Karl Townsend wrote:

Make that November / December 2001 Ed. of Homeshop Machinist. The article
also appears in Metal Web
News along with a lot of others....

And a very fine article it was too. I remember reading it when it came out.
But, IIRC, not a dang thing in it about soft start devices.

Karl

I think his point is that a properly setup RPC will start even the worst
loads.

Possibly a dumb question, but have you actually got the thing running in
that upper gear and confirmed that there isn't something binding?