Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've had this saw for years and it has come in handy for basic things like cutting a hole in a plywood sheathing board in my basement where getting a proper circular saw vertical would have been heavy and dangerous. BUT yesterday I threw it in the trash. Violently and with a flourish. I was cutting a brand new piece of 11/16" pre-finished Russian birch and the blade started to bend towards the fence that I had clamped to the workpiece. I had to stop the saw, and reposition the fence (and modify my project design slightly) but when I went to plunge cut back into the original cut line, the saw kicked back OUT OF MY HAND AND LAUNCHED ITSELF across my shop. I've been a woodworker for twenty years and I've never seen anything like it. I cringe to think of what this could have done inside my home. The other warning I'll give is that the little red safety switch is a really bad design. It's incorporated literally into the main switch, so it's barely effective at what it's supposed to do, which is prevent you from activating the tool inadvertently. But the main problem with this design is that you can't plunge the saw without sliding the safety switch, which means that if you are trying to line up the cut as anyone who has ever used a plunge tool of any kind can attest is an important thing to be able to do, and so you've got one finger holding the little red switch and ALMOST pushing in the main switch, and then you've got your other fingers pulling up the metal shoe around the blade, which is very small. Finally, if you do have a problem while the saw is running, in order to let go of the switch (which is huge, at least two maybe three of your fingers cover it, you have to let go of half of your grip on the tool. And there's no other handle. That's how mine ended up fifteen feet from the work piece. To finish that job I grabbed my trusty Rigid circular saw and if that thing kicks back (any saw will kick back of course) it's going to knock over my work bench before it would ever think about flying out of my hands.