Andy Hall wrote:

You can add routers to that list.


Yes, I'd forgotten those.

It seems that you have to go to about £160-170 for a reasonably good
1/2" one like the Freud. The £80-100 DIY store specials are either
underpowered, vibrate, or have poor mechanics and people end up
thinking that routing is no good as a technique or that they are
lacking in skill. Neither is really the case. Properly set up
and supported, a decent router does a good job.

I looked at one of the PPro 1/2" ones, and found that superficially it
looked ok with a couple of nice touches like dust extraction up the leg
etc. It was only on picking one up you found the plunge was pretty
rough, reports from other users also seemed to say it delivered nothing
like the claimed power either.

The real killer (possibly literally) was the minimum speed however, it
would not go below about 15k rpm. With a large diameter cutter in a
table, that was going to be lethal!

The Freud that I got in the end however is ideally suited to large
cutters, low speed, and feedback speed control.

Jig saws are an odd category, since there are low and high end tools
(with such a vast gulf in performance difference between them that to
all intents they may as well be different tools altogether), and yet
there is no apparent middle ground...


This was the strange one to me too. I can't think of any other power
tool where the divide is so great, but it is. For a long time I
dismissed jig saws as not worth bothering with.

Same here... I had used lots of different models over the years in the
= 50 quid range, and concluded that while fine for rough cutting a
shape, or making holes in worktops for sinks etc, they were not a tool
you would instinctively choose for much else. Since having a decent one
however, it has is transformed into something I use for a whole range of
tasks that would have been impossible / tiresome with what I used to
think a jigsaw was.

--
Cheers,

John.

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