Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought mine at Lowes for $269 And at that price, this thing is pretty darn nice. I had essentially the same thing, minus some features, in a craftsman that was,,, well, over 20 years old now. The motor finally died on me. I saw this in Lowes and it was cheap, (Enough), and convenient so I took a chance. I really like the speed control feature, the arbor lock as well as the table adjustment. (****EDIT: I like the IDEA of the arbor lock. In practice as many have pointed out, it does not work quite right as it hides the bolts holding the blades on. In reality, the arbor lock has no real function as is.) Some people have commented about the fence being,,,, well, cheap. It sort of is. But here is the thing. Most people that have a joiner of this size rarely ever change the depth of cut, or the fence setting. In all the time I had that craftsman, I never once set the fence to anything other than 90 degrees, and I never messed with the depth of cut. It was a pain on the craftsman, but the point is it didn't matter. I know people will insist that you can face "Plane" up to 6 inches of stock on this thing, but if you want to plan wood, by a planer. A joiners primary function is to joint edges. Maybe you have special wood working needs where you need to face plane wood, or joint an edge at 45 degrees. If so, I would suggest buying a proper floor model. If you need to simply joint edges, than set the fence up and be done with it already. I have it set up to take off 1/64 inch of thickness at a time. I will never move it. You don't want to hog wood off the edge. You want to remove just what needs to be removed. To that end, with the exception of possibly moving the fence in or out, (For the purpose of using different sections of the blade in my case), you certainly CAN set the fence up to be perfectly 90 degrees to the table even if it takes a bit of doing. And not that I would want to do it all the time, but I found setting the fence up was really quite easy. There is an allen set screw that fine adjusts the fence in the vertical plane. I set my square on the deck, and set the screw so the fence would tip in too much. I tightened down the fence locking mechanism so the friction made it just possible to adjust the fence with a bit of effort. Once I had everything firmly held in position, I turned the set screw and brought the fence back into 90 degrees to the table and then tightened down the locking clamp. I promise you, that fence is perfectly square to the table, and it took me all of 5 minutes. The fence flexes some,,, but I only notice this flex when I was actively flexing it to see how sturdy it was. For the intended purpose the fence is plenty sturdy and in practice, I have had no problems with the fence while joining wood. some people have said that the deck is steel. It sure looks to me like it's aluminum. Not that I think that is good or bad. It just is. I know one thing, this does not weigh in any where near what my craftsman did. And that is honestly a good thing for moving it around. I find it has just enough heft to keep it stable while in operation. The fence adjustments by the way, although cheap when compared to proper floor models, is perfectly reasonable on this small bench top unit. All the parts are made of some sort of metal, no plastic. And again, I find in operation that it works just fine. The knives can be sharpened if you have such a business in your town, but the blades are cheap enough to replace. 13 bucks or so. No big deal here. The unit is also much quieter than my old craftsman, especially at the 1 speed setting, where it tells you to set it for joining widths of 0 to 1.5 inches. 1.5 inches of width covers 99% of all the wood I need to join. So super bonus there. I really like this little unit for the price. Oh, and out of the box,,,, I had no trouble with the tables not being co-planer. Total set up took me about 20 min. I highly recommend this little bench top unit for the home hobby wood worker. I wanted to make one final note on a comment I read earlier. A gentleman was saying that you have adjust the fence to actually be out of square, so that when you tighten the fence, it actually pulls it back into square. He was saying that you have to keep guessing till you finally get it right. What the guy is talking about is the "Slop" in the fence pivot mechanism. When you loosen the clamp, the pivot mechanism sort of,,,, droops,,, for lake of better words. So when you set the fence to your square, and then tighten down the clamp, this pulls the "Slop" out of the pivot joint and pulls your fence out of square along with it. The way I dealt with this was to only loosen the clamp just enough to allow the fence to pivot under some force. You won't be able to easily pivot the fence by hand if at all. This prevents the slop in the the pivot joint. This is where that set screw comes into play. If you set the screw to make the fence tip in too far at the top, once you have everything else held in place, you can turn that set screw and force the fence to move in a way that you never could with just your bare hands. Once you have the fence square, you can tighten the clamp down fully. Because you didn't loosen it too much to start with, there is no slop to pull the fence out of square. Five minutes tops to get the fence set up. And that was with figuring this all out on my own. There is no instruction that tells you how to do this beyond, "Loosen the clamp, adjust fence, Tighten clamp". My fence has not moved, and I check it before every use to make certain. The way the set screw works, I don't see how it could come out of square honestly. The only thing that might happen is that the fence could get knocked out of adjustment by tipping IN at the top. The set screw won't allow it to tip out at the top. You would have to really bang the fence up pretty good I think to knock it out of adjustment. But then I would be more worried about bent metal than the clamp allowing the fence to pivot.