Circular saw recommendations

bjroche

Hi Folks,

What brand do you recommend to buy as a decent corded circular saw and what should be avoided? What blade size is best or most common, is it important? What features etc should I look for?

I realise that there is a huge range depending on budget but I am really looking for tips and people's experience to avoid buying a heavy, noisy and expensive lemon.

Thanks in advance.

SpitfireIV

Well the old saying 'you get what you pay for' is certainly the case! Certainly if you were to buy a Makita, Bosch, DeWalt or Festool you'd have a saw thats gonna last! But be prepared to part with lots of dosh!

What are you looking for the saw to do? Rough carpentry work? General household/light DIY work or for cabinet making/hobby? For the latter Festool do a nice little set up on a rail which more or less does the job of a table saw, produces accurate, clean cuts without the hassle of trying to get an 8x4 through the table saw!

I dont use a circular saw all that much to be honest, and why would I when what I have is one of Aldi's creations! So as you can imagine I dont get all that much pleasure from using it, if and when I'd go to get a new one I'll be looking at the brands I named earlier.

The blades are usually 7", and like all saws there is a range of blades which carry out different task and provide different finishes depending on what you are looking for. And again, like the brands a cheap blade will do for a short while, but will dull quickly, thus giving you crappy cuts, making the experience of using the saw a nightmare and in general put you off using it! Pop a good blade into it, a Freud or Makita and you enter another realm! :pac:.

cork1

hi i have a 7" makita, 92 makita and a 7" skil. unless you plan on cutting very big timbers a 7" is your job. if i were you id go for the makita. its a great relieable saw and has a nice feel to it. i have my 7" makita 3 years and have never had to fix anything or replace a single part.http://www.parfix.ie/index.php
this website is where i buy all my power tools they are great to deal with. they have great prices too.

Carlow52

It depends what u want to do: a good quality hand held circular saw, with adjustable depth and the guides for cutting straight will bring u a long way.

Then if u add a router table u could have it as a small table saw.

The trade off here is the bigger hand circular are quite heavy

Then in the table saws u are looking at the quality of the table as well as whether direct drive or belt drive.

ps the festool extras tend to be expensive as is their dust extraction kit

jack of all

I have a 7" Makita which I find very good, although it doesn't get an awful amount of use (have access to a proper table saw/ use handsaw for small jobs). The most popular circular saws on sites were Makita and Bosch from what I saw. Axminster seem to be very keen on their Makita pricing although their Makita range is due for a price increase next month so now would be a good time to buy if you're in the market for a saw.

doozerie

I used a Hitachi C7U (7" blade) for a few years with great success. With a decent blade (a Freud 40-tooth) and a home-made cutting guide I was able to slice up plywood, MDF, chipboard, and solid wood, with a very clean edge that needed no further preparation (sanding, etc.) before use. It was a very good saw, but towards the end I started to have more difficulty keeping the blade square to the base plate which made it a bit of a pain to use.

I have since bought a Festool TS55 (also a 7" blade) and so far this has proved to be very good albeit at a much higher cost (although some of the cost is for the cutting rail). I can't say that the finish produced by the Festool is really that much better than what I got with my Hitachi and the homemade cutting guides, in that they both produce excellent cuts, but I am hoping that the Festool will prove to be a better made saw and therefore will have a longer lifespan. Only time will tell though. One very useful feature of the Festool though is its plunge cut mechanism. I find this safer to use and generally a good function to have at times.

Generally speaking though, look for a saw with a good quality base plate (something solid/cast as opposed to bent metal), that can make angled cuts, one where the body can be easily adjusted to be square to the base plate (which might require tilting the body in the opposite direction to when you are making an angled cut, so the ability to make angled cuts doesn't guarantee this feature), and that feels right in your hand (in terms of weight, size, and balance). Most decent saws should qualify. If you make home-made cutting guides, then weight becomes less of an issue. Gauging the quality of the motor itself is the tricky bit so for that you're left relying on peoples' experiences and opinions - try wobbling the blade in the saw though to get a very crude measure of how much play there might be in it as more play should really translate to a poorer quality cut.

