuilt stuff is there is really nothing above suspicion, which can make finding a problem quite hard at times.
After some sketching I came to the conclusion that the first few cuts looked allright but that in reality they were not, but I could not quite put my finger on what the problem was (the depths were of ever so slightly, but that's a bit hard to tell if all you have for evidence is a hole with a line on the side that may or may not have been the initial cut of the router).
So I decided to run another test, this time in foam to speed things up a bit.
I'm much more used to working with metal, and I think it's messy. Both the lathe and the mill will spit shavings up to 8 feet away from the cutting bit. The first test I ran with the black and decker router I thought wow, this is even more messy. The first time I ran a pattern in foam (today) I thought WOW WHAT A MESS!!!
It is just unbelievable the amount of dust and trash you get from routing polystyrene. It goes everywhere. Literally. Even though the vacuum cleaner is right up there at the cutter bit it still manages to disperse enough of the crap through the air blown out by the router that everything in the shop (including me) is covered with fine pink dust. I *hate* pink. And pink dust is even worse.
Anyway, the test ran for a bit and I noticed that on every z stroke up the router came back a little less high than where it should be. The table I am using has steppers, without encoders on them so I do not get any feedback about it's actual position. It either works, or it doesn't and the only way you can really tell is at the end of a run, if you are back where you started you're ok, if not your workpiece is usually toast.
What I suspect is that this router is so much heavier than the old one that I'm losing steps on the way up (which is done at max-speed), and then on the way down with gravity helping and the travel being much slower it makes every step. I was afraid of that even before I started because this router is easily twice as heavy as the old one (it is also in another class from a quality perspective). I'll run some tests in the morning to confirm that, then increase the motor current or slow it down to fix it if that turns out to be the case. If not then I have some subtle bug in the z axis accounting and I'll be debugging that instead.
Either way I should have that fixed by noon or so tomorrow and then I'll run another test in foam to make sure that is licked. So, hopefully tomorrow I'll have my first scale model blade, barring accidents and other mishaps.
No pictures today, not much to show and my camera had a case of emmpty batteries.
That hole didn't look very good anyway
cheers to all of you reading this.
