Bosch GTS10XC

Warranty repair – The saw itself is ok, until it broke, lucky for me it was still under warranty.that has now been over 10 weeks since I took it in for repairs. What a joke, ever time I ring they say it should be done in a couple of days!! Let’s see if it back after 11 weeks. This has put me off buying Bosch in the future. Very poor service.

Only for job-site, not accurate at all – Spent 2 days trying to align and set it square. Fence is not locking square to the blade. If you push it in position from the left or right, always different. There is a YouTube clip of a German guy trying to align it, tried that, didn't work. There is a lot of play in the sliding rail on the left hand side of the blade, and it also sits higher… Read more

than the rest of the table. The cross-cut sled that goes in it has play as well, combine those and you get no accuracy in cross-cuts.

Power – My rating is based on one issue where the 10xc stands out - cutting power. Hot knife through butter is the relevant phrase. I cut a lot of ancient hard native (NZ) timber and this is the saw for the job. Much better than the De Walt of similar watts that I had previously. The only negative is that the fence is not as precise as the De Walt which… Read more

had a system of cogs with a magnified reading at each end. The Bosch 10xc just slides and clamps and you need to check the fence for square each time - but it is still pretty accurate.

Sturdy machine - best in its class – It is NOT a cabinet saw and out of 5 I'll give it 4-4.5 stars. The finishing is excellent, the extras are welcome, the idea of adding a router between the saw table and extension excellent. Herewith a few points to ponder (or to be sorted out).... Being a matte table surface makes sliding a bit sticky, not much, but still. The sliding table is… Read more

about just 1-1.5 mm (0.059") higher than the table surface, which makes it nearly impossible to square a piece of wood running over onto the sliding table, especially working from left to right against the fence. I have taken the slide apart to see if the sliders can be skimmed, but the tolerances are to small for that. I have raised the clearance plate thought to be more or level with the sliding table but then it causes issues in other ways. The fence is by default not square to the table (mitre slots or blade), but that was sorted out by loosening the top two hex screws and adjust it to the mitre slots. The blade was pretty much square with the table and mitre slots. The table surface by itself is not flat. Running a straight edge against the table surface, there is a lot of light shining through (Bosch, take note, add another 5kg to the saw by adding a decent skimmed top and align every thing) Recommendations: Once the warranty has expired I'll lose 5mm cutting depth for a 5mm shiny steel plate as a surface (some work to be done for the mitre slots). I'll also replace the fence with a SuperCoolTool fence (can do it myself). Otherwise, a steady machine with a lot of potential. I'll recommend this Bosch above all other portable table saws. In the long run with a lot of use - we'll see?

An excellent saw on it's class – Bought this saw with free stand and a bonus portable jobsite radio from Just Tools. It's on special, I think around $1035. The radio was redeemable from bosch website. What's good about this beast it it's onboard accessories and the two tools. Out from the box the rip fence was parallel from the saw and from the groove. The groove will be the… Read more

reference when moving the rip fence. Parallelism of the saw are adjustable on page 12 of the manual. I have changed the blade of this to bosch 100T optiline 254 mm with arbor size of 30 mm which is available at Master home improvement. The pack includes the reducer ring to fit the 1 inch or 25.4mm arbor of the saw. The manual says to not use a reducer ring. I don't know why, I have tested it and everything was alright. You just have to adjust the pointer to get the exact measurement when changing to a thinner blade. One thing you might have to adjust here too are the mitre and the bevel pointers. My mitre is 1 degree off the 90 deg. I have loosen two screws, one stopper and the other one is the pointer. With the engineers triangle ( make sure it's a good quality) one side on the tables groove and the other on mitre side it's easy to adjust it to a perfect 90 deg. Although the bosch optiline still chips the melamine board, there are some technique online to get a clean cut. Tried to get Freud blades, but their 254mm blades 80T is not available for 24.5mm arbor size of the saw. Hope in the future they will as they have a very good review when cutting melamine.

I would highly recommend this saw for accurate cuts which is critical when making drawers and covers.

Update: 5/6/2015

Just got my hand on Freud Diablo 60T 30mm arbor with reduction rings that will fit this machine. It's available on Bunnings at $90. Tested it on white melamine boards and it's a big difference compared to Bosch optiline. Freud 60T has beaten the 100T of Bosch! It's whisper quiet while cutting and very minimal drag! I have a chip free clean cut on melamine boards. Just lower the blade to just a bit over to the thickness of the board to achieve this professional result.

