First off I want to say that I have been if not impressed certainly not
disappointed with most Ridgid power tools. I've had my Ridgid table saw for
14-15 years, and I use it all the time. I use it for wood and aluminum
cutting and it does as good a job today as it did when I bought it. I've
got a Ridgid bandsaw, and Ridgid 1/2" drill in my service truck, and Ridgid
pneumatic framing nailer. All of them "just work!" No issues. No
headaches, and except for the bandsaw which I used a different blade on were
acceptable out of the box. All of them are better than "cheap" tools, and
to some degree better than some more expensive tools like my extremely
expensive Delta Piece of **** RAS which I hate and almost never use. I have
or have had other brands of all of those tools, and without a doubt I am
most satisfied with my Ridgid tools. Certainly for the price. If I want a
tool to deliberately abuse I'll buy a Black & Decker, but I am about 95%
convinced for a reasonable price for a decent tool you can't go wrong with a
Ridgid.
Today I setup a Ridgid Compound Radial Miter Saw. Out of the box you could
plug it in and run it. Nothing to assemble, and all well packed in a form
fitting styro foam shell. I assembled a new miter saw stand for it, and
mounted the saw. (I am going to put my Ridgid chopsaw on my old miter saw
stand).
Then I opened up the manual and found where it said it was precision
adjusted at the factory. I smiled to myself and pulled a small machinist
square out of the tool drawer under my first little CNC mill and proceeded
to check it. The first thing I did was move the both compounds out of zero
and back to the stops. Then I engaged the locks and started to check. I
slid the square on the table and moved it over against the blade. I had to
check twice because light between the blade of the saw and the blade of the
square disappeared uniformly from top to bottom. At first I feared I had
slid over to aggressively and flexed the blade, so I backed off and tried
again making sure the based was firmly on the table. As the blades
approached the little band of light between them winked out instantly over
its full length. Wow! I was kind of stunned. Then I did the same test
between the fence and the blade. That's a little harder due to the stick
out of the carbide teeth, but when I aligned the blade so two teeth lined up
with the blade of the machinist square they touch at exactly the same time.
By that time my wife who had helped me assemble the stand was paying close
attention as well. She said, "check it from the other side." Exactly the
same results. Not only is the fence already pretty darn close to perfectly
square with the blade at zero it is straight. This saw is atleast 10X
better than the old Hitachi I have been using for the last 18 years ever
was. The Hitachi still works by the way if anybody wants a cheap miter saw
with steam punk looking repairs to keep it going. LOL.
Anyway, all of that was interesting enough, but the thing that really got my
attention was when I finally pulled the trigger. It has a soft start like a
lot of routers. I thought it was broken until it spun up to speed and I
made a couple test cuts. No jump or jerk. That will be really handy when
fitting trim in tight spaces. Then only error will by the operators. No
jump to move the stock. The last thing may be subjective. It seems to cut
quite nicely, but it does seem to me to be a slightly lower RPM at full on
than any similar saw I have ever used. That surprised me. Its subjective
of course although I guess I could paint a white spot on the blade and break
out the old optical tachometer. Why would the blade be slower? Within
normal machine speeds I didn't think you could spin a blade too fast for
wood. (Obviously I'm not talking about running a 3phase motor at 400hz or
anything extreme like that.)
My biggest only initial complaint about the saw is the amount of plastic on
it. I knew that when I bought it though.
I didn't get to play with it too much though. As soon as I decided it was
another decent machine the wife started pushing me to haul it over to the
house to start cutting trim for some shelves we made yesterday. She hasn't
come back out to the shop, so I can only assume she is happily turn sticks
into sawdust with it.
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