In Brief.

We have opted to use the imperial method for referring to these circular saws; this is still the most commonly used term, so we will just go with the flow! For the purists they are, of course, also referred to as 184mm hand held circular saws.

Almost a dead heat but we rated Hitachi’s C7MFA very highly, closely followed by Bosch and the Makita 5007MG. A safety trigger lock off button would probably have swung it in Makita’s favour though, that’s how close we considered each of these excellent machines to be. Probably the sentimental favourite, Makita’s 5740NB is still very close behind despite its age. We found it hard to justify DeWalt’s price tag even with regard to the quality of the product, the TTD185CS was never really in the race – but what a field!

With only one machine tested there was no competition in the light duty or industrial categories, but the GMC machines deserve at least a mention; an impressive machine with a right or left handed model and loads of features that include a safety trigger lock button. The trade to industrial duty Metabo is, in a word, brilliant!

We have made quite a few comments regarding the lack of safety trigger lock buttons on various machines that we tested. Obviously these comments apply equally to any machine that does not include a mechanism to prevent accidental starting of these potentially dangerous machines. It’s worth repeating some of these comments here. We found the following statistic in an article from the website; sixwise.com that reported some 30,000 finger amputations annually in the USA (we could not find Australian statistics). “In men aged 55 and older, more than half of finger amputations were caused by power tools (power saws, most often).” Surely facts like this should steer manufacturers in the direction of providing every possible safety device to at least minimise the injuries that their products may cause.

What We Did.

Motor sizes of machines that we tested in this category range from 1010 watts to 1800 watts. That’s a big difference so we wanted to see how much difference the size of the motor made. We chose an old price of Australian hardwood about 40mm thick (1½” when this was sawn about 40 years ago). The thickness meant that at 45 degrees these machines are pretty much at their maximum cutting depth. The answer, precious little - so we wouldn’t buy any of these machines just because they have a bigger motor!

We always take our time inspecting the machines before using them; we record basic details and form an opinion on overall quality. After this we make a few simple cuts to get acquainted with the machine before actually performing our test procedure. In this way we hope to offer more than a first impression and we do our best to form a fair opinion based on facts as well as our subjective opinion of how comfortable we were using the machine.