Another brand that I have heard good things about is Triton, although I haven't used one myself so can't offer an opinion on them. Likewise for Hilti and Freud. At the end of the day though, I think that a decent cutting guide/rail can turn even mediocre saws into perfectly serviceable tools. Buying a saw with a commercial cutting guide/rail isn't cheap, but can have some advantages. I'd say set your budget first and then compare the options that fall within it, otherwise you might find yourself tempted to spend far more than you had intended.

Carlow52

doozerie: good info in this post: any chance u pen a few lines on how to make a good guide because as u say the guides are pretty expensive and proprietary to the tool whereas ur solution may be applicable to most saws.
Thanks.

doozerie

My home-made cutting guides are very simple. I found the instructions for them on a website years back but unfortunately it doen't seem to be there any longer.

Basically, you need a base on which the saw runs, for which I used 4mm MDF, and a straight edge against which the saw bears (acts as a fence basically), for which I used 18mm birch plywood. The edge of the plywood that contacts the saw obviously needs to be straight and smooth (which is why I opted for good quality plywood) so I had an 8" wide strip ripped off an 8'x4' sheet of birch ply by the place where I bought the wood. I opted for an 8" wide piece for solidity but you could probably safely get by with something narrower and therefore lighter. I screwed the MDF to the plywood, leaving a couple of inches of MDF overhang on one long side of the ply (optional, for using to clamp the guide later when using it) and an MDF overhang on the other long side of the ply which is wider than the base plate of the saw.

Once the MDF is in place, place the guide (MDF face down) either on a sacrificial cutting table or else overhanging the edge of a stable surface. Fire up the saw and with the base plate running on top of the MDF and the edge of the base plate bearing against the straight clean plywood edge, trim off the excess MDF. Your guide is now ready to use. To use it, mark whatever piece of wood you want to cut, place the cut edge of the MDF on/at your marks, clamp the guide to the wood to be cut, and run your saw along the guide as before. The piece of wood you keep is under the guide, with the offcut to the right of the MDF edge. With my saw, and I'd expect with most saws, the left side of the saw base plate bore against the plywood fence when cutting (as you push the saw away from you), so the majority of the saw base plate rode on the MDF.

It is a simple guide, but works very well. As the edge of the MDF is always where your saw will cut, it saves you having to muck about with measuring where to locate the guide, and as a plus the MDF will help prevent tearout on the portion of the wood located under the guide (the off-cut piece can get tearout, of course, but a good blade minimises even that). Once you have one guide made, you can use it to accurately rip more plywood to make more guides. I made an 8' guide, a 4' guide, and another 4' guide with another plywood fence attached at a right angle to make 90-degree cuts quick and easy.

The only issues that I had with my guides were:
- the weight of them (the 8' one was reasonably heavy). But you could make the plywood fence narrower to tackle that.
- the cutting edge of the MDF was relatively fragile when moving them around and storing them. Mine got a few dents but it never impaired its performance, and even if it had I'd just have replaced the MDF with a new piece and trimmed that to the right width.
- if you tilted the saw to make an anged cut, it would cut into your MDF edge and therefore you could no longer easily line it up against the line to be cut for straight cuts. I just chose not to use these guide for angled cuts, to avoid this issue. Alternatively, make guides specifically for angled cuts.

Still, they were cheap and effective and served me well for several years. I only retired them when I splashed out on the Festool. Having had time to compare them to the Festool option though (which is similar to many of the commercial options), my home-made guides definitely suffer a little from not controlling the saw more effectively (the saw can veer away from the fence and into the off-cut side, which isn't a big issue, but is a hassle when you get careless - with commercial guides the cutting guide/rail tends to run in a groove in the saw base so that the saw can't move left or right), and also they don't easily act as a cutting guide for a router too (although with a bit of imagination they could be made to). If I were starting from scratch again though, I would start out with home-made guides.

doozerie

Something else to consider is a sacrificial cutting table. Basically, just a surface that you rest wood on to cut it. You set the cutting height of the saw so that the blade extends the depth of one tooth beyond what you are cutting, so the saw eats into the cutting table. The table serves as a stable support for the wood to be cut and for the cutting guide, making the whole process easier, safer, and faster.

