Bosch 5412 Miter Saw only $599.00

This saw is a typical high-quality Bosch tool. Every tool I’ve purchased with the Bosch name on it seems to be the best tool I’ve owned of the breed (from a design standpoint). I mostly work on furniture projects at home, which is why the slider feature of this saw comes in handy (for cutting wider boards). If that isn’t a requirement for you, the Bosch 4212L will likely fit your needs (at about 1/2 the price). I upgraded from a Delta chop saw that was not nearly as accurate or easy to use (and was a single, not dual bevel like this Bosch).

The controls are very easy to read (large print) and the adjustment knobs and levers are easy to get to. The bevel adjustment takes more elbow grease to move than you might expect it to, maybe by design. The Delta would just flop over once I loosened the neck. This Bosch takes a good push or pull of the lift handle to move it off of the vertical position.

There are a couple of lift handles on the Bosch which makes it much easier to tote around.

My saw stop (Sawhelper Ultrafence) doesn’t attach out of the box to this saw very well. I contacted the fence manufacturer to find out how to attach it, some drilling was required into my new saw, ugh. It would be nice if there were interface standards for attaching extension tables to chop saws. I can’t imagine that too many professionals are out there don’t use stops to increase accuracy and consistency.

This Bosch saw is the first chop saw I’ve purchased with the laser, which works well. However, the laser is only on one side (left side) and doesn’t turn on until the blade is spinning. It was simply a washer installed (came uninstalled) on the outside of the blade with a laser light which means if you take your old saw and buy the aftermarket laser washer, you’ve now got a laser-enabled saw. Again, this would have made a considerable improvement to my old saw.

The only real complaint that I have is that they should have designed it so that it was easy to connect a 4″ vacuum system. As mentioned by another reviewer, the dust bag is a waste of space. It doesn’t collect 10% of the dust. Like many shops, I have a Jet 1100 4″ vacuum system, which worked better with the old Delta just by banding the hose to the neck.

With the Bosch, however, the center of the neck of the saw is so wide (like 3-4″) all the dust hits the neck and bounces everywhere. All Bosch would have to do is redesign the base of the neck so that a 4″ plastic tube could be inserted directly into the neck facing straight at the blade and this saw would be off the hook! I’m sure a decent vacuum system could catch 95% of the dust with this modest redesign of the neck.

I know there are aftermarket dust catchers for chop saws. I found one that had a large bucket design, but I doubt that one would work well given the slider and overall design of this saw, maybe I’m wrong. The least Bosch could have done is to provide some logical hole locations for bolting on a vacuum hose.

Delivery from Amazon was very fast as usual, and reminds me why I buy this kind of stuff from Amazon and not eBay.