Craftsman trim saw

For most of my cutting work away from my table saw and band saws and miter saws I use a nifty Skil Mag-77 circular saw. A nice piece of work, but too massive and heavy at times for certain tasks.

So, I recently purchased a Craftsman 5.5-inch trim saw. It has the same left-blade orientation as the big Skil unit, and also includes a decent laser guide (I had been skeptical about those until I got this saw) and even a built-in light to illuminate the cutting point.

The saw works fine, but I did discover that the blade is kind of rare. I could not fine any at Home Depot, Lowe’s, Harbor Freight, Grizzly (the catalog), or even Sears itself (including the catalog). Note that most smaller blades for battery powered small saws are 5 3/8 inchers, with small arbor holes. The Sears trim saw blade is a 5.5 incher, and it has a standard 5/8-inch arbor.

Anyway, I contacted Sears catalog sales and they said they could not get the blade. Instead, the forwarded my call to the Sears “parts” department, where I did manage to order two spares. (It pays to plan ahead with an item that is as esoteric as this one.) The blade appears to be a dedicated item, and it actually has a part number in the saw’s part’s explosion diagram.

The local Sears store did have a fine-tooth blade in this size (110 teeth), obviously for plywood work, but that may have been a fluke. Certainly, more users would need an 18- or 24-tooth blade than a 110-tooth job.

In any case, I will complement the saw. It is light in weight (8 pounds, with a magnesium plate) and easy to use, and since it can cut to 1 5/8 inches at 90 degrees, it would even be a good carpentry tool.

If anybody has additional data on this saw and the blade situation I would be very interested.

Howard Ferstler