Got my Freud $99 router - comments

[JeffG78]

My router came today from Lowe's and I since I know many of you have ordered it, I thought I would mention something that I learned tonight. Freud supplies a paper template so that you can use it to drill your router table mounting plate. Mine will be mounted in my BT3 accessory table, so before I started I removed my old Craftsman router and removed the Freud base plate. The paper template has a scale on it and it says to match it up with a 6" rule to verify that it printed properly which it did. I carefully marked the plate from the pattern and drilled the holes. The first thing I noticed was that the height adjust hole was not large enough to fit over the router. I rechecked the dimensions and grabbed a bigger bit after seeing that the Freud base plate has a larger hole than what they called for on the template. No biggie. The one that made me mad was the arbor lock hole. It was nowhere close to lining up. I rechecked the template and sure enough, they were way off. They even dimensioned the template wrong. It was about 1/4 inch off which was just enough to make it hard to redrill. I even lined up the Freud base plate to the template before I started, but the baseplate does not have the hole for the above-table arbor lock. It does have the two that were drawn correctly on the template. Doesn't that figure?

At least it was only my hidden router adaptor plate that had an ugly oblong hole. After I got everything to line up on the router, I drilled the three holes in my BT3 accessory table and attached it all. It all ended well, but for those of you who haven't mounted your new 1702 Freud routers, make sure you fix the template before you drill.

I also don't understand why they use Torx bits for their base plate, but supply straight slot machine bolts for mounting it to a router table. Why not stick with Torx? Oh, and the Freud emblem didn't stick to the router when they assembled it. It will fall off any day now.

It does run smoothly and the above-table height adjustment and bit changing are pretty slick. I think $99 was a great deal.

[Alex Franke]

Yeah, I had the same issue. I guess I should have posted on it -- might have saved you a bit of grief... I'll blame it on the holiday rush

Seemed like it wasn't quite a big a deal for me, though. Maybe I was sloppy transferring the pattern in the first place, but I was able to make up the difference simply by offsetting the larger hole. So it still looks like a round hole.

Here's what I ended up with: