a few hours into this job, the router bit slipped down in the collet, embedded it self pretty deep in the wood and pulled things off course. I hit emergency stop, but essentially the job was ruined. Not happy
Obviously my fault for not tightening enough in the first place, or double checking before I started the second phase of the job.
The combination of things moving so slowly, and the risk of this kind of fault means I need to rethink my approach. Certainly here, where there are really two parts, I should probably do them separately to minimise impact of a failure.
It happens a lot with home systems, they are not as robust as commercial systems. Our work machines have overload sensing, rpm monitors etc. And we still manage to trash parts occasionally. It’s all part of the learning process😁
When you load your bit are you sure you’re not bottoming it out in the collet? Because you cannot tighten a collet around a bit shank if the shank of the bit bottoms out inside a collet. To understand what I’m talking about you have to think about how a collet works. As you tighten the collet you’re threading the collet in. Once the collet grabs the shank of a bit now you’re moving the bit in too. If the end of the bit shank hits the top of the collet now you have to slip the shank of the bit in the collet if you want to get it any tighter. That doesn’t really happen though. What does happen is the collet feels tight so you’re like I guess it’s tight. Now you’re tight up and down (which is worthless as far as holding the bit goes), but not around a bit shank. Run the tool, get a little vibration, now the bit is loose and starts coming out on you.
What I do with my hand routers that I load upside down is I wad up a ball of paper towel and stuff it down into the collet. The paper ball can support the weight of a bit and keep it from bottoming out on me. But the collet can compress the paper so it’ll neck down and tighten onto a bit shank.
Just something to think about and be aware of.
@Paul_Frederick possible. Certainly something I’ll be thinking about next time. In this case it had run for hours with no problem on Wednesday. I then didn’t re-check the tightness today. It still ran for over an hour without problems before it started to slip.
But your explanation makes a lot of sense.
@Daniel_Would
I used to drop bits into routers upside down then tighten them til I was red in the face and bits would still walk out on me. Now with my paper wad trick I just have to tighten them what I would consider a reasonable amount and they hold like I expect things to. Push a bit into your collet and see if it hits anything up in there.
