i have my eye on 2 Sainsmart-Genmitsu makita clones:
ER11 Variant
and a truly makita trim router clone but way less than half the price: CLONE (supposedly they have soft start)
have anyone tried them_?
hee, hee, the pic shows it comes with not one, but 2!!! spare sets of brushes, interesting!
Carbide 3D (makers of the Shapeoko CNC) have an ER11 router. They were $150 but turns out no one wanted to pay extra for the ER11 version so they have them marked down to $60 right now.
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Sounds like a steel of a deal. Comes with two ER11 collets for 1/4" and 1/8" inch. It does not mention soft start, and I can’t see LED lights on the bottom like the Kobalt, but at $60 that’s a deal.
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That’s really great… I’d not trade in my ER collet ever again.
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Thanks for the tip, I just ordered one!
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120V only. Sigh.
well i live this side of the big ocean 
I was referring to the great deal on the Carbide 3D one. Just pisses me off because throughout my entire career I’ve had to devote extra time to dealing with making things 120V/208V or even 480V compatible etc. and it seems like half the time something interesting pops up it’s 120V only.
maybe because they are based in the us market, as i said most makers on this side of the fence wont deal with 220v, in our countries we get 110v, and 220v but most appliances are 110v for sure
My feeling everytime I have to buy and install another 600V to 480V transformer.
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Good way to make sure they never expand beyond the US market. Each to their own, I guess.
i guess.
i asked what would cost me to have 220v in my entire shop every single outlet (except for 4-5 ones to have some minor appliances/battery chargers/cellphone chargers) then asked for how much was the install of more than 50 amps to my new shop.
must say, i did go with mostly 110v and thicker awg cable. leaved only 3 5hp air pump connections for the vacuum tables and the main dust collector, all the other stuff will pass tru one of the phases.
480, where would that be??
The brewery I work at runs on 460 3phase. Serious pain in the butt when you want to run something someone else is getting rid of.
It’s the 3-phase line-to-line voltage of 277/480v single phase or split-phase line-to-line voltage of 240/480V split phase. Canadian commercial/industrial is where I’ve run into it most often. It’s a humongous pain in the ass because it’s well outside the ‘world range’ that a lot of companies design for, usually needing specific equipment. The companies that I’ve worked with in the past always ended up with a separate ‘Canada’ sku for that.
I believe it’s also at least somewhat common in the US but is usually available alongside 120/208V so we would typically target 208V 3-phase in that case.
480V line to line is particularly nasty because it’s 800Vpk with a 20% high line voltage. That’s high enough that you’re well beyond standard ‘commodity’ silicon power semiconductors at 600V and you’re pushing it a little with 900V special purpose silicon. The advent of 1200V silicon carbide has likely improved that situation quite a lot.
In more than a few cases I’ve seen people just require the installation of a specific step-down transformer for any equipment on a 480V system, which is a naaaaasty solution.
Edit: This is in comparison to a truly enormous swathe of the world where EVERYTHING is 230V/400V until you’re in some hardcore special purpose scenarios where you ‘might’ see the very occasional 350/600V or more likely you’ve got an MV supply in the 2-12kV and an on-site transformer. Or I guess some rare scenarios like we have here in NZ for rural supplies where it’s split phase 230/460V over single-wire-earth-return but always used at 230V single phase.
Edit 2: In my experience it’s not even the voltage that’s the issue, it’s the uniformity that’s the great part. Domestic single phase? 230V. Domestic 3 phase? 230V/400V. Commercial/industrial single phase? 230V. Commercial/industrial 3 phase? 230V/400V. Doesn’t matter if you’re in a high rise apartment, a milking shed in the middle of f’n nowhere, deep underground in a mine, on a temporary building site, pulling power from a nearby streetlight or just in your own garage, it’s all the same. In the US, we had situations where literally different parts of the same building had 120V supplied differently (split phase vs 120/208 3-phase) so it was an absolute crapshoot which equipment would work in which building or which part of it without needing to be internally reconfigured…
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All of the 480V equipment I’ve ever come across here in Canadaland has been US manufactured (or US targeted) industrial equipment. 480V is not a distribution voltage that’s been available from utilities in Ontario that I’ve encountered. I could see it being offered somewhere, though, perhaps in areas with very high concentration of demand but with small individual loads.
You could of course put in your own customer owned substation if you wanted 480V as your primary voltage (like some automotive plants do). I’ve always done 600V substations for customer owned transformers for industrial installs with step downs for lighting panels at 120/208V and for 480V equipment.
Commerical I’ve always done 120/208V either as supplied by local distribution or via customer owned transformation.
Please kill any 480V Canada SKU you see!
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That’s super interesting. Much like the US it could be intensely regionalized, I guess?
I would absolutely love to. Thankfully with my current project we’re buying ~30kW COTS AC-DC front-ends that already handle that voltage range. The previous project was briefly going to be designing a bi-directional AC-DC front-end and one of the first things we did was say ‘no 480V for the first version’ to save ourselves the pain and suffering!
I should have added “…and replace it with a 600V SKU!” 
Commercial I look for 208V equipment.
Industrial (manufacturing, water/wastewater) I look for 600V equipment.
Oh ewwwwwww, zero chance.
I guess that’s probably fine as long as you’re speccing motors and switchgear but 600V would be hideous for power electronics. That’s thoroughly transformer-on-the-input territory or just running line-to-neutral and calling it a day. 600V line-line is 850Vpk or damn near 1kV at high line. With our current rating requirements that’d mean we’d end up on 1700V SiC and 1200V film caps. Spicy.