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The things about it is it has more HP and RPM than Dremel It has a much better chucking system, the bearing housings in both the hand pieces and the motor are much better than Dremel’s. They have great bearing life and pretty much no bearing run out which is the Dremel’s biggest issues in my book. It is also nice to have your hand free to work the router base or hand piece and have the I/O and RPM control at your foots command. These are by all means profession grade rotary tools. The SR can be had for around $190 if you shop Ebay and the Stewmac hand piece if you use the Stewmac inlay router base or the any base designed for the Dremel for about $72 but well worth it.

By the way the Stewmac hand piece is the only hand piece with ¾”-12 un exterior threads. (same as the threads as on the Dremel spindle. And that is the only thing that makes the Stewmac hand piece special.

So we both can off a form of health care now

I don't think I am going to reply to this.

I agree it has more muscle but only runs 18000 rpm, the Dremel 300 series will crank 35000 so for small diameter bits in some cases the dremel could be a better choice,

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Keith MacKenzie
Location: Florida
"To err is human to really screw up you need tools"

I still use my dremel for a bit of inlay (until I find a good deal on a foredom), as well as the aforementioned yard implement sharpening.

Another option for a base if anyone is thinking about a foredom (or dremel for that matter...) is the base manufactured by Bishop Cochran (http://www.bishopcochran.com/). I have one of his laminate trimmer bases. Absolutely fantastic.

Anthony

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Anthony J. Lembo
Lembo Custom Guitars - www.Lemboguitars.com

A dust collector, mostly. I leave the case on a shelf and pretty soon its covered in dust. Works very well.

Actually, its my brother's. It I had my own then I could justify buying all the cool stuff for it that makes it a less effective dust collector.

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Expectation is the source of all misery; comparison the thief of joy.
http://redrivercanoe.ca/

I use a little grindstone to take the point off the parrot's beack. It's a viscous bird.

That's funny AZ, I use this for my dental surgery!

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

Waddy that thing is scary. Does it double as a garage door opener?

Dremel Multipro (old one), only really gets used with a small sanding drum to fine-tune convex shapes on cut inlay. Die grinder for inlay pockets, laminate trimmer for bigger stuff, routers for even bigger stuff.

It was actually a Dremel used in Marathon Man for the torture scene, now I have to listen to
horror stories from that movie nearly every day in my office. It was pretty gruesome.

I still use the Dremel and Stew-mac router base for headstock binding but use a laminate trimmer for the rest of my binding channels. I also use the dremel for rosette cutting as Hesh mentioned. I think there are some good uses for it but I find I use it less than I used to, just wish they'd come out with something with really good bearings...

Those cord-driven slow speed handpieces have pretty much vanished in Dentistry, thank goodness. 40 years ago my wife was a Dental assistant and used to get her hair caught it that rotating cord that drove the handpiece. We switched to air rotors pretty much across the board in 1963 or so, things got much better then, except for the noise of the handpiece spinning at 400K rpm. The move is on to electric Dental handpieces now, just not that perfected, the first one I bought got so hot I had to be careful using it. Dumped it in favor of the old tradition air rotors.
Much more information that you needed, I'm sure.

Best
Bruce

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Bruce Herrmann
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

Had a dremel about 10 years ago,
Burned out in the first week doing light work.
The replacement lasted a year of occasional use....
Never bought another.

Yeah, but "is it safe"

Sorry Bruce I couldn't resist

I have about 5 of the dremel tools. One Christmas I got 3 of them as presents...must have been a good sale on them? My favorite is the 395. I have the luxury of leaving my dremels set up for a particular job and permanently mounted in it's fixture. One of them is hung over the work bench and has the flexible extension. I use that one for polishing nuts and hollowing out the undersides of neck heels. The others are used for cutting inlay pockets, cutting the channel in the kerfed linings for inletting the x braces, ect.

I also have the foredom, and as said before, it turns much slower. I use this with some of the larger bits for rough shaping various parts and pieces and also shaping and polishing nuts and saddles. The foot pedal takes a little getting used to.

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Reguards,

Ken H

Ken, the foot pedal is one of the features I like best about the Foredom. It gives you just another level of control when cutting an inlay pocket.