Random Orbit Sander recommendations?

[Swingman]

Nice to have friends who just love to sand!! ;)

[upscale]

You forgot the hard part. That's when it ran rings around your credit card several times while taking several bites out of it.

[Robatoy]

The quantum leap in performance is reflected in the price. Not to mention durability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I said....not to mention it!!!

[upscale]

What? You suddenly appear at 3:00 in the morning? Only time I do that is when I've fallen asleep drunk and then woken up in the middle of the night, slightly more alert with a dry mouth and the need to pee.

[Robatoy]

Puppy is now 5 months old. Had to take a series of pees... Angela calls it P-mail. I figured I might as well too. Noticed my monitor left on... I never shut this particular Mac off, but do shut down the LCD monitor. It's my 'mail Mac'... online since the install of OSX in

2000 without a crash.... the odd reboot after a system upgrade but thatsabout it. Just an old G4, and at 1 GHz not the swiftest, but it knows how to read my mail and browse a bit. The Festool of computers, that.

[Just Wondering]

There are at least 3 different categories of people on this group:

1. The hobbyist/amateur/ tinkerer. Probably wants to pay or less for a ROS.
2. The one-man shop pros. Probably looking to pay around 0 for a ROS.
3. Folk who work FT in construction/production work. They may be willing to pay more in costs for a tool that will save in labor costs over the long haul.

Each group has different needs in tools. The Festool makes perfect sense for group #3, not so much for group #1.

Myself, I'm in group #1, but tend to pay for for tools than the average hobbyist. I would pay up to $100 but no more for a decent ROS Nice as a Festool might be, there's just no way I can justify the cost.

I find that Amazon is helpful in making tool decisions. Amazon ranks products both by popularity and by customer review rating. You can usually get some sense of what will work for you by reading what worked, and didn't work, for others.

It doesn't always work, though. I recently bought a Milwaukee ROS based on customer reviews. Maybe I just got a lemon, but it's been a POS. It arrived defective, I had it repaired under warranty, it worked good for for a few hours sanding, then started leaving swirl marks.

Now I'm back at Amazon, looking at Bosch ROS20VSK ($149 list, $90 on Amazon) and Porter Cable Porter-Cable 343VSK ($142 list, $93 on Amazon). Can anyone out there relate their experience with these ROS's?

[upscale]

I'm probably a group #2 person, mainly because I'm a sucker for quality. However, more and more I've been pondering the Festool group who reasonably often, expound the dust collection benefits of Festool. Considering I do much of my woodworking in the middle of my woodworking, really good dust collection sounds more attractive to me all the time.

[Pat Barber]

I have the new PC

it is a very nice sander.

Doug Miller wrote:

[RonB]

You forgot group 4. The extreme tool fetish. Gotta have the best of everything but really doesn't use them much.

Similar rules apply to fishermen, hunters, etc.

RonB

[Gordon Shumway]

I have a 333V sander from when PC was PC, not Black and Decker. I don't mean any disrespect but I wouldn't walk across the street for any free PC tool today. The same goes for B&D and Dewalt.