I am a DeWalt guy and have been using their compact router for a few years now and love it. Have all the accessories/attachments and have basically “moved in”. Well, I tried the Carbide 3D Compact router with my S5 Pro, and I have had 2 of them fail in fairly short order. NOT recommended. I guess you get what you pay for.
But I cannot afford one of those really nice spindles. I could barely afford this machine as it is, so here is where I have to stay for now. Anyway, obviously I knew I would have to get the 69mm bracket for the Dewalt, as they have them and all the accessories.
ONE PROBLEM: The 69mm bracket does NOT fit on the S5 Pro! I know this because they sent it to me and the mounting holes do NOT line up. The employee that sent it didn’t know this was the case. So I ordered the 80mm in the hopes of coming up with a solution.
So I designed a sleeve for my router to fit in the 80mm mounting bracket and it works PERFECTLY. I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but if you want to do the same, hit me up and I’ll sell you the file for cheap or a print of the sleeve itself (+ shipping).
Going to try and figure out how to attach photos here; new to this forum.
I have an SO3 from 2016. It came with a Dewalt and it has worked flawlessly. I have had to change the brushes twice in its life. I just had to replace the 2nd set last week. The router failed to power up and spin. I know immediately it was the brushes and I replaced them and everything works perfectly now. The C3D router is a clone of the Makita and both have the same problems. Mostly the lower bearing goes bad and secondly the brushes wear out very fast. I use my SO3 a lot and am very happy with the Dewalt. I did buy a second one and use it around the shop for utility work. The second one has a plunge base so it is very useful. Plus it is a spare but with the history of the original I dont think I will ever need it.
Back when we sold both the DeWalt and Makita, the DeWalts had a higher failure rate.
These days, one might want to try a Makita instead of a Carbide Compact Router, esp. if one has a significantly older one back when they were still Made in Japan.
We will send replacement Carbide Compact Routers for the entirety of the warranty period, so no one should be concerned about being left in the lurch.
Note that one concern is that folks cause this problem by damaging the body of the router by over-tightening — be careful not to do that.
Another option is:
which is what I picked back before Carbide 3D offered the VFD spindle.