Santa-Saws

Continuing my tradition of buying excellent Christmas presents for myself, I purchased a 12" compound miter saw today. It is something I have been wanting for a while. I built a workbench thing and a book case a while back and all the bending over saw horses with a hand held circular saw hurt my back.

As you can probably tell by the black and yellow in the picture it is a DeWalt saw. It is the DW715 model. I was disappointed that it didn't come with the clamp attached to the fence like the floor model had. Apparently that is an accessory sold seperately. If I didn't have such an excellent collection of clamps at this point, I might have been hard pressed to use it right away safely. Other than that minor complaint, I am happy with it.

I chopped up some of my scrap wood to make theoretical boxes and what not, and it worked well. It is so much easier and faster than using a hand held circular saw. It is a lot more acurate too. When using my circular saw, the bottom plate would cover most of the board when cutting wood like 2x4s, making it hard to see where the blade was cutting. I really see me using it more like a chop saw than for fancy miters.