Recently, I had the urge to scatter stainless steel, brass and aluminum chips all over the shop. I was impressed with the new MicroFence® Plunge Base (www.microfence.com) that they have designed for various trim routers. As luck would have it, Santa brought me the new Bosch variable speed Colt to play with.
My base is pretty much a clone of the MF with a few changes/improvements. This project even included some woodworking; note the two maple burl knobs. (I think they turned out ok, for not being a wood turner). The knobs are finished with John Miliunas’s witches brew (equal parts of BLO, wipe-on poly, & naphtha) thanks John!
To make the micrometer threads, I threaded the 304 SS bar stock to class 3A specs (read tight) and borrowed a 3B tap from work to tap the brass block with. The micrometer style adjustment system is surprisingly accurate with less than .001 deviations per full length of travel. Machining the micrometer barrel was a bit tedious with each graduation line having to be accurately indexed 7°, 12 min, 0 sec., using my 14” rotary table. (Pic#5)
The turret rotates on a small thrust bearing and there is a ball plunger installed in the base that indexes each post by 120°.
I had some ¼” Lexan sheet so I made three bases to cover all contingencies.
Travel is a little over 2¾”. The compression springs from HD are a little stouter than I wanted but I discovered that unless you’re willing to buy 100 or more from a spring company, your choices are limited. I’ll keep looking…
All in all, I have about $40 in it including the two trick LED lights from MicroFence.
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