Dremel Moto Saw Review

Dremel Moto Saw Review

Manufacturer: Dremel
UK Price (as reviewed): £84.95 (inc VAT)
US Price as reviewed): $99.99 (ex Tax)

The term Dremel has become synonymous with rotary tools, making it easy to forget that the Bosche-owned company makes a range of other power tools as well. Once such example is one of its newer creations, the Moto Saw, which has just received a new range side cutting blades.

The Moto Saw is essentially a scroll saw (or Fret saw depending on where you come from), and with 70W of power on tap, it's easily as capable as most sub £100 scroll saws in terms of raw grunt on offer. One of its main selling points has to be its size - at less than 20in long, it's certainly dinky compared to your average scroll saw, although its design does have a couple of limitations as a result.


It has to be mounted using two clamps, which are provided, and can't be screwed to a work top. The U-shaped clamps slide into the base of the unit, and then under your worktop, with a screw tightening the whole affair. We'd trust this with large sheets of acrylic or wood, but we'd feel much more comfortable dealing with hefty chunks of steel with the support offered by a traditional scroll saw. The Moto Saw will also protrude by a good eight or nine inches forward of whatever surface you mount it to. You'll also need to allow for the grip and power cord that extend beneath the work top.

You get one adjustable parallel guide, which can be placed in one of two rails either side of the saw. These can be locked off using blue levers at the edge of the table, and the parallel guide itself can be rotated to provide different cutting angles. Sadly, the Moto Saw doesn't offer anything in the way of tilt, which is something many budget scroll saws do offer.

Thankfully there's a nifty little feature that in part makes up for that. The whole saw assembly detaches from the table, allowing you to use it as a handheld saw, much like a hacksaw, that's likely to be very useful for cutting through thicker materials a Dremel or possibly even a jigsaw may struggle with. This does mean, though, that the speed and power switches are located fairly inaccessibly beneath the table, which isn't ideal.

To mount a blade, each end has small prongs that secure first into the base of the table, then into the top of the saw, locking off using a large lever on top. It's a little fiddly, but no great hardship. The size of the Moto Saw has also probably made one other issue glaringly obvious to seasoned modders out there. The throat depth of the U-bend to the saw blade essentially dictates the length of material you can cut. For a single-piece length of aluminium or acrylic, the Moto Saw doesn't offer a particularly long reach - less than 11in - and the blades can't be rotated either.

However, Dremel just sent us a solution to this problem - angled cutting blades. The MS50 side-cutting blade set contains five angled cutting blades that have been twisted at the tips by 90 degrees.