I believe I have seen this mentioned before somewhere in here but I can’t find where anyone has tried it. Can you ground the spindle somewhere internally in the Dewalt 660 so that is is always grounded? This way you only need the positive lead when doing a Z probe?
Yes, I’ve seen that. You have to take the router apart and attach a ground wire (to the logic ground on your board, not to earth) to the top bearing for the spindle. I saw it for the DeWalt and for the Makita.
Do be aware though that there is a possibility that this could do some very bad things to your control board, and/or you. These tools are not earthed for a reason. (They have 2 prong plugs, not 3) creating a path to earth near the brush material dust and the (by definition) arc of mains voltage across the brush gap is a recipe that can end in fire. In this case though, it could just end up with the ground plane of your control board energized at mains voltage.
Probably, nothing bad will happen. If something bad does happen, it will most likely just be a voltage regulator or a chip on your control board going “pop”.
I’ll deal with the inconvenience of attaching a clip to an unpowered tool, and remembering to remove it after.
I concur with Dan mixing high voltage ac with low voltage dc is rarely a good idea without some level of isolation.
Thanks for your input guys. I agree its a bit risky, so I will probably refrain from doing it. My thought was that I would ground the spindle and then inlay a metal square or disk into my table at its home position so it will home the z axis when I auto-home all axes.
The common fix for this is just to attach the wire to the bit with a magnet. Easy to add or remove.
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You might also attach both wires to a push button switch and mount the switch in a printed piece.
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If you wanted to go fancy and have a dpdt relay to controll power to your router, you could attach the the ground wire you install in the router to the second pole and opposite throw of the mains power to the router. That way you never have to attach the ground to the router but as soon as the router powers up the connection between the routers baring and the controll board is opened for safety.
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Yeah that’s much better than when I used an alligator clip and left it attached.
I had the first mpww (mostly printed weed wacker)
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