Best Baumr-AG Cut-Off & Mitre Saws

Dropped my drop saw at the tip – I'm a budget DIY kind of person. A distinct lack of experience and the necessary funds through the years has driven the necessity for purchases at… Read more

the low end of the market My first foray into mitre saws, some 6 years ago, found me purchasing (with some trepidation) an Ozito 210mm compound saw. It turned out to be a very, very noisy workhorse until I attempted a blade change and it's demise resulted in a visit to the local tip's steel bin. And so to the Baumr-AG: as far as I could tell, the current Ozito saw appeared exactly the same as my late lamented iteration. There was little comfort to be had in replacing like for like and I elected to try the only other saw at the same price. I like it a lot: it's lighter than the Ozito, looks neater than the Ozito. It's much less fussy than the Ozito and I find the various locking mechanisms easier to work with, albeit they're very close in style and format. What I do like especially is the starting position. The Ozito required a thumb to flick the guard's main lever to drop the saw. The Baumr-AG has a much neater and smoother flick switch and slide starter with the guard dropping by itself once you start cutting. The laser guide is well placed and well defined, whereas the Ozito's tended to clog up and the guide went missing during operation. It's noisy but slightly less so than the Ozito. If you're on a very low budget and really need a compound mitre saw, I highly recommend the Baumr-AG.

The first thing you should know is that the image of this product on the website is photoshopped, specifically the saw is photoshopped onto the… Read more

stand. Why they've done this instead of simply taking a pitcure of the assembled unit, I have no idea. It would have helped a lot because the saw doesn't fit on the stand as shown. I've attached some pics of what the unit looks like assembled to help. Most of my pics have the lock still in place. When you take it out, the saw will rise to its highest point.

First impressions - it's actually pretty decent. The stand is good despite the image being wrong. It comes with brackets with easy release handles. It all looks quite well built.

Important assembly note, the bolts that hold the saw to the stand braces are the wrong type to have the head of the bolt on top, so the only way to bolt the saw to the stand's quick release brackets is with the nut at the top. This causes bevel lock to hit it. You can see this in on of my photos. If they had supplied better bolts it would help. Then again, the stand isn't really made for this larger saw obviously because one of the bolts sits right on the hinge of the quick release and you wouldn't be able to get a socket in there to tighten it anyway. Someone should fix this because it's one of the few stupid things about this unit.

Accuracy: the bevel guage is horrible. Someone didn't quite know how to draw degree lines obviously. The little arrow that points to the degree marker is also horrible because it barely has a point on it. The label was damaged on mine and will likely fall off. Hopefully not. There are notches for zero and 45 degrees though, which seem to be fairly accurate on the bevel and on the table. The table lables are good and quite accurate. The table zero (90 dregree cuts) is 0.1 degrees off and there's not much you can do to change it because it's locked by the notch. That's still fairly accurate IMO. The 45 degrees on either side of the table were off slightly as well, but accurate enough for my work. When cutting at 45 degree angles, there was some lateral wobble in the blade as it spun, but it went away and din't come back for further cutting.

I mention a smell when I started the unit up for the first time in the attached video. It went away fairly quickly and didn't return.

The supplied blade cuts 3mm and the laser is dead in the middle of it and is 1mm wide. I got very sharp cuts with the supplied blade despite it being only 40T.

The slider moves cleanly with no points of resistance.

You can cut groves by setting the blade height and preventing the blade coming down too far. I found that when doing this, the front of the cut was 0.6mm deeper toward the front of the saw vs the back over 100mm. I'd expect about a 2mm depth difference over a 300mm piece of timber. This suggests that the slider isn't perfectly parallel to the table.

The manual is barely a manual. They shouldn't call it that. The should call it an information sheet.

All in all, I'd recommend the unit from what I've seen so far. It's cheap, but decent.