17November 2021
today we're turning good metal into scrap
with this mil wonky deep cut bandsaw i thought it was milwaukee uh yeah right
gary it is milwaukee this is the milwaukee cbs125 cordless bandsaw but before
when we uh when we purchased this tool we thought we'd best check out some other reviews and yeah
someone out there had a little bit of a challenge with it and hence uh yeah one off was what came
out of it so we're gonna try and do a better job with it today or it might be the case of you can't
cut it straight using a bit of kit and you'll also see that as well we've bought one of these not
for any other reason that we're actually going to use it employ here inside the studios when
we have it rewired when we pass it over to our home electrician aren't we there is yes and um
obviously yeah what would use it for so it lives in the world of cable containment from what we're
looking at from um you know okay you could say it's a bit oversized for this but we're looking
at using some four-inch trunking and obviously what other ways could you have to cut it you could
use chop sauce you could use obviously traditional hacksaw but we thought no we don't want to we'll
try this instead of having tired arms or watching eddie have tied arms yeah absolutely and you're
going to see at some point us cutting a series of lumps of metal that are in front of us so hold
on for that but let's, first of all, let's take a closer look at the bit of kit that we've got in
front of us gordon yeah so this is the uh this kit yep so it works on the m18 battery so this is
the first time we've featured a milwaukee product on the channel so if you're an expert in
the m18 series then bang a comment below um but it is what is a two-handed uh bandsaw or
we might call it a powered powered hacksaw so again we've got a trigger function here if i pull
the trigger you'll see the blade starts moving two-handed because obviously
on the other side it is a guard in place on that side and is that a slow
release trigger so if you press that it is yeah so i'll start so you can start slow but
not too slow so hold on let's see and it has got in there
you'll see a little led light yeah that can can catch you out a couple of times
yeah it does seem to help with the aiming i'd suggest and of course you can increase and
decrease the speed so this is maximum speed is there any other setting well we'll see we're
still getting used to it and slow and slow yeah it's pretty pretty simple tool pretty simple
to operate um however the first few attempts yes what i would say is if you can't cut to a
straight line with a conventional hacksaw if you use this it's going to get a
whole lot worse when it goes wrong it goes wrong quickly so i've got a few
uh once a few first attempts here gary oh wow yes that was the first effort and it did
grab the lid and those things ricocheting across the room whatever that so that was the first
attempt we had at it and uh yeah the channel the channel wasn't much better so we we agree with
our friends that we watch the video if you're not careful it is the milwaukee yeah it is and we
found that didn't we when we bring in it it isn't working necessarily like a chops or as it wasn't
a case of just bringing it straight down on it we brought it in almost 45 degrees in order to make
more of control and follow the line you can't just go i've got a bit of kit drop it on it's going
to be square so that's yeah so it is a band saw so i guess the first thing it comes out of the box
the blade isn't fitted so best first thing we do before we get to our metal destruction gary's have
a look at how you got the blade on so it's always a challenging moment isn't it when you have to put
a blade in the new tool so how did you get on gary well you wouldn't know because you didn't help me
so yeah release the left hand side there we'll see in a minute what's happening move up the guide
flick it over and then we can look at what we've got here so this arm here is moving in and out of
this section which puts the tension in the blade so you're obviously gonna have to have it untensed
when the new blade going in top tip for your teeth go downwards all right okay can you put it in the
wrong way well i'm sure i'm sure somebody would say you can so it goes in these two little clips
here so push them firmly into position first you notice i've just pulled the top blade down so
you see it's bulging out of the sides and i can see why you needed to get rid of that guide out
of the way as well otherwise you wouldn't get it in there it wouldn't no so once i've got it i've
bulged it round and now it's just really easy just lay it into position obviously it's sharp so
be careful make sure you wear the right gloves poke the blade into position just check it's there
and then you're just going to add the tension back in by doing the lever on the other side so
you'll see the actual tension increase watch this pull it across okay and there's there's
only an on or off on that is there yes yeah so fully up or fully down okay okay and
then we just bring our blade guide down so i think you'll all agree i made that look
incredibly easy for my 18th attempt to putting the blade in that wasn't my first attempt
there is a technique to it there is a set of instructions which i kept reading but when you
do get the technique yeah it did go in as easy as it did look okay so you'll be revisiting that
section of the video because i certainly have to live through that the pain in the background as we
went to use the original audio track either did we yeah i mean that's again that little uh you
showed the guide plate that moves up and down let's have a look yeah but this isn't it's
not a safety guard or anything this is just to help you guide it so it does it is easily moving
down now we're still getting used to this in terms of the best position to do so it helps you in some
cases in case of getting right up against the work piece but as i found on one of my attempts
it's um it can uh it can get in the way when we look at we've got this uh sort of complex
structure of a trunking here that yeah it sort of catches so you've got to plan your i would suggest
plan your angle of attack carefully when you're going in with the blade and there is also one
thing about it there is a safety catch on there as well to stop you accidentally pressing the trigger
and it also can't lock it on so you couldn't leave it running and walk off probably a good idea that
is a good idea well we've i think we've teased it long enough i think we ought to go over to the
workbench where you attacked i mean sorry you cut uh many times okay some of this metal let's look
at the bad examples just let's have a recap of do you want to go there again this is the
first attempt let's have a look at this and then we'll come back and look at the yeah
so that was the that was the first that was oh wow that was lovely done didn't go well and
that was the yeah that was the channel as well just rotate it over for us oh yeah
look at that yeah nice little slot yeah yeah not very straight wow i think we've uh we've waited about
long enough now yeah let's go over something you just chop some metal work ready hmm oh so it didn't take us long to get to grips with
the actual saw itself we've only cut a few ends and already we've got the ability to get it a
lot square of those early attempts that you had yeah it's a yeah you're saying i said earlier
if you can't cut straight with a normal so you're not going to be able to cut let's go
straight with that because when it goes wrong it does go wrong quickly but again it's not
attacking it with a high speed you don't you know it's not about a a little bit of patience
with it going easy on the speed especially when you come out of the workpiece as well yeah because
that's when if you're going at full um full speed when you're coming out and there's a lip that's
when it catches it is yeah and that's why we can't drop it down on it because you catch both the
lips at the same time we found that didn't work did we yeah i love cutting the strut okay that was
yeah how much effort it goes in when you've got to cut those by hand obviously if you're doing
many of them you don't want to cut it by hand i'd probably choose this lightweight isn't it
easy to lift could be at the top of a scaffold yeah i mean we teased this out on social
media before we actually did this review and yeah people said oh well i'd just use a
chop saw well a chop saw struggles when you get to bigger pieces let's say this is a one
two five so it'll do 125 millimeter square a lot of our american friends use it on pipe
but we're probably more likely to be using it on trunking and that's what we got it for we're going
to hand it over to our tame electrician eddie when we do the rewire here he also uses the milwaukee
circular saw for cutting metal but again circular saw struggles when you get to bigger pieces and
especially some of those more complex shapes however i think it's probably uh the fixed viewers
could help us out gary couldn't they yeah we'd love your comments on this okay you're going to
tell me the number what's the number of it it's the cbs 125 with the m18 battery system okay we
want your comments are you using this or something similar to this and it's an incredible tool
and you want to tell the community about it is there some top tips when using items like this
or is there something you think is considerably better and you've used both and you'd like us to
review the other tool that you suggest leave those comments below and if you can help anyone else
out in those comments we'd greatly appreciate
