The Titan is the cheapest machine on test. It has a steel body with a onepiece opening front door. The table is made from fairly rough alloy, and is supplied with a rip fence and a sliding plastic mitre fence.

The blade runs on a fairly small pair of alloy wheels, though it isn’t a problem to make it track properly and also to apply a fair amount of tension.

In the UK, Startrite’s bandsaws have long been seen as something of a benchmark: the old UK-built models seem to go on forever, and are still to be found in workshops up and down the country. Startrite’s bandsaws are now made in Italy, but they enjoy the same build quality, and the 401E is absolutely rock solid.

At 390mm, the Startrite’s throat capacity is the smallest on test, but its depth of cut is a huge 400mm, which is a…

This stunning limited-edition edge plane is cast in stainless steel using the lost-wax process. It shares the same long body, oversize grip and polished hand-contact areas as our bronze plane, but incorporates the advanced blade adjuster and stabilizing set screws from our iron edge plane.

It has a 14° bed angle and a 30° blade skew and comes with a 1/8" thick, 1-1/4" wide lapped A2 steel blade. The depth-adjustment mechanism is a…

If your workshop is anything like mine, the addition of this surface thicknessing jig will be a welcome one. It does exactly what it says on the tin, insofar as it allows you to surface a wide board using a thicknesser. The problem I encountered in my basement sized workshop was that I had enough room for a small six inch surface planer (on wheels) and a ‘portable’ thicknesser (also on a wheeled cabinet). The thicknesser can plane timber…