Black & Decker 400W 85mm Mini Circular Saw Kitbox 230V

Saw did exactly what I wanted and only dropped a star as it is not easy to follow a cut line due to smoke coloured guard.

Great mini saw, easy to use but powerful enoighy to make any job quick.

Ideal saw for the job I had to do. A good feature was the dust extractor. Very pleased.

I've had this for a couple of weeks now and have been using it to cut floor boards and ply. Overall I really like it, particularly for cutting sheet material with a guide rail. Although I haven't tried it, the handle on the blade guard makes it theoretically possible to do a plunge cut. The manual doesn't seem to cover this explicitly but does say "use extra caution when making a plunge cut". The depth adjustment is not sprung so that makes it a bit more risky and the manual says it has to be locked. The main thing to watch out for would be kickback with an exposed blade.

The depth lock lever is excellent. It works beautifully although it feels a bit light weight. The main handle (which was the main reason I got this over the other saws of this type) is much better than holding an angle grinder type housing. I expected it to sound like an angle grinder, but it's not quite as bad although it has that characteristic sound of the gears meshing.

So why isn't it a 5 star review? I would have given it 4.5 if that was an option. There are only a couple of things I don't like. The dust extraction hose is of the quality you would expect in a Christmas cracker. It's narrow and made of very thin plastic. I've ended up 3D printing an adapter to use the vacuum hose directly onto the saw and that works OK but is surprisingly noisy.

The other thing that annoys me is the way the fence attaches. They've done such a good job with the cut depth lever that the little allen bolt in a bent bit of metal seems shoddy - it doesn't even hold the fence very well. The fence does work OK, but the way it's held just doesn't feel like a good engineering solution.

If you're shopping around for price on this, note that this version comes in a case (it has K in the part number) but it's also available without the case.

Other things: you can cut to within 28mm of an edge on the left side and 65mm on the right (those are the dimensions I use for placing the guide rail with the supplied TCT blade).

Brilliant little circular saw. I wanted something lightweight to do lighter jobs smoothly and more importantly in a stable way and this ticked all the boxes. I do have more powerful ones and bigger ones but the ease of using this to just cut thin plyboards and softwood timber is why I gave it 5 stars. Not used much so not sure about the reliability but its Black & Decker.