My poor router bearings

Owen Lawrence · 2006-01-25T01:07:50+00:00

I was SO happy getting my Freud FT2000E router. Finally I had lots of power and a machine that should be sturdy enough to withstand any of my hobby use. I spent much of last year building my router table, and finally put it to good work on my window sill project. I've probably got less than 2 hours of run time on this thing. More like one hour. Light passes, too; I did NOT stress this baby. Imagine my disappointment when it started making this huge noise last Saturday. Today I paid the $90C repair bill for the new bearings it needed. (Of course the warrantee expired almost exactly one month ago.) The repair man told me he'd press the manufacturer to honour the warrantee if it was the armature or something like that, but not for bearings because they wear out, and they're really strict about their policies. "Especially if it's hanging in a router table, because the dust settles on the bearings, and even though they're "sealed", they're not really sealed, and the dust draws the oil out of the bearings." Does any of this sound reasonable to you? I'm doing this hobby for fun, not for profit, but let me tell you the fun goes out of it really fast when it gets this expensive. - Owen -

Jan 25, 2006 21 Replies

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Andy Dingley 20 years ago

I bought mine about 8 years ago. If I'd bought it a year earlier I'd probably have got the AEG instead. They built a near-copy on the same lines in the same factory (a few other tools too) but the AEG seemed to have a slightly better standard of finish. My SDS drill and biscuiter are AEGs rather than Freud but they seem to have pulled the router model.

Mine lives in the table almost all the time and I've never had a squeak out of it. Still, there's always the weekend...

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Owen Lawrence 20 years ago

One says 6005RS, the other 6201RS. Now that I have all this great knowledge (thanks to you guys) I can fix my router really cheap.

Education costs, no matter how you get it.

- Owen -

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