My old homebrew saw/ router table was falling apart and I was tired of crawling on the floor to make awkward adjustments to the plunge router attached to it, so I decided it was time for a big upgrade. After a lot of research I opted for the Incra Mast-r-lift II with the intention of installing a Milwaukee 5625 router in it. No problem, right, especially since Incra presented the opportunity of buying them as a bundle on their web site. Well, they are backordered everywhere. Grizzly listed them as in stock, I phoned to confirm and was assured they were ready to ship, placed the order and found out a week later they were on back order. Grrr. Then their alternative facts department told be it would ship by today. Today it's back-ordered until May.
There's a silver lining-- in the fine print on the Incra web site it says that the Milwaukee router won't work with the metric version of their lift, which is what I installed. Whaaat? The only thing that needs to be different between an Imperial and metric version of the lift is the engraving on the top that tells you how far the router has moved. How can they be incompatible?
Ok, so alternatives. The obvious one, the classic PC Speedmatic has been discontinued and is only available on the black market for absurd amounts of money. The Bora Portamate has terrible reviews overall with a full third of reviewers complaining of vibration and runout. The JessEm Powertek motor also has decidedly mixed reviews (and seems to be out of stock everywhere) The AUKTools Mk II looks pretty promising (especially since it can be ordered with a remote speed controller), but has to be ordered from the UK and I've never heard of it nor know of no one who has. The rest of their list of compatible routers are either much smaller 2 hp models or are brands that disappeared some time in the last decade.
So this is a bit of a rant, sorry. I no longer have a functional router table, having replaced my table and installed the lift. I need to do something. Is the 3+ HP fixed base router a thing of the past? I run some pretty big bits in the table and think the added power is useful, the Bosch plunge router I've been using is a 3.5 HP, but of course won't fit the lift. Any other alternatives?
It's frustrating when something you hadn't anticipated to be hard turns out to be.