Hi Stu
I am sure there was a review not long ago on this, but I will give you my tuppence worth.
I bought it recently I think at £119.99 and my impressions generally are favourable. I thought the price was good, and delivery as usual from Rutlands quick and efficient. I bought an additional bumper pack of sleeves which they had on special offer. I didn't think it wasn't particularly well packaged, but it arrived undamaged. I would check it carefully on delivery for damage however, as I think I read elsewhere about some issues there. The cast iron top needs cleaned off before use, but that was simples.
In operation it is slightly noisy, but not too bad - I now wear ear defenders as a matter of course in the workshop anyway so it is not really an issue for me. Once hooked up to my Camvac ( I had to cobble together a reducer with a sleeve and some duct tape to get to fit the 38mm outlet) the dust extraction is good, with surprisingly little dust lying in the table after use, although it does depend on the thickness of the work piece that you are sanding . Understandably larger pieces create dust further away from the extraction holes, so the dust created by them is less likely to be caught.
I could only get two grades of grit from Rutlands, 80 and 120; I keep meaning to search elsewhere for finer grits, but the ones provided seem fine.
My biggest niggle is the fact that the plastic inserts that surround the sanding bobbin are not flush with the cast iron top, so you have to be careful with small work pieces that they do not get caught on the ledge created. On my to do list is to produce some sort of shim to rectify this. It is a small point, and any creative woodworker will solve it quickly .
Other minor niggle is that although there is storage on board for the plastic inserts and bobbins there is no where to store the spanner needed to change the sleeves, or the spare washers provided for different sleeve sizes.
I understand most of these bench top bobbins sanders are all clones of each other, so price is probably the determinative factor in which you go for. Seems to me for the price on offer today it is a bargain, and I wish I had saved myself £20, although mine has been invaluable over the last few weeks in the build up to christmas, with family demand for bandsaw boxes and tree decoration now in full swing !
Robert