GTS 10J, Little brother is a ripper – I read the above review, and I have to say what a load of tripe. I had to rip down bevels on site for custom matched mdf skirting, modify existing jarrah architraves by cutting them down, panels, thin mdf etc. I bought the cheaper GTS10j with stand with some trepidation based on these reviews, but as there wasn't much else to choose from took the… Read more

plunge.

It worked all day without a drama, cut thin and straight with the existing blade and I never had a problem. The rip fence was parallel in any position. I got smooth finish cuts on 20mm jarrah to 3mm mdf sheet with the blade out of the box.... just started it up and ripped into it (no pun intended).

I am impressed with it and it adds to my other Bosch blue tools

Buy this at your own risk – Update I've now had this saw about a year. After all the initial teething troubles I've grown to appreciate its clever design features. With a decent blade, it's a usable saw. I still wouldn't recommend it. Even if I'm the only person in the world who got a dud when I bought it, I still didn't appreciate Bosch's attitude and I still don't buy… Read more

Bosch any more.

But, now all my frustrations are so far in the past I guess I'd give this 3 stars. Or maybe only 2, considering the awful way of adjusting the blade angle.

As the other reviewer points out, if you make accessories for this saw they're not going to fit any other saw - and if you already have accessories, they're not going to fit this. He also points out that there is now a 2 year warranty on it.

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This is a very critical review so I’d better say right away that I’ve used Bosch tools at home and at work since 1983 and always found them to be excellent. I’ve used table saws since 1970.

Summary

This is a review of the saw as it comes – I know that a better blade might improve it, but I’m reviewing the saw as it is sold by Bosch. This is a $1,000 saw so it ought to come with a decent blade – and, anyway, maybe a different blade won’t improve it. I will never buy another Bosch ‘professional’ tool because of the warranty – see below – and I’ll probably never buy another Bosch tool of any sort because the quality of this is so poor that I don’t consider it fit for purpose. At the moment, I don’t even think I’ll be able to use it at all since it won’t cut even reasonably accurately.

I guess, in summary, I’d say, “Don’t buy this saw.” It has some very clever design features but they don’t make up for the shortcomings. I’ll write about these more or less in the order I found them – and, I’m sorry, I’m not going to detail every single fault.

Rip fence

(By the way, for some reason, Bosch have invented new names for most parts of the saw e.g. the rip fence is now the parallel guide). There are no instructions for setting the rip fence parallel to the blade or the slots in the table. I think Bosch have the idea that it’s set at the factory so it’s good. Now, I’m not one of those people who use a dial gauge or any other bits of engineering gear to set up a circular saw. If my steel rule says it’s okay then it’s okay for me. The rip fence, as supplied, is not parallel and there are no suggestions as to how to adjust it. I have adjusted it but I don’t expect it be reliable.

Pointers

There are two pointers which point at the scale for setting the width of cut. They are so high above the scale that there is a parallax error of several millimetres. Easy to fix? Yes, but why is it wrong in the first place? Also, these pointers are held in place by screws and there are no washers between the pointer and the screw head. So, you try to set it and it moves when you tighten the screw – or you put a washer on it.

Table insert

The table insert (around the blade) was so poorly made that I couldn’t use it. It’s a casting of some light alloy – we used to call it monkey metal – and it was nowhere near flat. I was lucky enough to flatten it but bending a casting is not always successful.

Power

This is a 2,100 watt saw. It struggles really badly to get through 40mm Tasmanian oak. It basically burns its way through, leaving an unusable finish with a cut width that varies by about 4mm. ‘Constant electronics’ sounds like the blade will maintain its speed when it’s working – no!

Blade

Remember this is a $1,000 portable saw. The blade has so much flexibility, it just won’t cut accurately. The adverts for this saw say it takes a 254mm blade with a 30mm hole. It doesn’t – it has a blade with a 1” hole (25.4mm as they say). The spare blade storage is made for a blade with a 30mm hole, so maybe it has a 30mm hole in some other part of the world. It would take only one spare part to allow the saw to take either size of blade so why can’t they supply one? (Okay, I admit it, my spare blade has a 30mm hole – but then that’s what the adverts say this has.)

