I used the Kapex professionally for several years and was severely under impressed. Strip away the gimmicks and tricks, the business end....the turntable and sliding mechanism....no more accurate or rigid than a host of other saws I've used, and in some cases less so. That soft start/slow start thing is for the birds, let up on the trigger just a hair and it has to go all the way to off before restart, it drives me crazy. Course some say it's a short trip for me already.....
all that dust collection/safety aperatus around the blade are great....until you trim an outside miter on the saw and then need to trim just a bit more off, and the long point of the miter gets hung up on the blade shroud every time. Yes, that's a joy I can live without. I used one to cut hundreds of small parts for a complex parquet panel, wound up bringing my makita to work, couldn't take the Kapex anymore. I remember it seemed difficult to attach auxiliary fences to it versus how easy it is on the makita. I had to cut a bunch of oak herringbone flooring on it, 5" rift and quartered......this is when you find out just how rigid it is not, because I couldn't get two cuts to come out the same to save my life. The oak wants to pull the blade off coarse on a long miter and this saw is simply not rigid enough to resist it.
There are some good features, the angle splitter built in, the rack and pinion bevel adjustment is heads above any other maker. And it's relatively quiet. I found the miter scale clogged very easily with the slighted but of saw dust in it, so you had better use a vacuum, or like most things festool it gets very cranky. Almost every guy in the shop developed the same opinion of the Kapex....over priced and over hyped, rather use something that works better and deal with the dust.
"A good miter set up is like yoga pants: it makes everyone's butts look good." Prashun Patel
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Originally Posted by Phil Thien
