John Horner wrote:
HerHusband wrote:


I'm not really in the market for a saw now, and $500 is about my
maximum budget, but if the saw is really as good as it appears I
might just scrounge my penny's together and pick one up.



I second the motion to invest a couple of buck in the recent Fine
Woodworking issue which has an excellent comparison test of hybrid
table saws.

Take the time to save up and move up to something more capable like
the Woodtek.

The problem with buying an eh-ok tool is that it consumes the space
and much of the money which could have been used to get something
better.

Another issue with the Hitachi is that it is an uncommon beast which
will be harder to gets parts and accessories for than some others in
the future.

If that's the one in "Tools and Shops 2008" it strikes me as falling
far short of being "excellent". There's 4 paragraphs of discussion.
They say very little about any of the saws--the main issue they
discuss in the description of each is "parallelism", which is
something that I would expect to adjust as part of the initial set up
on _any_ saw. Some discussion of how easy or hard it was to adjust
(other than "simple" or "easy") would have been very helpful. Their
measurement of the change from 0 to 45 degrees is suspect too--the
Craftsman had one of the largest changes, the Steel City (which is the
same saw under a different label) had one of the smallest, leaving one
wondering if they are seeing differences between individual saws
rather than a characteristic of the design. Other than flex they
don't say anything about the fences. They don't say what the table
material is or anything about the flatness. There's no discussion to
speak of of what's included in the way of extras.

They didn't like the Hitachi because of lack of power and because the
alignment was difficult--that's useful in ruling it out but the
article doesn't really give enough information to choose between the
others. The Woodtek looks good on paper but they don't seem to have
much of a dealer network, so it's buying unseen.

--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)