Power saws

Good power saws are an important part of what, for me, makes it possible to enjoy weekend woodworking. They provide fast, accurate, clean cuts that require minimal follow-up work.

Benchtop table saw. My first benchtop table saw was a cheap one. It always scared me half to death as I never felt totally in control when I was using it. This is one tool that I would definitely recommend spending a bit more on to get a good one.

I now use a Bosch 4100 portable saw. It has a good rip fence (though you must move it by pushing the part that slides on the rail), a smooth, soft-starting 15-amp motor, a large table top for a saw in this class, and a good blade guard/splitter called the Smart Guard System. A good blade guard/splitter is a really important safety item, and something manufacturers only recently began to get right.

The 4100 has a splitting table top so you can widen the top to accommodate wider wood like sheets of plywood. It comes with a rugged and clever "Gravity-Rise" wheeled stand. With the saw mounted, the stand easily unfolds and just as easily re-folds to allow for mobility and compact storage of the saw. For my purposes, though, the stand I built is better because it makes it easier for me to stabilize longer lengths as I feed them through for ripping

Sliding compound miter saw. I didn't know what I was missing before I added a power miter saw to my shop; it makes it so much easier and faster to work. I also didn't know how challenging it could be to find a good one. Over the course of a year, I went in-depth hands-on with three leading saws in the 10″ and 12″ category and was left disappointed with each experience. Finally I set up the Festool Kapex 120, an innovative 10″ saw, in my shop.

As soon as I began making cuts with the Kapex, I knew I was dealing with a saw in a class of its own. This is a very precise saw. Using the 60-tooth blade it comes with, I've been able to make very clean, absolutely true cuts. It's easier to set up compound cuts on this saw than any of the others I've tried, it has a 12″ reach, and there's absolutely no wobble or torque movement, perhaps because the rails are fixed and the head slides (all the other saws I've used have a fixed head and sliding rails). Its honeycombed magnesium base makes it both light and stable.

As I've been using this saw more, in addition to just plain appreciating how well it works, I've been thinking about some of the reasons it's so precise. One thing I think it has going for it is that the housing that contains the slide pipes is big, making the housing on the other saws I tried look puny by comparison. This may be a case where the engineers of some of the other leading brands, looking to cut weight or cost on their more recent saws, shaved off too much. The housings on the Kapex that hold the pipes and the saw head itself are like Rocks of Gibraltar.

There are already several excellent reviews of this saw online, so it's not worth it for me to spend any more time reviewing it. What I can say is that the reviews are accurate in their shared conclusion of just how good this saw is. Worth the money? Well, if you want precision, as I do, then currently there may be no worthy alternative. Some reviews:

• Brice Burrell
• Gary Katz written review | video review part 1 | part 2
• Rob McGilp
• Justin Fink written review | video review*
• Dan Clark's blade review

*Note that Justin Fink got the working of the trigger lock and power switch wrong in his video review: you can depress the trigger lock to lower the saw head to the workpiece without spinning it up, in order to align the blade with a mark.

I built a wide rolling miter saw stand, which enables me to easily handle longer lengths of wood. Right below the saw, I built a sloped ramp into the stand so that the saw dust that escapes tumbles down to the floor behind, though not much escapes the Kapex when a vacuum is hooked up. The stand itself provides storage for the sheets of thin wood I use for shoji lamps.

The reason the stand has so many bolts in it is that I initially didn't know how high the stand should be in order to put the saw at a comfortable height for me, so I built it in a way that allowed me to adjust the height. But the joke was on me: the first height I tried was great, so I never had to adjust it! (The saw's table is 37½″ above the floor.)

Circular saw. In early 2009 I replaced a Porter Cable Model 447. Over the years, the material painted on its cast aluminum shoe to make it slippery got softer and stickier until it wasn't easy to push the saw across wood anymore. Finally I sanded it off, but the exposed aluminum was sticky, too, so I decided to get a new saw.

I looked for a saw with an electric brake, a must-have safety feature for me. The Makita 5007MGA 7¼″ Magnesium saw stood out as the best fit for me. I paired it with a Freud D0740X Diablo 7¼″ 40 Tooth ATB Finishing Saw Blade. My first cut went well. My second cut was a more challenging angled cut through 2 feet of glued up 1½″ thick maple for an end table I'm making. When I finished that cut and looked at the results, and then repeated it several times, I knew I had a good saw and blade combination in my hands.

Jig saw. Until you've used a jig saw like the Bosch 1587DVS 5 Amp, you can't imagine how much better it is than cheaper ones. The blade tracks very precisely, it's totally easy to change blades, and Bosch makes some good jig saw blades.

Band saw. I couldn't work without a good band saw. It enables me to cut the really unusual angles that run lengthwise along the sides of my lamp faces (the dihedral angles), as well as the very thin pieces that make up the kumiko (as delicate as ¼″ × ¼″). The Inca Model 340 10½″, which I've been using for many years, is a compact, well-designed machine with a direct-drive ¾ HP motor.

The stand I built for this heavy tool is a sturdy, rolling, double-sided tool chest. (I talk about the drawers on the Odds & ends page.) It provides me with a large amount of storage, optimizing my small shop's space. This was the first rolling stand I built, inspired in part by how heavy the Inca is (I originally had it mounted just on the darker base you can see in the photo and carried it to my workbench whenever I needed to use it, which was a real back breaker!). I assembled the stand using a bunch of 3″ lag bolts that came out of our old and quite rotten deck when we tore it down to replace it. I love recycling old stuff into something useful!

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