AJB Temple
Finely figured
I bought this saw mainly to cut 4” oak rafters and such like for timber framing, as well as general carpentry. It is a good saw. I bought the Axminster package deal with the Bosch saw trolley and this was £742.47 plus VAT for both. Competitors for 12” / 305 mm saws in the UK are basically the De Walt (highly regarded by many) and the Makita. Both of these have conventional rail systems. They are a bit cheaper, but not enough to matter for most people who expect a saw like this to last several years.
My thoughts on the saw having used it for several hours and made hundreds of cuts:
1. The saw with standard blade cuts extremely well. Very smooth cut from the general purpose wood blade, with hardly any break out and extremely smooth finish. This is as expected. I have not tried a blade change but it looks easy enough.
2. The pull push mechanism is outstanding – easily the best on the market, super smooth and very easy. Takes up far less room on the bench. This would hardly matter on site but makes a difference in the workshop.
3. Laser is feeble and hard to see in daylight. It has two dashed red lines that show each side of the blade. These work well enough for straightforward mitre cuts but are very hard to see for laterally angled / compound cuts. Also quite fiddly to adjust.
4. Dust collection is woeful without extraction. It is also woeful with extraction! The rubber / plastic rear shroud system at the back of the blade results in a cloud of sawdust being directed back at the user when cutting through thick timbers. All mitre saws are fairly hopeless in this way, but my old and much smaller Elu saw has 3 ports. Dust extraction from that 20-year-old saw is better than from this Bosch. But to be fair the Bosch is cutting much thicker stuff and thus creating more waste.
5. Depth stop is very rudimentary, being a screw down knob with spring retainer. There is a slide bar that enables you to either have the depth stop in use or not, as you wish. However, it has no graduation scale – which is poor for a pro tool in my view, and has insufficient range of adjustment, so if you want to do shallow cuts it is tricky or impossible to set up.
6. Anyone who tells you that these kind of saw are great for cutting accurate trenches etc, doesn’t know what they are talking about in my opinion. You can if you want cut out tenon cheeks with multiple cross cuts, but I would say you will get a depth variation of 0.1 or 0.2 of a millimetre. Good enough for most purposes, but not really fine work. Don’t bin your rebate plane just yet.
7. Horizontal mitre adjustment is excellent. Very precise, locks in place well.
8. Adjustable back fences are pretty good – but not perfectly rigid when you slide the tops out. You need these adjustable back fences for when the saw is tilted over a lot.
9. Saw is easy to set up accurately. However, as it happens mine was dead on straight from the box. The reason I know it is easy to adjust is it got a slight nudge from a big beam so I had to check it over! In normal use, it stays accurate.
10. Rotational mitre adjustment works well but if you want unusual angles rather than the standard ones where détentes are, it is quite difficult to get the saw into the correct position, because of the sheer weight of rotating the saw head. Also the détente lock is fiddly. It goes to a maximum of 47 degrees left and right rotationally. I wish I could get a saw that does 60 degrees, but there is no such beast. Standard detents are in sensible places. Lock mechanism for this range of adjustment is very good too.
11. Blade guard is good (transparent plastic) and
12. Blade guard release (thumb operated) and trigger mechanism is excellent.
13. Motor is more than sufficient for heavy duty use and not too noisy. I am using it to cut thick, seasoned oak and green oak and it is not struggling at all.
14. It has fast blade stop. Not fast enough to prevent your thumb getting lopped off though if you ignore the safety principles about where to hold your work.
15. There is a rudimentary hold fast supplied. This is OK but would be much better if it had a quick release. And there is only one.
16. The multilingual manual is pretty good. Oddly, the German version is slightly more comprehensive than the English one. I found some of the English bits slightly confusing, for example I thought you could only get 47 degree lateral tilt one way, but this is not so.
Issues
Aside from the feeble laser I have had no issues in use except that when you release the trigger there is a tendency for the blade to plunge down about 5mm unless you have got the saw back in its fully retracted safe position first. You don’t always want to do this with trenching or compound cuts. It may be a feature of having such a powerful saw, but I don’t like this aspect.
The trolley is a right pain to assemble with eight fiddly little nuts you have to wangle into a slot to fit the top table. Fits the saw well and is reasonably easy to operate. The extension arms go out about a metre on each side, but they could do with being stronger and more rigid, and the plastic knobs and end fittings could be better. The end supports are partly plastic and not good enough in my view. Overall the trolley is worth having but not a premium product in my view. The Makita one is better actually.
No assembly tools are provided, but we will all have the necessary spanners etc anyway, so that was no big deal. Trolley should be sent pre-assembled. 6 out of 10 as I would prefer it to have better supports that are both wider and more rigid and it took me 90 minutes to assemble on my own. Mainly because you need three hands.
Conclusion
Overall recommended. I give it 8 out of 10 for the saw. Maybe 9. To get 10 it would need better lateral adjustment, and a better laser. I can forgive weak dust collection as all chop/mitre saws spray dust. It is a very capable, high capacity saw. Accurate enough for the intended purpose – I can shave off transparent end grain slices quite consistently from 4” by 4” oak or 8” by 4” oak, not that I need to very often, but it would not do that if it was in any way struggling. It is a very good saw and the push / pull mechanism is clearly class leading.
