I nicked this saw barely used on Ebay for $40. Thanks to all of you who gave it bad reviews here, must be the reason it went so cheap - and I got me a great...See more »
I nicked this saw barely used on Ebay for $40. Thanks to all of you who gave it bad reviews here, must be the reason it went so cheap - and I got me a great tool. It seems this saw has suffered from the 'real men don't read manuals' syndrome. Sure enough, the saw I got arrived sans manual, which probably got discarded by the previous owner the first thing after opening the saw. So, I printed and thoroughly studied the PDF version off Dewalt website. I will just go over the problems that seem to be mentioned the most here. 1. Dust removal: works a lot better if you turn it on. My saw arrived with the switch on 'off'. 2. Inability to make a straight cut: Orbital action is for aggressive cutting, and manual specifically cautions to set it to 0 for precise cuts - or for cutting metal. My saw arrived with orbital jacked to 3. Previous owner must have had trouble cutting straight. And this saw is powerful. I shudder at the thought of trying cutting metal on orbital with it. 3. Base plate retention lever working loose. It did come loose during test cuts. Manual says if that happens, tighten the screw holding the lever. Which I did - and the lever never came loose again - ever. 4. Blade retention mechanism. Manual states that in order to secure the blade, one must turn the tab clockwise a couple turns before pushing it down. Having done this, I never had a blade go loose. This is one knock for Dewalt - the claim to support both T and U blades is not entirely correct. You CAN chuck a T blade, but a quick survey of the mechanism assured me that is is really made for U blades and is not likely to hold T's properly. This problem is made worse by the fact that later Dewalt jigsaws are all T-blade users, and the only Dewalt blades I saw in stores were T. So I got me a set of quality Bosch U-blades. Never tried this saw with a T. So far, I've been using this saw for several months - cutting all sorts of things with it. Not a single problem. No bent/ejected blades. No crooked cuts. No desire to ever get another jigsaw. Comment | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)See less »
one sec please...
