I've acquired a Bosch Colt Model PR10E palm router. It was on special at Canadian Tire, and I've long been meaning to get a palm router, so I snagged one while it could be had for $119.99 CDN. It'll be just what I need for all the rounding over of edges on the rocking horse that I'm building. Here's a view of the router just out of its box.
Note the rectangular sole plate. It's attached to the router's base casting by four M4x8mm pan head screws in oversize holes, so the sole plate can be 'floated' about to centre its circular opening around the router's spindle axis.
If, like me, you're fussy about sole plate centring and you dislike guesswork, Bosch offers a centring cone, P/N RA1151. I got one from Amazon for $11.38 CDN.
Inside the bag are two pieces -- a steel spindle and a plastic cone.
Press the two pieces together by hand and you have this.
A jig for centring a router's sole plate to its spindle. Here's a view of the jig installed.
I can't say that I'm all that impressed with the centring cone; I found it a bit awkward to put to use.
My main reason for acquiring the centring cone was that I wanted to be able to be certain of having the sole plate's edges centred around the router's spindle axis, for the sake of straight-edge guided cuts. But there's a fly in that ointment -- the sole plate is metric dimensioned,[1] not fractional inch. Setting up such cuts with fractional inch router bits could be a little challenging.
Anyway, perhaps I'm being too picky about a tool that is essentially just a trimming router[2] for use with bearing-piloted bits. For that sort of work, an 'eyeballed' sole plate centring is entirely adequate.
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NOTES:
[1] The sole plate is 88mm x 96mm. That works out to about 3 15/32" x 3 25/32" -- not the tidiest of fractions to work with. 3 1/2" x 3 3/4" would be nice.
[2] That's a little unfair of me. There's an awesome array of accessory bases available. The tool's potential versatility is amazing, as is the amount of money that one could spend.
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