We agree with Skil’s site: Hardwood (or high-quality laminate) flooring is indeed one of the slickest improvements you can apply to a room in your home or office. But installing ‘em can be a job. Skil’s solution: Replace the miter saw, table saw, and various accessories you need to do the job with a single tool that’s small and light enough to carry around in one hand. It’s cheap, too, streeting for around $200 — about what you’d pay for a basic miter saw alone.
Hell, you can probably see how this saw works from the picture above alone. With the saw in its longitudinal mode you can re-saw flooring to fit, like you would on a table saw. Flip it to crosscut mode and you can chop board to length — a job you’d normally take on with a miter saw. It can miter, too, with detents at 22-1/2 and 45 degrees.
The miter and rip fence are made of die-cast aluminum, and that’s a 4-3/8″ 7-amp trim saw attached. It ships with a 40-tooth carbide-tipped blade, but like most miter saws, you’ll probably see the best performance by replacing the blade with a higher-quality model designed more specifically for whatever flooring material you’ve selected. The whole thing weighs 25 pounds, and the base is about 2′ x 1.5′ in size.
The bottom line: We’re guessing that most pros will stick with less project-specific tools as they’ll likely take on other trim work as well as flooring to pay the bills. But while we’d have to try one out to tell you for sure, this sounds like a pretty slick solution for the homeowner looking to pick up a tool, floor a couple of rooms, and move on. What do you think?
Model 3600 Flooring Saw [Skil]
Flooring Saw Demo Video [Skil, warning: Flash]
Street Pricing [Google Products]
Via Amazon [What’s This?]