Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have bought 3 Dremel tools over the years, and none has stood up to moderate use. Usually the speed control goes: either the tool will only run at top speed, or, in the current 300-series models, it quits altogether. Also, the ball bearings Dremel boasts about are not sealed, so they fail due to the dust from whatever you're cutting or grinding getting into them. No other power tool is so fragile or short-lived: you can get a decent 3/8" electric drill or an angle grinder for about the same amount of money, and they'll last forever. If drills failed so easily, the customers would riot and nobody would buy the company's product. To be fair, I've had the same experience with a Ryobi rotary tool I bought about ten years ago. But it was cheap -- only about $20 -- so I didn't feel quite so shafted when it stopped working. With the Dremel, you pay a high price for a shoddy product. If you could replace the parts that go bad, that might be bearable. It used to be that you could buy replacement parts. Of course, you couldn't just replace the ball bearings with decent sealed ones -- because you couldn't get them off the armature. You had to buy a whole new armature. But now, you don't even have that option. Dremel has stopped making replacement parts available! So now, when the machine packs up, that's it: your expensive Dremel is now a piece of useless disposable junk. Your investment is down the toilet. Dremel talks a big game about quality, etc., but they treat their customers with utter contempt. As for me, I guess I'm going to have to bite the bullet and shell out hundreds for a Foredom or something equivalent. They're even more expensive, and they're not as easy to use for my purposes, but they have a reputation for holding up. We'll see. I should point out that I use the tool for cutting and shaping metal, which is a purpose that is explicitly advertised for the tool, and for which attachments are made available by Dremel. Apparently, however, the dust and tiny chips produced by cutting and grinding metal get into the switch mechanism and the shielded bearings and wear them out. Using it to cut and shape wood or plastic you may not have this problem. In any case, if they used proper sealed bearings and weather-proofed the switch, that wouldn't happen. Some commenters, who may be plants, have complained that I was using the tool for "production" work. That's not true. Over the course of about two years, I used the last one I bought for about 10 to 20 hours. That's all it took to fail. Because it failed after the guarantee period had expired, I couldn't turn it in for replacement or repair. So I'm screwed.