Review of Prima 2500 panel saw

I bought a brand new Prima 2500 sliding panel saw from Peter at Leda Machinery - Melbourne. Single phase machine (3ponies for the main blade and 1/2 a pony for the scriber). Chinese model name is MJ6132TZ (or something close to that. this is just the model no. on the instruction booklet). before purchasing, I could not find any review of the machine. I only took one quick look at it on the showroom floor and bought it a couple months later after a holiday in the US.

I have been using panelsaws at work for 15 years and I have used a Altendorf F45, 2 SCM's (dunno the model, atleast 18yrs old) and a Felder (2003 model). Of all of the panelsaws I have used, excluding price, the Prima 2500 runs second after the Altendorf which stands to reason. the altendorf is a beautiful machine designed and built in germany and a real workhorse.

Anyway, to the prima. the things I like about it are...

-The price, its a great machine for the money.

-the sliding table locking mechanism is the best I have seen. It gives a dozen or so places where the table can be locked, so you dont need to drag the machine all the way to the back just to lock the table when lifting a sheet of 2400x1200x32 MDF by yourself and have the slider move around on you.

-The overhead guard is a heavy duty guard. made from plastic, but it is very thick and well thought out. It is easy to remove the standard guard and install the 45 degree guard just by releasing one knob and sliding it out of its groove. It has a couple of those gas struts which support the weight of the guard so you can choose to set the guard at any height and it will actually stay there rather than gradually falling down closer to the table. It has a 70mm dust port.

- It has digital readout of the sawblade angle

- the outrigger table is of solid construction. It can hold my weight (90kg) sitting on the very edge of it without it buckling much...

- the sliding table slides smooth and straight.

- basically everything that needs to be moved to setup the machine to cut square, parallel etc has some kind of an adjustment, some adjustments are bad, and some are good. you can adjust the sliding table to run parallel to the square, you can adjust the height of the outrigger to sit flush with the table surface, you can adjust the squaring arm to cut square, you can adjust the ripping fence to be parallel with the saw/square to outrigger. you can adjust the steel measuring tapes so the read the exact measurement. and you can adjust the scribing saw to be inline with main saw blade.

- you can choose to have the scribing blade turned on..or in my case turned off because i rarely cut melamine and as such I have removed the scriber.

so thats the good stuff. a bit of the bad...

- the riving knife supplied is very very cheap...not straight and too big, even at its lowest point it is still a fraction higher than the top point of the saw blade which is a problem when running a 3.2mm slot in a drawside for the the bottom. I think it is just a piece of mild steel roughly cut to shape with a bit of a bevel on the front edge. Ill have to get a better one or run the machine without a riving knife.

-its not very easy to change the location of the squaring fence from infront of the timber (cutting sheets) to behind it (docking solid timber). It doesnt seat itself into one fixed position, so everytime you remove it to change location, your measuring tapes might be out a bit. because the fence can slide left/right when not tightened down. I have decided just to keep it hard left and that will have to suffice.

- the electrical plug supplied which is running one 3hp motor +1/2hp motor has a 10amp plug...i think it pulls about 2625watts which exceeds a 10amp circuit. I run it off a 15amp circuit with 16amp breakers...but really it should have a 15amp plug.

- i dont think there is capacity to put any sort of a dado set in. you might be able to get away with max 8mm dado's if your clever. Im not too sure, I havent looked at the length of the arbor, there is definitely room inside the table to add a blade 10mm wide by removing a table insert..

-the main blade dust port is only 4inch...commonly panelsaws have 5 inch ports. the 4inch port is kinda set in stone since the dust passes thru a pretty substantial piece of steel (10-12mm thick) so it would be pretty difficulty to open it up. alot of the dust just falls to the floor anyways or gets blown back behind the workpiece, I have never had a panelsaw which had sufficient dust extraction, its just a messy machine. I think ill just add a 3rd hose running under the table with a 'catchers mitt' setup to catch whateva falls.


All in all, if money wasnt an issue, I would buy an Altendorf just because its a slightly (and i mean..only slightly) more refined machine. since I can buy about 3 chinese machines for every altendorf....I would have no problems recommending these chinese built Prima's that Leda sell. its packs alot of punch for your dollar.

