Jack,
        I have done something similar many moons ago with a upside down
Dremel mounted to the router accessory plate, diamond cutters or high
speed carbide work well. However, you need to be concerned about the
health and safety implications of such a setup. Safety in that you have
a high speed cutter sticking up that will essentially go through
anything it contacts, and it will require proper guarding to assure that
fingers and such can come nowhere near it. Health in that you will be
generating extremely fine particles of abrasive dust that will not be
adequately captured by the standard filters found in most 'shop vacs'.
Both of these can be overcome with proper design of the tool support
guarding and dust collection. Also, the tool should be controlled
through a foot switch, you don't want an operator trying to align a
cutter with a slot when it is spinning at 20,000 RPMs. If you ever get
an OSHA inspection, be prepared to answer lots of questions.

        The other issue to consider is that the cutting accuracy is
dependent on the handling skills of the operator. It is extremely easy
to make an expensive piece of scrap with one little improper cut. Some
of this can be addressed with alignment tooling and carriers that are
board specific, but this will continue to add ongong NRE capital costs
to what is proposed to be a low-cost solution. You may want to continue
to search the used market for an older benchtop depanel router system,
I'm sure that they can be found for much less than $25-30K in today's
'buyer's market'....

Mike McMonagle

-----Original Message-----
From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jack Evans
Sent: Saturday, November 08, 2003 12:43 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [TN] Router for depanel operation


Hi Folks,
I am looking for a router for depaneling finished circuit cards. We
build high quality cards in a low volume, high mix shop. I am looking
for a low cost solution that will give me excellent results. Has anyone
out there experimented with your own creation. Seems I can't free up 25k
to 30k for a used machine and I am thinking about some ideas using a
rotozip mounted to a plate. Any Ideas?  What type of cutters give the
best results? Thanks, Jack

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