I already did that. Placed the order last night. but only because as you probably read a few posts ago,I can expand it by sitting my home made bench right next to it, dropping an mft/3 mini profile on to an edge of it and mate it to the mft/3 itself using the table connectors. The simple fact is that mft'3's on their own are
a) just not big enough, especially if your track saw is the 75
b) not sturdy enough for hand tool work even with the leg supports. They just aren't
Yet I don't want to keep everything up and assembled all the time. I want to use what I want to use when I want to use it and get it the heck out of my way when I don't.
The MFT/3 on its own will be devoted to power tool work of a manageable size only. If I have to reef something down into a bench dog hole and perform hand tool work it is going on one ply section of my home made bench. It will take that sort of abuse and just grin back at me. The MFT won't. The MFT won't even do the job never mind whether it will grin or not.
The reason I initially was committed to just the home made bench is that it by virtue of its robustness and size. it would give me more functionality. The mft/3 gives the user the means to conduct a varied degree of power related tasks within a given size range quickly and thats where it ends. One can make the mft/3 the basis of a larger work surface and expand the use of the mft/3 tools but only by growing the work surface itself.
Now if an MFT was better at hand tool work, somebody like me might grow that work surface by just adding MFT's. But that would not get me what I need to do hand tool work.
So my MFT will be the center of my power work. Alone it will be given middling size tasks that I want to complete quickly. One ply section (24" x 48") of my home made bench equipped with 20mm holes with 96mm spacing will get all the hand tool work. Anything that has to be reefed down to a work surface hard for hand tool work will go there. That ply section along with one more 24" x 48" section with either a slab for surface or again in ply with be the final piece of the puzzle. My total power tool work area can go from the basic MFT/3 itself to a surface 57" wide or finally a surface 81" wide or if I want to, I can just pull the two sections of my home made bench right off the legs, throw a full sheet of ply over the frame and work from that if I choose, leaving the mft in my wake at the same time.
Go take a look at the track that comes with a TS75 just as one example of the mft/3's limitations.
The fact of my hand tool work and the kind of work surface I need for it allows me to think of a track saw in terms of a larger work surface area because I needed something that could handle hand tool work. Why not make it big enough to handle a TS75 as well and forgo owning both a TS75 and the smaller TS55? Now others might be throwing sheet goods work at a track saw constantly and for them, maybe owning both or owning just a TS55 makes sense. Doesn't make sense for me. Honestly if I wanted a smaller track saw as well, it wouldn't be a TS55. The 75 is the game changer of the two. To me it is maybe the best saw Festool makes as it is truly a game changer as long as you can handle the size. Other Festool saws are for me great tools but not game changers.
Th MFT/3 is a nice bit of kit. Bit like most things Festool we tend to anoint them as God's gift to woodworking, universally and unilaterally appropriate for any woodworking task and very often if not always that is simply not the case.
