Trend T3E Router

A few years ago, I bought a Trend T3E and it was installed as the woodrat router. After making plantation shutters and some other jobs it suddenly stopped working. I had a quick look and couldn't see any obvious fault, so put it away and bought a DeWalt 625 for the woodrat. As it happens it is a far superior router, much smoother, maybe a bit noisier, but with much smoother slides. Anyway, I now may have a need for the Trend, as it is lighter and more suited to hand held work. 

I got it out and put it on the bench to see if I could see why there was no rotation.

 I powered it up and it started first time. This was odd, so I took the top cover off and had a look. 

Quite a bit of sparking from the brushes, so maybe that's the problem. A quick ebay later and I have new brushes. They are a bit bigger than the old ones, but the old ones don't seem too much smaller. With new brushes, there's still a lot of sparking. There must be some other problem. I removed the rotor from the motor and had a look. The commutator seemed to have a couple of copper connectors that had raised above the rest.

This is why I have a lathe. The rotor was easy to fit into the lathe and I skimmed the high points off the rotor. I won't be able to do this very often as material is lost, but it wasn't necessary to remove much copper.

Anyway, afer re-assembly and running the new brushes for a while and the Trend is much happier. Still a bit of sparking going on, but I can probably use it for a while more.