So following on from Craig Salisbury's thread the other day about wanting a new router to replace his Dewalt 625E, he sent me the Dewalt 625E to have a look at.
The router has been kept immaculately and is almost like new having obviously done very little work in its life. It's a 2018 Type 7 model so it's not that old.
From Craig's footage it was obvious that the end of the armature was bent so I got to task getting it out, I must say that the Dewalt (and I would assume the Trend T10 and T11 also) is an absolute pig to get the armature out of, the machine has to be completely dismantled to its base components. I would recommend a drink to smooth over the experience a bit.
Once I had the armature out I chucked it up in the lathe and got it running true to the bearing surface near the collet end, then I checked it with the dial on the inside of the taper (you might want to watch it on youtube as it looks rather small here).
So from the bearing surface to the collet taper it is out 25 thousands of an inch which is about 0.6mm in metric. I doubt that it is possible to straighten it without a decent setup for such work.
Once I took it out of the chuck I noticed this on the armature:
Well, obviously it's not supposed to look like that, I'm not sure how that could've possibly happened in a totally enclosed machine unless it was a manufacturing defect from new. The field doesn't seem to have any obvious marks from a collision but there is a slight blackish mark where it was run:
Now, I know the machine does run fine as I've run it myself before taking it apart, I don't believe there's been any serious damage anywhere, but I'm not sure how that could've happened to the armature internally. Since I barely know what I'm doing I kind of want a second opinion before buying a new armature whether it's actually worth doing or if the field is toast and it's not worth the effort.
As a side note, if it is worth doing I think I'll change the bearings while it's apart as these seem to be a common failure item on both the Dewalt and Trend routers, interestingly they use an Italian SKF 6005 C3 bearing on the routing end but I do wonder if it's a lower quality SKF bearing as it's not like others I've used already shedding its grease though the top seal which I would guess has happened because of its use in a router table, although it does have a high-speed phenolic cage inside.
They use a cheap unbranded Chinese 608 bearing on the top end of the armature.
I think swapping them for decent NSK DDU bearings or non-contact SKFs would be a good idea.