I am building some prototype chairs out of Birch plywood. My router x and y axis are solid, the weak link is my router a 2hp hand held router and my z axis which deflects under heavy/mid loading.

I have a 1/4" spiral upcut bit which has enough cutting depth to cut the whole 18mm of my plywood boards in one pass.

On my first run I cut out each profile in three passes @ 2000mm/min or 80 inch/min. I know this is slow I have been reading as many threads on the topic and I know 10000mm/min is more common and achievable with 10hp spindles.

The first complete chair took me 1hour 45 mins to cut out. This to me will do however I am worried my router will not cope with the load. I would also like to preserve my tooling however im not sure how best to do this as I can't run at the recommended speeds?

The noise coming off of the router bit was piercing and I had to wear a set of ear muffs to make being near the router tolerable, is this normal?

I reckon the next thing to do would be to just dismount the router and make some passes at differing depths and speeds by hand and just feel the resistance, to see whether all the noise is justified.