I’m not a big fan of the handheld router. It’s loud, messy and it wants to kill you. Seriously, there’s actual hate there. The router table is a different story. Breezy can control the mess, the little bastard is locked in a box, much more manageable. The table has my big chamfer bit in it most of the time. An easy way to add a shadow line to a piece and much nicer looking than a rounded over edge.
So, before prying that out of the table for the new round over, I thought I would run some of the other pieces that I haven’t edged yet. Well, in the course of that operation, the bearing on the top of the bit seized up. The item rides on the bearing which is at rest relative to the bit. The bit is spinning at 20,000 rpms, so without that, the wood is riding against something that, while smooth, is moving really really fast and quickly heating up. In the middle of all that the little bolt that secures the bearing comes out of the bit and gets ingested by the router. That’s a mission kill. When I finally get the router disassembled, the magnets on the armature are trashed. Bah.
This is/was a Porter Cable 7519 3HP production router. They sell it which a big two handed base, but no one would dare use it like that. These are for router tables and big CNC machines. And, they have been out of production for a while. So, no armatures are out there. Bah. That’s a $600 router. Not that I paid $600 for that one. It came on a router table at the junk portion of a tool auction for $50 because no one there understood what the funky contraption was (it was a vertical router table, pretty uncommon). I sold the router table for $150 and the base I would never use for $60 and put the beast in it’s cage under the table.
Anyway, replacing it won’t be easy. You can get some new old stock occasionally for $500 to $600 or a used one that’s probably been run hard for $300 and up. Of course, I don’t have to have an exact replacement. Something reasonably powerful is all I need, right? No.
The router table has a complicated contraption to raise and lower the motor called a router lift. I had purchased a fancy one close to 20 years ago and that’s what I am using. They don’t exactly wear out, they are big chunks of machined aluminum. But they sure save a lot of hassle when adjusting the router or changing the bits. They make them in some generic largish size and then you buy the collar that converts whatever diameter your router is to that size.
Well, this PC 7519 is about as big a router as they make, so only it and one other type that fits the collar I have. The people that make the router lift no longer sell this model. They have a fancier model that anodized red instead of gold now. Because…it’s faster? IDK. But, it uses a different system to mount the router. So…I can’t get a different router collar. I either have to track down another PC 7519 or this other brand I haven’t heard of before. Or, get a new router lift which opens up my options. Well, the cool new red lift is $350. So, no, that’s BS. Time to track down this other type of router.
It turns out the company that makes the lifts, imports these routers from China specifically to fill the void left by the PC 7519 being discontinued. It doesn’t even come with a base, they know it’s going into a table. And it’s $289. Sold.
So, I got that in, finished the chamfering and prepared to make dowel stock for the pins.
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