Rockwell Blade Runner

[Rick Potter]

I am just curious. Does anyone have any experience with these? How well do they work? Do they excel at any particular job?

I have a jigsaw mounted upside down in a board that I occasionally take to work on a rental, because I have no portable table saw. Clamps and a board for a fence, etc. The Rockwell being a refined version of mine, I am curious to see how others use them.

Rick Potter

[Albert T. Tappman]

I'm embarrassed to admit that I tried one out recently. Lowes had them on sale for $149. My objective was to have a very lightweight saw that I could use to make quick cuts on small parts without having to get out my table saw or band saw. After making many test cuts for a couple of hours, I put it back in the box and returned it.

Here's what I found: the most basic cut is a square crosscut. You do this on the Bladerunner using the included miter gauge. The problem is that the blade exerts a sideways force on the work piece, pushing it away from the blade as you make the cut. This leads to a cut that's a couple of degrees off square. Try as I might, I couldn't compensate for this reliably. Clamping a stop block onto the miter gauge worked, but that only works for small pieces, and the miter gauge is so dinky it's hard to clamp anything to it. The miter slots aren't standard so you can't use your own. The upward motion of the blade also exerts an upward force on the work piece, kicking it up off the table. You use the blade guard as a clamp to prevent this, but that obscures the cut line making it hard to make freehand cuts. The clamping pressure has to be high to prevent the upward kick, and on softwoods it mars the wood. I didn't try cutting pipe or aluminum or tile. I can't imagine cutting a round pipe, when the clamping action of the blade guard wouldn't work. The pipe would want to jump out of your hands. I thought of keeping it just to cut t-track with, but I doubt it would work well for that.

The tool looks like something you would buy for a kid. Everything about it is small and Fisher-Price like. I felt like a fool carrying the thing out of the store; I was afraid somebody from work would see me and I'd never hear the end of it. It's only positive attributes are that it's light and the dust collection works pretty well if you hook up a shop vac to it. I can imagine building some jigs that might make it work better.

The only thing I can think of where it might have been useful was when I was installing wood flooring. Occasionally I had to make some notches in a piece of flooring to fit under a door jamb, and I'd have to wheel my band saw out into the garage, hook up dust collection, tension the blade, etc. A Bladerunner might have been better, since the cuts didn't have to be perfect.

I decided it wasn't worth $149. For $50 I'd have kept it.