$599 with 2 9.0 batteries and rapid charger, free shipping.
I bought mine from Ohio Power Tool. I'm not affiliated with them, but their customer service has been excellent. I get all my Milwaukee stuff from them. I recommend them highly if you're looking for anything.
Sweet! Let us know what you think. I've been strongly tempted many times to ditch my garbage Bosch glider for one of those.
First impressions on the Fuel SCMS:
Man this thing is an *** kicker.
I recently had a basement leak in a finished area, which I am starting repair work on. So I had to cut a bunch of 2x lumber yesterday to rebuild the wall and soffit.
Obviously cutting 2x is no big deal for even the cheapest miter saw. This saw handled it without an issue. A full day of work (for me.. not a pro carpenter for sure) and probably 100 cuts or so on 2x4 and 2x6 used up ONE bar on the 9.0 battery. Unreal.
I also had some landscaping work to do- so I worked on that on Saturday. This stuff was a little more intensive, as I was cutting up very fresh, very wet pressure treated timbers. Again, no problem. Blew right through them. 60 or so cuts, 1 bar on the battery.
When I first unpacked the saw, I immediately put it all together (it's mostly assembled, you just mount the blade and carry handles) and checked the condition of the fence, tables and blade. I used 1-2-3 blocks and feeler gauges to inspect for 90 angles between fence and table, table and blade, and fence and blade. Everything was perfect out of the box, and required no adjustment at all.
The bevel adjustment mechanism is excellent- easy to use, easy to find detents, easy to override detents when you want to. Same thing for the detent mechanism for miters. Everything is very well designed.
One of the things that I found strange (in a good way) is that the saw seems to have very very good speed control. When the blade enters the material, the motor does not reduce speed- it apparently just ramps current to maintain blade speed in all conditions. It's very impressive if you've used other saws a lot and are used to hearing the motor pitch drop the faster you push the blade through the work.
One nice feature is that if you lift the blade guard first and then lift the head up, the blade guard mechanism is designed so that it goes over center, meaning that the blade guard stays up and you don't have to deal with the guard being in the way for a blade change. A very simple thing but very nice compared to some other saws.
It comes with a 60T carbide blade, which is nice- mine will see more furniture/finish/trim work than heavy framing, so I don't need to upgrade the blade right away. I'll take it.
It uses a light on each side of the blade to show you the blade shadow for cut line indication, similar to Dewalt and a few other saws. This feature works very well (much better than a laser) and was easily visible even in bright sunlight.
My only complaints:
1) On my saw, the locking pin for the head was stuck, and it took a few minutes to A) locate the pin (it isn't in the documentation which is weird) and B) get it unstuck. I had to rotate it a bit to break it free. After a drop of oil it works fine.
2) Dust control isn't great. It comes with a little bag, which ***** about as much as any other saw with a dust bag. The dust bag port is sized to accept 1 1/4" and 2 1/2" hoses, so most shop vacs will work without adapters. With a shop vac hooked up, it's not bad. Without one, meh. Not impressive. I don't really count this against the Milwaukee saw, because every sliding saw I have ever used has had mediocre dust collection ability.
3) To miter 45 degrees to the right, you have to remove the top part of the fence on that side. Kind of a pain. The fence is very easy to remove quickly, and it does go back in right at 90 degrees with no problem, so this is a minor issue, but not having to remove the fence would be better.
Looking around CPO seems to be the only place has them at this price.
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