were £100 recently but they put the price back up again.)
They seem to be basically angle grinders with 2 disks and some sort of dust collection hood: how good are they at containing the dust (connected to a vac, of course)? I do a lot of domestic work and it'd be really good to be able to cut a chase in a brick & plaster wall and not have to spend the rest of the day cleaning up the whole room!
I've got the Screwfix/Ferm one. The other one looks identical with a different label stuck on it (maybe a different angle grinder body too).
The first one got sent back with excessive blade wobble. Replacement was better, good enough to keep.
The cover is not good at containing the dust. I would think twice about using one of these in a furnished house. At least seal off the one room you are working in. I've hired a Bosch which was better in this respect from what I recall (it was some time ago), but ~3 times the price to buy.
Second problem is they chuck out very fine dust at a rate which exceeds what a domestic vacuum cleaner can pick up. Dysons just about cope if you go slowly. Bagged cleaners are useless with this sort of dust -- if the bag catches the dust, it clogs within a few seconds. Otherwise the dust goes straight through and out of the exhaust. Really you need a cyclone for this type of dust, and an industrial sized to cope with the rate of it.
One other stupidity of the design (which you can observe in the photographs) is that although you can get the cutting blade near one side to cut up close to obsticles/corners, that knob sticks out, and the angled exhaust also sticks out the same way. I rotated the exhaust mounting to get round that, but then it's only held on by 2 of its 3 screws.
One nice thing is you can run it with just one blade if you want to cut a single groove or use it as an angle grinder with a better shield. The Bosch one couldn't do that -- with only one blade, you couldn't tighten it up.
are useless with this sort of dust -- if the bag catches the dust, it clogs within a few seconds. Otherwise the dust goes straight through and out of the exhaust.
Just having a powerful cyclone hoover snout near the workpiece makes a major difference in dust dumping. One room with no vac was filthed out, another with vac didnt even need cleaning, except for a couple of feet round the work area.
Snout can be taped, tied, etc to tool, or attached to its own movable stand.
ISTR seeing someone use a Bosch one a while back and thinking that it seemed to run slowly compared to an angle grinder, and that this would be an advantage from the POV of keeping the dust under control (at the expense of cutting speed, but so what if you can perhaps still see the wall ahead of you while you're cutting!)
Did the Bosch you hired seem slower running?
(Actually what I really wanted was one of those Arbortech Allsaws
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which ISTR costing about £350 - pricey but possibly worthwhile. Sadly when I looked they're actually £760 .)
Sorry John, I would not have noticed, as I didn't have an angle grinder or anything else to compare with at the time. The basic construction was the same, in that it looked like a regular angle grinder joined to a modified head.
A few years before, I hired a very much larger one (I think that's all that existed at that time). This one had what was probably a better dust trap with rubber flaps round the edge, but on this particular one, the rubber flaps had large chunks missing so it was also dusty to use. No idea what make it was -- came from a small independant hire shop in Henley-on-Thames. It sat on the floor for a couple of days before I could pluck up the courage to switch it on -- it looked like one false move, and you'd have both legs off at the shins ;-)
Something which could be useful here would be a long length of vacuum cleaner hose, such as the following:
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know they also do a 32mm hose 'cos I bought one last year.
With such a hose you could feasibly locate the vacuum cleaner outside the property, or duct the outlet of the vac to somewhere away from the house.
Andrew
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The one and only I've ever used - many years ago - didn't use cutting discs, but some form of twin jaws that sort of nibbled at the wall in anti-phase. It was very heavy ;-) Not bad from the dust point of view, though.
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