Excellent
The deal with Record Power on discounts is straightforward. If you choose that route then buy it from one of their road shows. Each year they travel around their dealer network on "open days" or "show days" of one sort or another (like the Yandles Spring and Autumn shows and the D&M tool show at Kempton Park in October).
Specifically on those days you can either turn up in person or do as I did and just telephone the RP rep on site and they typically offer exactly £100 off the published price PLUS free delivery. Thus I paid £799 for my BS400 as the published price was £899 and it was delivered free. Delivery is normally £100 on top. Thus by taking the path I recommend you save £200 which is not to be sniffed at. You need to negotiate the free delivery by the way
I'm now 3 years on from that purchase and the review and literally nothing has gone wrong with the machine yet and it's been cutting plenty of green log material for turning blanks. I remain as impressed with it's performance today as I was back then, absolutely solid.
Greatest lesson I've learned about bandsaw opinions on this forum....buyer beware!! There is definitely an echo chamber here and there is definitely plenty of snobbery against far eastern made machines. It was precisely for that reason I conducted tests that removed opinion from the conclusion gathering. My conclusions are based on honest and open observable evidence with repeatable results.
I'll venture another observation too for nowt, in my view the BS350 is almost certainly another good machine but once you go below that capacity, the record range become a lot lighter weight in every sense of the word and I started with a BS300 many years ago. I've done no tests whatsoever on the 350 so am breaking my own logic by pronouncing on it but it's very similar, feature for feature to the 400 which of course is tested and I know the 300 ie the one below.
I don't doubt for one second the Jet will be a well built machine and I also looked closely at the 18" throat version because I wanted a foot capacity under the guides for big bowl blanks. But it was pretty expensive, didn't have a 5 year warranty and the capacities for the 16" version were rubbish compared to the BS400. In the end, I started to find homes for the money I would save!!! The bottom line is that if the 400 does everything I need and the only thing stopping me was "Far Eastern" doubt related to amorphous views about quality then......that's what I mean by the bandsaw snobbery, I even suffered it in my own mind when I was making this decision!! Once I'd got it and performed the tests, I realised I'd made the right choice. In point of fact, shortly after that review was published, the BS400 became a huge best seller because the review became the No 1 hit in Google for a while
Record Power had no stock for months as they were flying out!! (No I'm not on commission...wish I was).
So, each to their own in terms of what floats your boat about tools. Personally, it had to do the job I asked of it, not empty my bank account and keep going for a long time or get fixed if it broke. I'll stick my neck out and say it's the best value versus quality bandsaw in it's class.
