I swear I thought it was british lol
I have their drill press, the nicer mini chop saw and the dremel stand.
drill press is great for PCB drilling and stuff, the chop saw is fantastic for trimming bolts and cutting small aluminum angle irons etc.. (I have the proxxon saw blade)... but also you should know it kinda works with the DREMEL brand abrasive saw blade meant for their beefier ultra saw but it does not center right so you would need to drill out washer or something to make a adapter but its close enough to be usable but it might be putting excess wear on the bearings but I have been doing it anyway.....*******
******* warning you need to move the blade guard up when you use off brand abrasive saws, they will hit the saw cover just bearly. What you can do is remove one of the bolts on the cover (it has a pivot bolt and a lock bolt, so remove the lock bolt), then move the cover up, then insert a longer lock bolt to basically hinge the cover on what its attached to to move it up a few degrees. Now by doing this you lose positive securement so its not as safe, but if you dont you will scuff up the nice dark plexiglass cover like I did. Keep in mind bypassing the safety shield with this method means you lose security in particular failure modes in case the blade breaks (see my other thread in this forum with BACKYARDSCIENTISTs safety videos.
Basically what I saw can happen with abrasive blades is this failure mode (backyard scientist destroyed like 5 wheels and it happened once so it might not be as rare as you think):
1) part of the wheel flies off
2) it hits your shield, or you goggles, and knocks them off
3) the high RPM wheel is still spinning but its extremely unstable, it rotates a few more times
4) the wheel fails and you get hit a second time, this time without safety equipment.
SO yea don't bypass your shield to accept wrong size blades unless your really armor yourself well. SO that means don't do it at all
the dremel stand I have not really used but its of high quality and worth the money, I was going to make my own dremel stand before and with the amount of labor you need to do to make it, its actually a decent price.
The price of their tools is high considering you can get something twice as big for half the price from like Ryobi at home depot but yea you can defiantly tell its a huge step up in terms of quality.
I have been thinking about their hot wire cutter, mini table saw and maybe their dremel, mini belt sander and polisher (particularly the long necked one). No one makes a decent hot wire cutter (you can make professional insulation for out door enclosures and for thermally sensitive projects) or mini table saw (its safer because its lower energy and it has the blade guard and you have precision adjustments on it, so its unique).
I have used some other brand mini belt sander and its alright but its kinda bulky for what I want to use the dremel one for (like cleaning pipe bends and stuff), the american ones are larger and are more suitable for wood working but its kind of a weird tool because I found its most useful where you want to normally use some kind of router or mill, but I can see it being useful for weird stuff like chair restorations, I have some large heavy wooden chairs that have ancient varnish on them that peeled off and the geometry is very fancy so you need some kind of conforming sand tool in places where its difficult to even do it by hand. You won't get uniform bevels on it so it makes it kind of less useful for cosmetic wood working but it does get the physical benefits like removing splinters on hastily errected work tables and stuff like that, so you could say it could make a job site better or something, but I would not use a expensive proxxon tool under those conditions, but I would use it for something like precise chair restoration or small pipe work (maybe sanding off excess braze in a tight bend or junction
Like for quality, a ryobi scroll saw has a bend sheet metal aluminum base IIRC but its pretty good. The proxxon has a cast iron base so it knocks it out of the park. A ryobi table band saw uses plastic and aluminum (bent I think), it fits together real nice and runs well but compared to something made of full metal with a cast base and speed adjustment it seems poorly made, however it is 1/3rd the price and still decent.. I do want it though but I don't think it would help me make projects like getting the other stuff would.
With proxxon I never felt jipped but I kinda thought to myself sometimes "do I really need the quality for the jobs I am doing with them"... but that is kind of my fault because it will do a bang up job on something super nice like model making etc, but since I focus on electrical parameters in my projects, or general robustness, I lose some of the things the proxxon design engineers were going for in regards to applications. I do feel that in the long run I will be thanking myself. And I have the capability to do cosmetically nice work if I wanted to.
But that would mean getting out of the prototyping and experimenting phase
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