Charnwood B250 10'' Premium Woodworking Bandsaw

"Excellent product. Meets my requirements exactly."

"I needed a saw with the potential to turn pieces of tree into stripwood, without breaking the bank. This was the only bandsaw that met the cut depth & price requirements and it does a fairly good job of it once you've got things calibrated. The motor isn't really powerful enough to cut at the full depth the saw is able to take unless you go extremely slowly with a very rough blade, but it copes remarkably well with 2-3" hardwoods. The saw was a bit of a pain to set up since the upper blade guide wants to tilt & the lower one stripped the threads of the bolt hole in the saw body (this should really be a proper nut instead), but a couple of replacement bolts & it's now nice & sturdy and provides me with straight, reliable rip cuts in the 2" hardwood I normally saw. The blade doesn't wobble & the wheel offset angle & tensioning are easy to adjust, although the plastic wing nut to lock the offset is a bit too weak for the job, so be gentle with that. When it comes to bevels, the table is square with its supports & the table tilt isn't the smoothest but it is accurate. The extra stop bolt at 45° prevents the table hitting the saw body so you can be a bit rough with it if it does stick, & the large cutting depth means you can tilt the table for mitres instead of using the fence, which is good because.. Compound mitres are a different matter, unfortunately. The mitre fence is all but useless outside 90°, with the table really being too short to feed the wood in properly at +-45°. The rail is really quite loose in the T track & the fence has a tendency to lift off the rail when you tighten it, throwing off the accuracy even more. Replacing the whole fence with a more accurate one will be necessary if you need to cut compound mitres, but the T track itself seems to be well machined & clean of burs. The table insert & its sink do benefit from a bit of emery paper along the edges. The included blade was a bit too extreme on the drift angle, perhaps due to being on the wheels during storage/transit, so it screamed when ripping long, thick pieces of wood. Replaced that with a new blade & the saw no longer screams at me, cutting smooth & straight with only a tiny drift angle. If you aren't put off by the time it takes to calibrate things properly, this is a great saw for the money. It has all the functions you might need (although you will need to bring your own dust extraction; the drawer doesn't really work) and the massive cutting depth means you could potentially replace the motor with a more powerful one in the future, rather than buying a whole new, larger saw. Adjustment is a bit trial & error, but sticks reliably once you get it right. As I said above, buying a separate mitre gauge/fence & a fresh blade will be necessary for fine work, but then it'll cut like a champ. For rough sawing, this one will work more or less out of the box."