Base flatness on routers

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Aegwyn11

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Apr 20, 2009
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On the other FOG (Felder), one of the guys measured the table flatness of a few of his routers (with respect to the collet) and found some suprising variances (.060" on one, .030" on another, .020" on another). The variances manifested as visible variations in the cut when using a small radius (1/16") roundover bit.

I've done some small radius roundovers (not that small though..) with my OF1400 and never noticed anything like that. I don't have a way to measure this, but I was wondering...does Festool spec this on their routers?

Nick
 
Nick, I've never seen a spec published for tolerances on router bases.

Edit: I should also go on to say, I've not heard any complaints on the flatnessitude of our router bases. [big grin]
 
A router base out of flatness by .060" ??? I suspect his measuring method is fowl. That's 1/16" out of flat on a 10" diameter. Imagine the surface of a board being out of flat by that much, I'm sure everyone of us would easily spot that.  I can not imagine a machine shop doing anything that bad. The machinist would have to go through some deliberate actions to make a 10" surface that bad.

I suspect his measurements are off by a factor of 10. I can understand .003 to .006" out of flat.
 
I probably wasn't very clear, sorry about that. What he did was put a 1/4" shaft in the collet, then set up a dial indicator attached to this 1/4" shaft to indicate to the base and swung it around the base and found the variances I mentioned. This doesn't directly indicate table flatness, but indicates flatness along with whether the table is perfectly perpendicular to the collet.

None of the routers he measured were Festool...which is why I got curious about it and asked the question here.
 
In that case he is measuring how far out of square the base is. Those numbers might be realistic. On a 10" base and assuming his measurements were at the outer edge, then you are looking at just over a 1/2 degree error. Not big but noticeable in his cut.
 
The only complaint I have about flatness of router bases is that it disappears when I step on the power cord and bugger up a formerly clean run. 

[scared] [big grin] [scared]
 
Qwas said:
In that case he is measuring how far out of square the base is. Those numbers might be realistic. On a 10" base and assuming his measurements were at the outer edge, then you are looking at just over a 1/2 degree error. Not big but noticeable in his cut.
Click to expand...

As I read this, the person on the other forum that Nick mentions in the OP made no mention of a base size of 10".  So if Steve has placed 10" into the equation when he should have used something smaller -- like 6-3/8", or whatever the sweep of the indicator -- the result would have been worse.
 
I believe the guy swept in a 5" circle. So yes, you would expect his results to be much worse in a much bigger circle.

I was more wondering how much better this kind of measurement would be with a Festool router, since I've never had the depth of cut variation problems he was talking about with my OF1400.
 
Sparktrician said:
The only complaint I have about flatness of router bases is that it disappears when I step on the power cord and bugger up a formerly clean run. 

[scared] [big grin] [scared]
Click to expand...

Done that more times than I care to admit.  [blink]
 
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