My thoughts on the saw having used it for several hours and made hundreds of cuts:
1. The saw with standard blade cuts extremely well. Very smooth cut from the general purpose wood blade, with hardly any break out and extremely smooth finish. This is as expected. I have not tried a blade change but it looks easy enough.
2. The pull push mechanism is outstanding – easily the best on the market, super smooth and very easy. Takes up far less room on the bench. This would hardly matter on site but makes a difference in the workshop.
3. Laser is feeble and hard to see in daylight. It has two dashed red lines that show each side of the blade. These work well enough for straightforward mitre cuts but are very hard to see for laterally angled / compound cuts. Also quite fiddly to adjust.
4. Dust collection is woeful without extraction. It is also woeful with extraction! The rubber / plastic rear shroud system at the back of the blade results in a cloud of sawdust being directed back at the user when cutting through thick timbers. All mitre saws are fairly hopeless in this way, but my old and much smaller Elu saw has 3 ports. Dust extraction from that 20-year-old saw is better than from this Bosch. But to be fair the Bosch is cutting much thicker stuff and thus creating more waste.
5. Depth stop is very rudimentary, being a screw down knob with spring retainer. There is a slide bar that enables you to either have the depth stop in use or not, as you wish. However, it has no graduation scale – which is poor for a pro tool in my view, and has insufficient range of adjustment, so if you want to do shallow cuts it is tricky or impossible to set up.
6. Anyone who tells you that these kind of saw are great for cutting accurate trenches etc, doesn’t know what they are talking about in my opinion. You can if you want cut out tenon cheeks with multiple cross cuts, but I would say you will get a depth variation of 0.1 or 0.2 of a millimetre. Good enough for most purposes, but not really fine work. Don’t bin your rebate plane just yet.
7. Horizontal mitre adjustment is excellent. Very precise, locks in place well.
8. Adjustable back fences are pretty good – but not perfectly rigid when you slide the tops out. You need these adjustable back fences for when the saw is tilted over a lot.
9. Saw is easy to set up accurately. However, as it happens mine was dead on straight from the box. The reason I know it is easy to adjust is it got a slight nudge from a big beam so I had to check it over! In normal use, it stays accurate.
10. Rotational mitre adjustment works well but if you want unusual angles rather than the standard ones where détentes are, it is quite difficult to get the saw into the correct position, because of the sheer weight of rotating the saw head. Also the détente lock is fiddly. It goes to a maximum of 47 degrees left and right rotationally. I wish I could get a saw that does 60 degrees, but there is no such beast. Standard detents are in sensible places. Lock mechanism for this range of adjustment is very good too.
11. Blade guard is good (transparent plastic) and
12. Blade guard release (thumb operated) and trigger mechanism is excellent.
13. Motor is more than sufficient for heavy duty use and not too noisy. I am using it to cut thick, seasoned oak and green oak and it is not struggling at all.
14. It has fast blade stop. Not fast enough to prevent your thumb getting lopped off though if you ignore the safety principles about where to hold your work.
15. There is a rudimentary hold fast supplied. This is OK but would be much better if it had a quick release. And there is only one.
16. The multilingual manual is pretty good. Oddly, the German version is slightly more comprehensive than the English one. I found some of the English bits slightly confusing, for example I thought you could only get 47 degree lateral tilt one way, but this is not so.
Issues
Aside from the feeble laser I have had no issues in use except that when you release the trigger there is a tendency for the blade to plunge down about 5mm unless you have got the saw back in its fully retracted safe position first. You don’t always want to do this with trenching or compound cuts. It may be a feature of having such a powerful saw, but I don’t like this aspect.
The trolley is a right pain to assemble with eight fiddly little nuts you have to wangle into a slot to fit the top table. Fits the saw well and is reasonably easy to operate. The extension arms go out about a metre on each side, but they could do with being stronger and more rigid, and the plastic knobs and end fittings could be better. The end supports are partly plastic and not good enough in my view. Overall the trolley is worth having but not a premium product in my view. The Makita one is better actually.
No assembly tools are provided, but we will all have the necessary spanners etc anyway, so that was no big deal. Trolley should be sent pre-assembled. 6 out of 10 as I would prefer it to have better supports that are both wider and more rigid and it took me 90 minutes to assemble on my own. Mainly because you need three hands.
Conclusion
Overall recommended. I give it 8 out of 10 for the saw. Maybe 9. To get 10 it would need better lateral adjustment, and a better laser. I can forgive weak dust collection as all chop/mitre saws spray dust. It is a very capable, high capacity saw. Accurate enough for the intended purpose – I can shave off transparent end grain slices quite consistently from 4” by 4” oak or 8” by 4” oak, not that I need to very often, but it would not do that if it was in any way struggling. It is a very good saw and the push / pull mechanism is clearly class leading.
