Router OK

My plan was to allow the router to dry out in the garage for several weeks and perhaps longer.  I would have preferred to allow this drying to take place before drenching the interior of the router with Inox but I was afraid that this would result in one or more parts of  the unit to seize up due to corrosion.  This forced me to apply the Inox treatment as soon as I returned to my house only 3 days after the soaking at the bottom of the marina even though this risked the trapping of moisture under the Inox (even though it is advertised to dissipate moisture, but I am a worry-wart by nature).  This turned out to be a wise decision because initially I could not get any movement when trying to plunge the router down.  I managed to free the plunging mechanism after 30 minutes of patient work with judicious use of a hammer and plenty of Inox. 

However, I became impatient with the wait and a week later got the bright idea of forcing warm air through the unit with a hair drier.

Blow Drying

Rescued router at right

It didn't take long to set up the system on Saturday morning, with the drier directed into the cooling vents at one end of the router.  After satisfying myself that there was warm air egressing from the other end of the router I  set the drier to "low" and left it do its work.  Forty five minutes later I returned to find the router warm as toast.   That afternoon I returned to the garage and gave the router another full hour session of drying.  On Sunday morning I threw caution to the wind and gave the router a final 1.5 hour dose of drying - caution because I  did not want to risk damage from prolonged overheating.

That afternoon my friend Reg arrived to witness the power-up trial.  The test bed was an extension cord connected from a power point inside of the garage to the router which was outside on the brick driveway.  The RCD on the electrical panel would surely prevent an electrical explosion but I wanted to be prepared for anything.  I couldn't even be sure if the router switch was working correctly, so the first step was to set the router switch to Off then throw the power point switch to On.  All remained quiet so while holding the router down with one hand I threw its switch to On ... and the router spun up as though nothing had happened.  A week later week later I spun it up again with no problem.  So far so good, and only time will tell if there is incipient corrosion that will  manifest itself later.  But for the moment I have two Makita routers, a brand new 1800 rpm model and the rescued 3600 rpm  model.

As I wrote in a report to my friends, Never Give Up!