I was at wal-mart earlier and saw they had a dimmer switch for ~$6, and I remembered reading about how they can be used to rig a make-shift speed controller… but I wanted to see if anyone had any negative experiences to attribute to this method and/or tthis method? I can’t afford another dewalt 660, so I would hate to burn it out…
as a side bar i have a variable speed rotary tool (black & decker), would there be any possibility of porting that over to the dewalt safely?
The cheap analog dimmers work fine. There is also a cheap one designed for routers at harbor freight.
which would you recommend? are the advantages (if any) that the hf speed controller affords me worth the extra tenner?
When I was researching speed controllers before my purchase, there was claims by both manufactures and individuals that some speed controllers (more expensive ones generally) preserved more torque for a given speed. None provided evidence, so I don’t know how much truth there is to these claims. But it is possible that a dimmer switch will work but provide lower torque than a commercial unit.
As for cost, the Harbor Freight speed controller runs $18. If you are building your dimmer version from scratch, adding up the dimmer, box, female outlet, male plug, cord and cover, You are closer than a tenner to the $18.
your insight is very much appreciated, i do believe i will end up going with the harbor freight controller, i dug a little deeper into the forum just now and found out they tend to run hot, but there was a link to an instructable to fix the issue so really it’s a non-issue.
I did this, but I haven’t used it on the DW660. I use it on the vacuum. Not sure the precise cost but yeah it was cheap.
I don’t think a speed controller will be able to increase torque at low speed when the tool gets loaded unless it has some external speed sensor. A brushed DC motor on rectified 110 doesn’t provide any real indication to the speed controller that it is slowing down and needs more juice. At least not through the power line, which is why some external feedback would be necessary.
The main problem of cheap triac based dimmers is that they lower both the speed and the torque at the same time. So, indeed, if you lower the speed then you’ll lose tons of torque, no matter the load.
It’s better than nothing if you need to slow the router down, but I’d recommend you to work on finding the correct feeds and speeds instead.
Real inverters designed for speed control at constant torque exist, but most of the time they are quite expensive.
They really lower the speed by reducing the torque.
I don’t think we usually need all the torque of the dw660. So I think it is ok. But what the reason you should know that is this. If it was spinning at 30krpms at full speed and you dim it down to 10krpm. You’re really reducing the torque so that it spins at idle around 10krpm. It will drop a lot of speed when it touches the wood.
I think they are fine to use, but you should just make small adjustments to slow it down after it is in the material. And don’t bother with a tach. It isn’t precise enough to stay at a certain speed.