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I'm looking at the same saw or the 3200 and know of one old bloke who has the same saw as you. He likes It although he is a semi retired cabinet maker so I wasn't sure of his review and that left me wondering what to buy and heavens forbid if I asked to use his saw!! I've only been cabinet making for 27years and i might hurt myself, lol.
Anyway I'm setting up a cabinet making workshop in Birchip and as I live in rural Vic I am limited by distance to test machines and don't need the headache of buying poorly.
What's the accuracy of cutting 45deg along a sheet of board?
I once bought a Chinese saw and it couldn't cut square or straight, what a piece of rubbish and that experience has me nervous and wondering if buying a second hand saw would be better!
Thanks for an informative review.

the accuracy of cutting 45degrees along the length of the board (to waterfall a benchtop for example?) is heavily reliant on your own workmanship. you can set the saw to be 45degrees, perfectly 45degrees..but as you cut the board over a long length, the board must be held hard down to the sliding table at the point of cutting, once it lifts off it will increase/decrease the overall width of the board and create a wavy edge (i learnt this the expensive way, too much rush rush without thinking) this is true for any panel saw.

my saw cuts straight, tested by cutting the edge off along two different sheets and butting the sheets up against each other, essentially jointing a board with a panel saw. no light gaps over the 2400 length. i did have to make a slight adjustment to the slider to get it parallel to the saw, that is an initial setup thing and there was a specific adjustment control for it. as far as cutting square, the crosscut fence needs to be setup initially. I have found that once it is setup its fine and cuts perfectly square. but as i readily swap the fence from the front of the outrigger to the back of the outrigger, it doesnt seat in its home position with any consistancy. there is a screw in which a steel plate rests against to set the home position, i am yet to figure out where the inconsistancy is coming from, im thinking its from the pin that locates the fence nearest the saw in the slider. on a 2400x1200 panel, instead of the diagonal measurement being ~2683, its more like ~2681-2685 so i need to re-square the fence each time, a royal pita but only takes me about 3minutes and i mostly use the fence for solid timber located behind the timbers and i can also use this setup for sizing boards less than 2000 long. for this reason i prefer the altendorf, its easier to change the fence from infront or behind the timber and it positions itself with a decent amount of accuracy.

one last thing which is starting to bug me about the machine, is the rise/fall of the blade height gets hard to move when trying to lower the blade really low because the screw thread is exposed inside the saw cabinet allowing dust to build up on the greasy threads, im gonna get a sock or something similar to cover it. once cleaned with a quick wipe with a rag it moves freely again.

the only thing i can think of which will prevent the saw from cutting as intended, is if the sliding table aluminium extrusion is cast like a bent bananna. the only way to fix this would be to replace the extrusion. everything else which springs to mind has an adjustment control somewhere (most of the adjustments are just a simple bolt u wind in and out to find the location, and then lock down the locking grub bolts to hold it firm).

you would be welcome to come and have a look at my machine, im in caroline springs VIC, dunno how far away you are.

Thanks for a great review Kuffy. I'm looking at upgrading from a cabinet saw to a panel saw and this is almost $2k cheaper than the Minimax SC3 that I've been assessing.

Would you mind letting me know what the overall fully assembled footprint of this machine is? Also has anything else about this machine become apparent since you wrote the review?

Cheers,


Justin.

its about 3450mm wide, thats from the edge of the ripping table to the end of the outrigger arm. the outrigger is about 1900mm long.

need approx 5460mm to push the outrigger from the back all the way to the front. my garage is 5900mm wide, so i have the saw setup so when the outrigger is pushed all the way forward, it has about 100mm clearance between it and the wall. when pulled all the way back with a 2400mm sheet of mdf on it, i have about 350mm between the sheet and the wall to squeeze into (just gotta think thin).

apart from what has already been mentioned about the rise n fall building up with crud and the riving knife being bent and sits too high, its not given me any issues. dust extraction could be greatly improved, needs some angle grinder surgery. atm it has a 90mm inlet below the machine, which works "ok" for ripping with a 30tpi blade, but crosscutting with a 72tpi allows alot of dust to escape. doesnt look too difficult to remedy if you were that way inclined.

