I know there are various posts about problems of static, but I haven’t located quite the problem I have, namely a shocking Makita router. Lately, I sometimes get a static shock when changing bits. It seems straightforward to ground the 1F, but from prior posts I understand the Makita does not ground to the 1F. Has anyone grounded their Makita directly or to the 1F?
Hey RedstoneCNC,
the Makita is an isolated device and also you cannot isolate a PVC shop vacuum hose, which is often the source of the static buildup.
I have seen someone retrofitting a shielding to the Makita Power cord cable however I believe that neither grounds the router nor is it effective against EMI since most of the EMI that originates from the router is from its carbon-brush commutators and these EMI come over the air and not from the cable, and you cannot enclose the motor into a shield itself without introducing heat problems (and too much heat under load is the real problem with universal motors). Although there exist sealed universal motors for environments where sparks are not allowed, a cheap hand-held trim router is obviously not such a motor and such a motor would also be much too expensive, especially considering the fact that you could use a spindle instead that does not have carbon-brush commutators at all and can be grounded correctly (also for the monitor intermittent issue, it would have been simpler to add ferrite cores).
So in practice you cannot prevent the buildup of static electricity in some cases, however grounding the machine correctly (see also Material and Tools needed to ground your frame) however usually helps.
What you can do, is to put some metal foil where you touch the router/dust hose and ground this foil to prevent you get the shock, this is also what John McGrath recommends in those cases, but you cannot ground PVC hoses and have to live with the electrostatic buildup.
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