Well, I don’t own the Skil, but just looking at the spec sheet, I can take a few guesses about why it would be so popular.
When people talk about “best budget X” they’re usually talking about “relative to other things in its price class”. In this particular case, the Skil has a few features that are uncommon on jobsite table saws in this price range:
So, what would you get from stepping up from this to a CSC SYS 50? Well, the most obvious answer is portability: it’s cordless, more compact and integrates with existing Systainer storage for people who are already heavily invested into the Festool system. Digital adjustment of the blade height and angle are also a big plus if you need to make a lot of small precision cuts. You lose the rack-and-pinion fence and a significant amount of rip capacity but gain the sliding table for high-precision, repeatable crosscuts. And if you’ve got Festool’s 60mm track saws, the blades are interchangeable. I would also expect the dust collection on the CSC to be better just based on Festool’s general design philosophy, though that’s strictly a guess as I’ve never used the Skil.
These saws are really targeted at completely different use cases, though, despite both being jobsite table saws. The Skil is aimed at people doing rough carpentry work with larger workpieces, while the Festool is aimed at people doing high-precision work on smaller pieces. The sliding table is largely useless to someone doing framing work but probably accounts for a significant portion of the cost of the CSC because of the manufacturing complexity.
When people talk about “best budget X” they’re usually talking about “relative to other things in its price class”. In this particular case, the Skil has a few features that are uncommon on jobsite table saws in this price range:
- A rack-and-pinion fence, which offers more rigidity than a single-end clamp fence
- It uses standard ten inch table saw blades and supports an eight inch dado stack
- It offers blade parallelism alignment, which makes the miter slots actually usable for precision cuts
So, what would you get from stepping up from this to a CSC SYS 50? Well, the most obvious answer is portability: it’s cordless, more compact and integrates with existing Systainer storage for people who are already heavily invested into the Festool system. Digital adjustment of the blade height and angle are also a big plus if you need to make a lot of small precision cuts. You lose the rack-and-pinion fence and a significant amount of rip capacity but gain the sliding table for high-precision, repeatable crosscuts. And if you’ve got Festool’s 60mm track saws, the blades are interchangeable. I would also expect the dust collection on the CSC to be better just based on Festool’s general design philosophy, though that’s strictly a guess as I’ve never used the Skil.
These saws are really targeted at completely different use cases, though, despite both being jobsite table saws. The Skil is aimed at people doing rough carpentry work with larger workpieces, while the Festool is aimed at people doing high-precision work on smaller pieces. The sliding table is largely useless to someone doing framing work but probably accounts for a significant portion of the cost of the CSC because of the manufacturing complexity.