Thanks for your prompt reply Kuffy, much appreciated.

Here's hoping this is still active...


Kuffy,

Love this review. I keep coming back to it every time I get my drool on for a good saw upgrade. (BTW: Lockwood Auctioneers have one coming up through liquidation on 30th May in Camberfield, Vic - Estimated @ $1500 - It's the second one I've seen through them in my sporadic browsing over the 6-12 months)

I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind helping out with a few more questions on how you've found it over the last couple of years?

- Have any other niggles or issues turned up through use and wear? (Most mentioned seemed more like mild annoyances rather than serious issues)
- Has it, for the most part, stayed aligned?
- Did you fix the riving knife/thread and dust hassles?
- Have you done much work on it with really hard woods (long rips etc)? Was the 3hp gutsy enough and the sliding structure strong enough to clean up, say, the edges of a large dining table in something crazy hard and heavy like spotted gum?


Yours, and the 3ph model sound like great saws for reasonable dollars, and I'll take your years of experience with other saws gladly over a stock standard feature review :)

Thanks for the top notch review :2tsup:

one thing has raised its nasty little head in the past couple of months. Adjusting the ripping fence to a set dimension is very sticky. It is basically three components with some circ clips. The main body, a eccentric shaft and a cam. The cam is located on the shaft using circ clips. One of the clips is bent out of shape for some reason and now the adjustment slightly racks when adjusting. it locks down nice n tight and I can still trust my fingers/hands/life to the fence as I often do but it is a pain in the butt. I am trying to fix it now using a random pack of clips I picked up from bunnings for a few bucks.

I did fix the riving knife a while back. I ground the height of down and flattened it and set it correctly in the machine. Made a video of it for my youtube channel and it is now my most popular video which irritates me to no end. The video took me an hour to make total and I fixed the machine at the same time. My real videos which take a couple of weeks to make, not many are interested in. such is life.

The 3hp motor is a lightweight motor for a 12" blade asked to do solid timber ripping operations. But it does handle it without issue. I can bog the motor down whenever I like, it is only 3hp. But I can also bog down 7.5hp whenever I like too, so perhaps that's just me. On Monday just past, I had a slab of redgum on the saw approx 2200x900x55/60mm thick. I just had to square it up and flatten the faces for a bloke, easy work, easy money. I used a 30teeth flat top rip blade to do dimension the slab and it did it easily. I could have used a 72teeth ATB blade also, but the saw would have put up a fight and forced me to slow down.

The dust extraction is still annoying me. Enough that just last weekend I got in under it and clean it all up with a vacuum and started to think of what is needed to make it better. I gave up pretty quickly though because it is so much grinding and cutting in a confined space down at ground level, seems like it should be someone elses job, not mine :D

It is staying aligned. I haven't messed with the alignment of the ripping fence. The crosscut fence can be set incorrectly when changing from being in front of the material to behind, or vice versa, but it is user error helped with poor engineering. Learn how to do it and it works. Mostly I just keep the outrigger pushed all the way forwards and have the fence behind the work. Good for most of my solid timber work. When I need to break down a sheet of MDF, I simply do a head cut first to bring the 8' sheet down to sub 2meters so it fits behind the fence and then I can rip it in half or whatever it is that I am doing.

hope that helps. I'm off to fix this damn ripping fence issue. i'll let ya know if I get it to work good or not.

edit: because I am prettier than I am smart, I overlooked one possibility. As I was messing around with the clips, I just happened to feel the underside of the bar that the fence locks on to. It was kinda dirty with some kind of resinous crap stuck to it, probably polyurethane overspray or similar. Gave it a clean with some WD40 and it moves very freely again, too freely because now the friction lock bar is covered in oil. So a quick wipe with metho and she's good as gold again. locks down tight and moves freely when you want it to. I guess I need to clean it more often, seems like it is another job for someone else though, not me!

post edited, it is working good now. Smart > Pretty :(

Heh. You're still gorgeous to us mate ;)

Thanks a bunch Kuffy. Plenty of great info once again.