Some people use a sheet of foam (a couple of inches thick or more) and lay it on the ground and cut on that. Some people use a standard internal house door lying flat on the floor or on a bench/table. My choice was to make up a table from two 5' lengths of 4"x2" with several cross pieces of 4"x2" to hold them together (like the shape of a ladder). The overall dimensions were roughly around 5' x 3' or so. I'd rest this on a pair of trestles and it would comfortably support an 8'x4' sheet of 1" birch plywood. One benefit of the ladder style is that it leaves you with plenty of gaps in the table through which you could run clamps for clamping the piece of wood to be cut, and the cutting guide, to the table - that is very handy.

With use you obviously destroy the table over time, but again mine has lasted for several years so far and still has several more years in it. If you adjust your saw's cutting depth correctly, then you only ever cut into the cutting table by the depth of one tooth on the saw blade each time so the damage is minimal.

When I make my next cutting table, I'll use finer/thinner pieces of wood to keep the weight down (current one is quite heavy, which is its only real issue) but I'll probably go for about the same overall dimensions.

doozerie

One last thing: if you are looking for a reasonably generic commerical solution, that'll work with a variety of saw makes and models (and routers, in fact), then have a look here: http://www.eurekazone.com/

If I hadn't opted for the Festool products, then I'd have gone with the EZ Smart stuff from that site. There are video clips and the like on the site which give you more info about how the various products work. It's marketing, so it promises the earth as you'd expect, but the stuff does genuinely seem very good. It's not cheap though, and for someone starting out I'd still recommend the home-made option first so that you can get a taste for what you can do with very little money and a little imagination.

jack of all

Great posts doozerie, cheers!

Jack of all

doozerie

No problem. For info, this PDF document describes the same cutting guides and includes advice on the saw too. It also includes pictures of the guide in use, which makes more sense that many words to try and explain the same thing.

Actually, it even shows a sacrificial cutting table which is very like the one that I made so its probably the same source document that I got the info from a few years back. Wish I had his space though!

endasmail

i wouldnt use anything bar a 7" or 9" hitachi skil saw
makita ,festool ,de walt are all good quality makes but the hitachi wins every time for the simple reason of when your cutting timber ,there is a space on the hitachi s which allow u to see your line on the timber making it harder for u to cut it off square

doozerie

endasmail wrote: »

i wouldnt use anything bar a 7" or 9" hitachi skil saw
makita ,festool ,de walt are all good quality makes but the hitachi wins every time for the simple reason of when your cutting timber ,there is a space on the hitachi s which allow u to see your line on the timber making it harder for u to cut it off square

If you are talking about the ability to follow the cut line, then that is entirely the purpose of using a cutting guide in the first place. With a decent guide, you don't need to see your line as you just follow the guide - all of the difficulty, such as it is, is limited to positioning the guide correctly before cutting.

One disadvantage that I have found with having a substantial gap in the base plate of my Hitachi, and as a consequence the blade being exposed, is that dust extraction doesn't work that well with it. Enclosing the blade provides for better dust extraction (and safety too) - the cost of a little but of visibility isn't an issue when using the cutting guide.

endasmail

doozerie wrote: »

If you are talking about the ability to follow the cut line, then that is entirely the purpose of using a cutting guide in the first place. With a decent guide, you don't need to see your line as you just follow the guide - all of the difficulty, such as it is, is limited to positioning the guide correctly before cutting.

One disadvantage that I have found with having a substantial gap in the base plate of my Hitachi, and as a consequence the blade being exposed, is that dust extraction doesn't work that well with it. Enclosing the blade provides for better dust extraction (and safety too) - the cost of a little but of visibility isn't an issue when using the cutting guide.

cant use the guide in every situation ,just not practical ,i always like to see exactly where im cutting

gsxr1

I use 2 saws every day. 7" and 9"

I would only use a Hitachi. They are hands down the trade fav.

they are real animals when slicing through 9x2 or ply or anything. Even ripping timber. From shuttering to 2nd fixing
You get a good view of whats going on at the cutting edge which is completely safe as long as you are wear goggles.

Go to any site. tha chippys will be using hitachi.

the older models used to grab the back of your hand and hurt after a days use but the new type hitachi 7" sorted this

festool are good but only really suit kitchen fitter.

Makita and just down right badly designed . as for dewalt . forget it.

I am a Dewalt man. Every tool I have is yellow . except my skill saws

cork1

Id agree with gxsr1 i have also used hitachi and are very very good dont have one anymore though. wouldnt go with dewalt at all though. they do the job but so do other cheaper tools. in my opinion dewalt is totally over priced and over rated.