There should be two, and only two, wrenches in the main (upper-right) drawer of the router table: a 16 mm wrench and a 24 mm wrench.
People are constantly leaving other wrenches in that drawer, invariably large (24ish mm) ones. I remove them when I find them. Why? What’s wrong with an extra large wrench in that drawer? Because people wanting a second large wrench reveals that they don’t understand the proper mechanism for tightening collets and are doing something that risks damaging the router,
Here is the key point: you keep the router spindle from turning while tightening the collet by using a 16 mm wrench on the flats located on the spindle. The 24 mm wrench fits the collet nut. If someone is using a second 24 mm wrench, that means they are engaging some short flats on a face piece of the router to try to hold the spindle. Those are not fixed flats — by grabbing them, you are trying to disassemble the router!
People trying to hold those wrong flats have caused another issue we’ve had with the router table over the years. These face flats are lower down, and thus harder to reach; they are below the table level even when the router is fully raised. Which likely explains why two previous lifts were destroyed by people who kept forcing the lift up even when it was fully raised, stripping the raising screws. They were trying to reach something that was supposed to be unreachable.
That also explains the wrench with the offset head I confiscated yesterday. It’s a clever solution to the wrong problem, making it easier to hold the wrong flats and potentially damage the router.
The pictures below should help clarify what I mean. But put simply, if you are using two 24 mm wrenches to tighten the router collet, you are doing it wrong. One 24 mm wrench and one 16 mm wrench are what you really need.
