LOVE this router. Plenty of power, smooth starting and operating. Very good ergonomics – love the trigger mechanism. VS covers a good range, soft-start is great – no bucking when starting. It also holds steady speed/power under load … and I have pushed on this guy just to see if I could bog it down. I stopped short of being stupid /unsafe before I had bogged it!Fixed base does it’s thing well, and plunge base is smooth, precise and overall great. Can’t say enough good things. The ONLY downside I can find to this router is the weight – it is heavy. BUT any router of this power will be – heft comes with the power territory. It balances very well and is manageable despite the weight.I have had, oh, maybe a dozen routers over the last 25yr, still have many … this is by far the most powerful + smoothest. Ideally, this would occupy the slot of “large router” in a shop and you’d have a trim router (and maybe a midsized too…) for lighter tasks. I honestly reach for a smaller one more often … but this is an invaluable part of my lineup. In the role of large/power router, this one is unsurpassed IMHO.

The 15amp router market is usually reserved for Router Table behemoths – the big Porter Cables, Hitachis, Triton, and several others; with the 12amp doing the hand-held heavy lifting. This 15amp Bosch is clearly an exception – and and excellent one. I’ve pushed this hard for the past three weeks, with deep mortises in Jatoba (an incredibly dense wood) using Bosch’s template guide bushings, and hand-held edging – more delicate, precise work. This router is smooth, relatively quiet, very predicable, and a pleasure to use. This replaces my venerable PC895, which is 10 years old, still as good as new, but a generation or two older than current models. Being a long-term PC user, I was concerned that my trained hand & body positions would make using the Bosch difficult – not a bit.The real advances for me are: Soft Start, power switch on the handles (unlike others in combo packages); quiet operations; better engineered dust collection – though, this is not dust-free by any stretch of the imagination; and effortless power which comes without the heavy weight of the routers mentioned above.Festool is a common comparison to Bosch; and I own several Festool products. Unlike many Festool owners, I am not a rabid fan – I buy for long-term professional-level functionality. For me, the Festool price-premium is not justified, when compared to the power, ease-of-use, and quality engineering this product demonstrates – not to take anything away from the OF1400 or OF2200 machines – for me, they’re just not worth the extra money, compared to this.For $300, you’ll get one of the best on the market, and certainly enough power to handle whatever you’ll encounter.