After 13 years my chop-saw is dying and I am in search of an new one. I ruled out the cold-cut saws as being too pricey. Considering only the abrasive ones, what brand did you folks have had good luck with? I am not brand loyal, but have a certain fondness for Ridgid tools. As far as what I need to cut? I dabble in some basic fabricating having made several trailers, a logging winch and a large number of other smaller projects. So the saw would not get used much by professional standards. Please share your experiences to help me decide which one to buy.
I have used quite a few abrasive cut-off saws (or what I would call a hot-saw) and several cold-saws all in production applications. Hot-saws typically low production and cold-saws in high production applications.
I have never used what we're (apparently) calling the dry-cut saws here so I cannot speak to those.
The consumer grade hot-saws are pretty much (in my experience) interchangeable in that spending more does not generally get you more. To be accurate and repeatable, they all (again, in my experience) must be fixtured. But for everyday stuff they are fine. They are messy and the burrs can be rugged. We treated them as consumables, because while you can usually replace the brushes, by the time you had to the rest of the saw was worn out. We built fixtures we could just weld them into and cut them out of.
Cold saws are typically safer, cleaner, more accurate, provide a burr-free cut, blades last forever and the saws last years in heavy daily production. The last Doringer I bought was over twenty years old and still in daily production when I retired a few years ago. Most everything about the cold-saw is better than a hot-saw except for price and portability.
For cutting angle, channel and smaller bar-stock, pretty tough to beat an iron-worker.
If I were going to buy a new:
Hot-saw: I would just buy something cheap
Cold-saw: I would buy a Doringer
Horizontal band-saw: I would buy a Bomar
Iron Worker: I would buy an Edwards
