DEWALT DW625 Router...... Do I smell burning plastic.....

Stuart Ablett

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15,917
Location
Tokyo Japan
OK I'm trying my best to get these darn chairs done, the tightwire chairs, I've had a lot of set back, but was on track then last week I went to the L shop to help out my wife and my Mother In Law was sick, I worked the register for a few hours a couple of nights in a row and boom I caught a cold, dang it.

Today is the the first day back, I was too foggy to really be working with sharp spinny tools until today, well I'm cutting some of the final mortises on the legs and all of a sudden the router slows to about half speed and I can smell burning plastic :eek:

Shut down right away and take a look, it is not hot, that I can feel, the cord is not hot, the outlet is fine :huh: I was cutting about 1/4" deep with a 10mm straight bit, I want nice neat cuts so I take it slow and do small steps, the wood is Beech so it is fairly hard but nothing stupid. I bought this router brand new on March 7th 2015 and have only really used it to make the Chinese chairs, not a lot of hours on it.

Any ideas?

I desperately need this tool to work right now, or I'm kind of screwed.

If I order it today Amazon can get me a new one by the 16th, but I don't know if I need a new one...?

I ran it again and it seemed fine for about 5 min, then the same thing, slow down and burning plastic smell.

I guess I have to tear it apart and see what is up..... I'm so screwed......
 
Is it variable speed? Possibly a capacitor in the circuit that is on its way out. Sounds like something electronic if it has speed control i would be looking there if motor is not heating up and cord is not hot indicating current draw is normal. I guess warranty is a mute point for you in Japan, shipping back probably costs you as much as new.

Any chance you can use one of your other routers in mean time?


check this out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dELKleG5xtk
 
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I have the same model, and what I know from it is that it doesn't like routing with long bits despite making light passes. I had to take mine to the repair service after some deep routing 25mm / 1" the bearings were worn out due to the cantilever force.

I know it is no help to you, but it may be only a badly positioned wire that is touching a hot part ( probably the collector or near it) and the insulation is burning.
 
Well almost 4 hours later and I think.... I think, I'm OK.

I took the whole thing apart to check the bearings, and I think I figured out what was going sideways.


If you watch this video at the 8:58 mark the guy is taking the retaining cup off the bottom of the router, this kind of holds the bearing in place, and has the spindle lock in it as well. You can see he has to really grunt to get those three screws out, mine almost fell out. I think this let the bottom bearing kind of float in it's cup and caused side to side deflection, which caused a LOT of stress on the router and the brushes basically over heated spewing this black power on to the case, which then heated up and that is where I got the plastic burning smell, I think, mainly because I could not find anywhere else that had any melted plastic.

IMG_0085.JPG

These are the three screws that were loose.

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You can see the black stuff around the area the brush sits in the case

IMG_0071.JPG

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and here on the fan shroud

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The armature has a few of these kind of burnt spots

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The face of the brush

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the back edge of the brush, I can see some yellow plastic in with the burnt black stuff on the edge.

I guess I will see if it works or not, it runs, but that is not the same as being able to cut.

Fingers crossed.
 
Fingers crossed it seems to be OK, I'm taking extra light cuts for sure.

I'm also going to replace the three screws with allen head bolts and put some thread lock on them, so this never happens again, but at some point if I do have to replace the bearings, I'll be able to remove the allen head bolts, sometimes with the thread lock, the philipps head screws don't want to come out again :)

Fingers crossed! :)
 
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