Reading in this forum I came across references to musclechuck and eliminator (?) and so I went on a search ...
neither of those two seems to have a model that goes on a Hitachi TR12 out of the box - I seem to have the impression that Hitachi changed the chucks for the M models, and then I found, on Amazon, the Xtreme Xtender.
The nice thing about it is, you just plug it into your old 1/2" chuck and away you go. No compatibility issues (and I'm thinking about buying another router so compatibility
really WOULD have been an issue with the aforementioned.
xtreme-xtension1.jpgxtreme-xtension2.jpg
Things didn't go quite as smoothly as one might have hoped for. I stuck it into the router table mounted TR12, plugged in the rather long 1/2" bit you can see lying on the table and turned it on. Got a hell of a fright, because it was making very unsavoury noises. Not to mention that the insert and the spanners on the router table started to dance the jitterbug. I hit that off switch ever so fast.
I spent some time cleaning out the collet and oiling it (as per troubleshooting instructions) and then did what I saw people say about fine tuning musclechucks -- rotate the insert a little bit, retighten, rotate a little, retighten ... it took me maybe 30, maybe 45 minutes but I got the vibration down to the same level as the vanilla router with nothing in the chuck at all. Pretty happy with that result. Since I hopefully won't be taking it out for a while (It's definitely not recommended in free-handed mode by the makers -- they also discourage you from using it without a speed control) this should see me right for a while.
Meanwhile I'm still looking for a second hand machine with a speed control .... eventually one's going to come up. Or maybe I'll win the lotto or finally sell the farm :;
neither of those two seems to have a model that goes on a Hitachi TR12 out of the box - I seem to have the impression that Hitachi changed the chucks for the M models, and then I found, on Amazon, the Xtreme Xtender.
The nice thing about it is, you just plug it into your old 1/2" chuck and away you go. No compatibility issues (and I'm thinking about buying another router so compatibility
really WOULD have been an issue with the aforementioned.
xtreme-xtension1.jpgxtreme-xtension2.jpg
Things didn't go quite as smoothly as one might have hoped for. I stuck it into the router table mounted TR12, plugged in the rather long 1/2" bit you can see lying on the table and turned it on. Got a hell of a fright, because it was making very unsavoury noises. Not to mention that the insert and the spanners on the router table started to dance the jitterbug. I hit that off switch ever so fast.
I spent some time cleaning out the collet and oiling it (as per troubleshooting instructions) and then did what I saw people say about fine tuning musclechucks -- rotate the insert a little bit, retighten, rotate a little, retighten ... it took me maybe 30, maybe 45 minutes but I got the vibration down to the same level as the vanilla router with nothing in the chuck at all. Pretty happy with that result. Since I hopefully won't be taking it out for a while (It's definitely not recommended in free-handed mode by the makers -- they also discourage you from using it without a speed control) this should see me right for a while.
Meanwhile I'm still looking for a second hand machine with a speed control .... eventually one's going to come up. Or maybe I'll win the lotto or finally sell the farm :;
it arrived today