Warranty

I contacted Bosch about this and, apart from confirming the details, they have not commented. This is part of the Bosch ‘professional’ range, so in the UK you’d get a 3 year warranty – and it’s a good warranty with good service. In Australia, we get a 1 year warranty. I only want to use this for DIY jobs – a bit of furniture, that sort of thing – but the warranty is one year. Now, the Bosch DIY range has a 2 year warranty in Australia. How can it be that the DIY – cheaper – range has twice the warranty? De Walt give a three year warranty in Australia. Even the cheap brands give a 1 or 2 year warranty. How can it be that Aldi and Bunnings give as good a warranty on their tools as Bosch do? This is so bad that I have to repeat it – Australia 1 year warranty, UK 3 year warranty! Clumsy Aussies, careful Poms?

Very Good, Just Short of Great – Other reviews of this table saw and previous bad experiences with Bosch "Green" power tools led me to cross this product off the candidate list. Trouble is, none of the other saws available in our limited Australian power tool market scored well in the reviews either. So I made the rounds of the hardware stores and tool specialists to see the… Read more

products for myself.

The "cheapies", Ryobi, Ozito, Einhell etc. were all small and of very poor quality. It would be difficult to make a straight cut. The only in-stock options I could find in the better quality category were the Makita and the two Bosch saws. The Makita looked OK-ish. But the Bosch saws looked better. My budget would only stretch to the lower priced model, so with the salesman's reassurances stifling my misgivings, I took the plunge.

Obvious benefits of the GTS 10 J were the accessories that come as standard, including a surprisingly stable folding stand, very good quality fence, mitre gauge, thin stock fence attachment, push stick, dust boot to connect to your shopvac, blade guard with riving knife, cord minder and hex keys. The best part is, everything has it's own little place on-board. Thus endeth the frustrating hunt for missing bits and pieces. Brilliant. No finger boards were included. This saw is designed as a job site tool, and the designers have done a great job of making it compact and robust enough to withstand real world wear and tear. It's just light enough for one man to lift and there are two separate pairs of "grab points" to give you carrying options.

The stand sets up easily and has positive retaining clips to securely locate the saw into place. Sliding the saw into place however is difficult and the clips could use a bit of re-engineering. You can't just plonk it down on top, you have to slide it forward into clips you can't see. This isn't really a one man job.

The tabletop expands on one side to accept large boards or panels. Unfortunately, the fence channel moves with the extension, so every cm you gain on one side, you lose on the other, moving the fence closer and closer to the blade. You can cut medium sized panels this way, but only in relatively thin strips. The fence however is excellent. It glides over the table top and when you lock it down it stays put, without lateral movement to throw off your setting. Saves a lot of time and aggro. The mitre gauge is typically flimsy and a bit wobbly but OK for small stock and rough cuts.

What about the saw itself? Soft start, no blade wobble, well located on/off switch, plenty of power, a decent blade as standard. The fence is perfectly perpendicular to the blade, resulting in clean, straight cuts. The riving knife follows the blade nice and close, so long boards don't bind. The throat plate snaps in without tools. Saw depth and mitre adjustments are easy and accurate, with well designed, easily reachable front controls. The blade guard is a strange arrangement and to be honest is a bit clunky and hard to set up. I'm still not sure I've got it 100% right, but at least it works. The manual is no help. As with all Bosch tools I've used over many years, without exception, the cryptic instruction manual was written by someone who either has never used the tool or is just impossibly poor at communicating ideas. It's next to useless. (Actually, I think Makita employ the same bloke.) The warranty extends to two years if you register online. So, apart from a few minor irritations, everything is hunky dory.

But, before you rush out and buy one, I need to tell you about one issue. The mitre slots are not the industry standard three-quarter by half inch. They are a Bosch original, quite shallow and double profiled on the edges. So you can't use industry standard accessories or jigs. When I called to enquire about how to get hold of their unique channel, the Bosch customer service guy was a bit huffy and to paraphrase, said "they're not available and he wasn't aware there was an industry standard. And anyway, the product is designed as a jobsite saw and it's never been an issue in the seven or eight years they've been making table saws." How then are you supposed to fit finger boards, a basic safety device? And if you need a taper cut "on the jobsite", how do you secure the jig? Personally, I'm going to try to get around this problem by ordering some tough UHMW polyethylene strips to rout my own bars. I'm temporarily using timber strips, but it's not ideal.

So, if you're workshop is lined with an accumulation of essential jigs using the standard mitre slots, or if you want to buy off the shelf jigs, look elsewhere. If you want a solid, well designed, powerful saw of high build quality mainly for straight cuts, this is a fantastic option. Build quality, on-board attachments, quality of cut, 2-year warranty Non-standard mitre slots. Very limited accessories available.