What is your most disliked or disappointing tool?

tvrgeek

Scott
Corporate Member
aMANA tools are some of the best you can buy
Two lessons, as several of us mentioned "wonder blades" First is the correct blade. Rip, crosscut. Just suck it up and change blades! Second, Amana, CMT and a few others are top notch. No magic. Just the right blades for the jobs well made.

One thing to what Bob says on HF. Sandpaper. I would call it crap, but crap is at least decent fertilizer. HF sandpaper is not that good.
 
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castiger04

Brian
User
Although I enjoy Rockler products and appreciate the design behind most of them, the Dust Right vacuum hose for sanders is difficult to use. The hose is heavy (the one time I will complain something is built too well) causing the sander to strain towards the weight of the hose.
 

gator

George
Corporate Member
14" Grizzley bandsaw (circa 2000) with riser kit. Have, like those above, tried every trick I have ever read and still I can't even saw a straight line except with a pivot point fence and guiding by hand.
 

Mike Davis

Mike
Corporate Member
Hollow chisel mortise attachment for a drill press.
A dedicated mortiser is absolutely much better, but if that is all you have vs. chiseling by hand I'd use one.
Back in around 1980 I used one to make 200 wood wheel axels with 8 mortises in each hub. I think they were 1/4 x 3/4 inch.
That is 1600 mortices times three cuts per mortise or altogether 4800 cuts and the Rocwell drill press attachment held up through it all.
At the time that was all i knew but it sure saved me a lot of time and effort.

A396BE5C-48E2-4104-AAED-FD4535EA743A_1_201_a.jpeg
 

bob vaughan

Bob Vaughan
Senior User
A dedicated mortiser is absolutely much better, but if that is all you have vs. chiseling by hand I'd use one.
Back in around 1980 I used one to make 200 wood wheel axels with 8 mortises in each hub.

What drill presses were made of back then is completely different than what came later in the pretense of a "drill press".
 

tvrgeek

Scott
Corporate Member
Heck. what they pass off for heavy duty drill press these days can't even push a Fornster bit without deflecting. My Delta 14 is not really much better than the Sears 10 it replaced. I went back to a chisel, but then, I never had to do 1600 of them!
 

jhreed

New User
james
Delta lathe with Reeves drive. I was happy with it until the Reeves drive broke and found out Delta no longer sells replacement parts.

The upside is, I may be getting a Powermatic 3520 c next year.
what is the model number of your Delta lathe. Is it for sale? How much
 

Mike Davis

Mike
Corporate Member
Some old printing presses use Reeves drives. Probably a much higher quality.
Some of them ran day after day for 50 years or more.
 

tvrgeek

Scott
Corporate Member
Reeves drive works well enough for light trucks and cars now ( metal belts). Ones I have seen in "affordable" tools are just too light weight. Single systems don't have enough range for a lot of things, like a drill press. So industrial ones use gears, good old ones two sets, and now, a VCR is a far better and cheaper design.

Have you considered putting a Rikon VCR on your Delta?

Yea Delta screwed their entire loyal following by dumping all semblance of support and selling tools now of very spotty quality. Otherwise I would have bought the new Delta drill press and maybe the new Unisaw. Instead, I bought an old Delta drill and had to find alternative sheaves as the original ones were drilled off-center and am still saving up for a PCS. Sorry I bought the Delta drill.

Rough on Delta? Yea. Good business is good business. Bad business is well, bad business. A mark of a company is how they treat their customers when something goes wrong. "Up yours" is not a good service plan so IMHO they do not deserve to stay in business.
 

JimD

Jim
Senior User
I agree with Brian's comment on the small Rockler hose. I haven't thrown it away but I may. Not useful at all.

I also was very disappointed with a couple blades I bought from Infinity for my then new SawStop PCS. To be fair, part of the issue was mine, I bought full kerf blades and my 1.75hp PCS needs thin kerf. But old, not terribly clean or sharp Freud blades cut much better than clean new Infinity combination and ripping blades. I was tripping the thermal overload on the PCS with the Infinity rip blade when a full kerf Freud could complete the cut - at a slow feed rate. Now I use thin kerf Freud blades. They work well and are fairly priced.

I also agree with somebodys comment on sandpaper from HF. They may have changed but I will probably never find out. I bought some once and it was useless.

I have a little DeWalt 5 inch ROS and I think it's OK. It has a small orbit, I think it's 2mm, which means it sands slowly but for knocking down a finish or other light tasks, I use it instead of my much more aggressive Bosch DEVS 1250. The Bosch has a 5mm stroke and an extra aggressive mode and it uses 6 inch disks. So it sands a LOT faster.

I also like my inexpensive HF dovetail jig. I don't think other comments mentioned brands but you can't get less expensive than the HF. I replaced the finger guide with one from Grizzly and it works great. I leave it set up on a little base I put on top of the workbench (I like to cut dovetails with the jig pretty high). The base has setup jigs so I can quickly get dialed in. I've cut a lot of drawers with this jig.

Some of this is we tried a tool, it did not do what we wanted, and we did not take the time to get the results we want. My Infinity blades might work well for somebody with a 3hp or 5hp saw. The DeWalt sander is light duty but not useless IMHO. I know a guy who is pretty smart and a good wood worker but he never got his dovetail jig to work. So he makes drawers with pocket screws. Sometimes, at least for me, it is as much me as the tool.
 

bob vaughan

Bob Vaughan
Senior User
A couple of years ago I decided I wanted a pocket hole jig for some casual work. I settled on the Porter Cable 560 jig and bought one. My little battery drill struggled to get a hole drilled but the jig worked even better than I expected. I examined the bit. The PC people ought to have their wrists slapped for putting out a wood boring bit with such a sorry grind. The 'pockets' this awful bit bored were off centered and sloppy. Once I ground a good relief angle on the larger diameter and put a couple of cutting spurs on it, it worked fantastic. I think the jig is gone now, but if PC had put out a good bit with that jig, I think it would have been a market success.


1   560 - 1.jpg
Original grind on the right.

1   560 - 2.jpg
Original grind on the right with the resulting holes

1   560 - 3.jpg
What the PC 560 looks like for those that don't know.
 

Hmerkle

Board of Directors, Development Director
Hank
Staff member
Corporate Member
Delta lathe with Reeves drive. I was happy with it until the Reeves drive broke and found out Delta no longer sells replacement parts.

The upside is, I may be getting a Powermatic 3520 c next year.
All the later Delta tools with a Reeves drive were disappointing...
 

ShortRound84

New User
ShortRound
Porter Cable biscuit joiner - I could not make boards line up with biscuits for the life of me. Maybe it was a me problem, but I doubt it. The Domino works much better (as I would expect from a tool thats 6x the price)
 

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