Lidl have a table saw on sale (stores in the Midlands, Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Merseyside, the North West of England, North Wales, Yorkshire and Humberside only) from Monday:
For occasional use, what do the panel think?
There are lots of other DIY items in that day's "specials", too:
Apparently it has a "Die-cast table made from robust sheet steel". How does that work, then?
construction goes out the window with this table saw. Hmmm! £89 the other ones where £29.99 both look identical except for colour and name plus that is 1800w the other was 1000w.
One bad part of its construction and this is the uttermost importent part...its blade guard is absoluty atrocious and servers no purpose but being an hindrance. Rating : 4 out of 10
In message , Bogoff writes
What other ones?
You gave it a rating? lol
Says it all at the top of the page - "Lidl is cheap!"
My main concern with this kind of stuff is not with accuracy or reliability, but with safety.
On cheap saws, often the guards are of poor quality and get in the way which leads to the temptation to remove them. Also blade alignment is likely to be way out increasing the risk of kick-back. The riving knife ( if fitted ) will probably be made out of the same "Die cast sheet steel" as the table and will probably cause more bind-ups and jams than it actually stops.
A more expensive "name" saw will be more likely to be better made and have better safety features.
Buy a Fisher-Price saw and you could be counting the savings on one hand - literally.
If you go for it, get a pair of 10 foot long push sticks and you should be Ok ;-)
Personally I'd spend the 90 quid on a decent circular saw.
ETV
lol I think he means at Aldi they have them for £30 but are identical to Lidol's
It depends on what you had in mind to occasionally use it to do.
Pricing on portable table saws has come down and down over the last couple of years, but quality has dropped a great deal as well.
This particular model is very limited because of the small size of the table and the fact that there is no provision for extending it (at least as far as the illustration shows.
It doesn't say which dimension is which, but appears that the 60.5cm is the table width. The blade appears to be about in the middle, so this means that the maximum cutting width against the fence is under
30cm. So you could rip along boards of less than this width, but that's about it. The fence could be removed and the unit built into something larger (a tablesaw station made from wood for example) to enable larger pieces of material to be handled. It would be quite dangerous to try to balance larger pieces on the table otherwise - this is not going to be a heavy machine and will have a risk of tipping.The blade size of 210mm is fairly limiting.
Despite what the ad says, this is not going to be a precision product, simply because the fences are too light and not well supported. You can make improvements with after market fences (just been done) but £50 on a £90 saw?
I think that you could do better than this product in three different ways:
- At about the same price point Axminster do a saw with larger table area (using detachable tables) - CCTS10 for £84.95. I doubt if the precision will be any better in terms of the fence, but the extra possible table area would make it a bit safer and give more working area when needed. THere's a stand, but you don't have to use that. Having a 250mm blade gives 80mm depth of cut.
- Go for a similar type of saw but one step up. Again from Axminster there is the Jet JTS-10 at £150. I've seen this one and for the money it's not bad. The main differences are that the tables are more substantial and IIRC, the fence will run all the way along the extension table which will mean the ripping width will be a lot more if you want to cut sheet materials.
The next significant step up on table saws is to around £300 - 500 but that's a different game at that point.
- If you mainly want to cut sheet materials, a viable option is to use a circular saw and saw guide. You can get a very respectable circular saw like the Skil for about the £80 price point and then either make a guide with a batten or buy one like Axminster CE51.
Axminster have (or had) a deal on at present; a Skil circular saw, a Skil SDS drill and a 4.8 volt Skil driver all for £99:99! You could do a lot worse than that.
Dave
Makro are doing a better looking SIP one for 59+VAT at the mo...
Problem there is...not every one has a makro card, plus I've heard makro always have substantial amount of returns.
True, although I would have thought most folks could either get one (they don't exactly make it difficult), or at least know someone with one.
Could be true - they do sell a fair amount of bargain basement stuff.
Partly why I pointed out the saw was branded by SIP, which should at least give you some confidence regarding quality and support.
Their solid wood flooring at 15GBP (approx) per square metre seems to be quite good but you do have to look carefully at their prices that sometimes look OK only because there is no VAT on the ticket. Electrical equipment always seems to be very expensive.
I've been quite impressed with the computer equipment (including 2 computers) I've bought at Lidl. I thought both computers were pretty good value for money - at least as good as similar machines available elsewhere here.
Also I've been very impressed with their after-sales service.
Oops! I was meaning at Makro.
Do you reckon that also applies to JCB branded tools ?
:-)
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Their diggers seem quite robust ;-)
ETV
Well it ought to give you some confidence that you know what you are getting ;-)
It might not be the same you would get with SIP though!
Alas the only thing they share with the power tools is the name...
... and the colour. Don't forget the colour.
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