A year ago, or so, someone wrote in Duckworks about his experience with a Bosch GST 85 PE oscillating saw, and his praise made me buy one for myself, and it is a gem! Worth every penny!

Having a week's vacation we had planned to go sailing with our Klepper XXL, but the weather wasn't what we had expected so we did some housecleaning and I fiddled with my leeboard:

Makita BO3700

A Makita BO3700 in the box

When the weather is too bad for sailing, or paddling, you can do other things instead. I decided it was time to improve my leeboard a bit!

Therefore I began by having a go at my old dented leeboard with our old trusty Bosch oscillating sander today.

The machine quickly gave up - wouldn't get a firm grip on the paper, so that it worked loose, again and again. Tried putting extra strips of abrading paper in the claw that failed, but that was a very temporary solution.

So the Bosch was for the scrap heap, what to get?

I wanted an old style one, as those with pointed noses wasn't anything I needed, even if Black & Decker had a nice one - deWalt's being clumsier, and costlier. But the first shop didn't have any more of that B&D sander we had looked at in the display, so off to the next warehouse.

Here we again had problems finding the B&D model we were interested in (nifty feature was the cyclone filter attached to its rear end, taking care of most of the dust). But being of unusual form the abrading paper you needed ware packed five by five, with Velcro backsides, and you can guess the price for sanding an entire boat - not really to my liking.

While waiting for a clerk to help us I spotted a Makita BO3700, complete with a little dust bag. Nice to hold and not too expensive - we had looked at Bosch range, the Pro models being far out of bounds, and the smaller Bosch seemed to hold the paper very tentatively, or use Velcro, as the one mentioned before.

Naturally we couldn't find any under the display case, while all other models seemed to be represented! About then an attendant did show up, and he said it might be somewhere else, locked away.
but as he spoke I saw two BO3700 boxes four meters above our heads - so the attendant went looking for a mobile lift.

We waited and waited, and eventually he came back with a skylift-like truck and got one of the boxes for us. Made me wonder what would happen if the shop had even a little earthquake - tons and tons of machines and spare parts would come tumbling down, that's beyond doubt!

At home I unpacked the sander, which came with an eight language instruction leaflet, one dust bag, and a safety manual.

At home I unpacked the sander, which came with an eight language instruction leaflet, one dust bag, and a safety manual (really dumb instructions about what not to do - I only missed a 'Don't use under water!' from the rows of don'ts it included!).

The clips that holds the abrading paper in place are very sturdy on the Makita, and that I really liked.

In use, it was amazingly quiet, and much more efficient than the old Bosch, even though it is only 180W!

If you don't find suitable holed abrading papers it comes with a punch that does them for you! You just attach the paper the normal way to the machine and then set the sander in the punch and press down - finished! Great!

It comes with a punch.

So, full points on most details, like effectiveness, cost of use, build quality, design. The only negative is that it had been very nice with some more dustbags! One is just a few too few!

We paid about $110 in a Bauhaus warehouse in Sweden for ours.

Tord S Eriksson,
Owner and moderator of Bagboater yahoo group