Review on BORA Portamate PM 3550 Super Mobile by Nick Beck

This base is very well made, sturdy, easy to assemble, I have several and will be buying more. However, there are a few small things and they are not insignificant. First of all the packaging is really terrible, I'm sure it's ok if a full pallet is delivered to a retail store but I bought 3 of these and they all came from different suppliers. shipped by different carriers and everything came out at the seams. The last one looked like it had been dragged here and was the only one packed in a different box, the first two were just wrapped in a roll and a half of duct tape. Add to that the box is heavy, filled with metal that shifts and has a nice shiny finish with hard-to-capture images. It's a heavy metal box, packaged like a coffee maker, doesn't really work and the necessary ribbon cocoon doesn't help, it really needs to be packaged in a more rigid (brown) multi-wall box that probably costs about the same as photo intensive cardboard in which it is delivered. Second, I'm not sure who came up with the standard sizes, there are various "kits" to make it bigger, crazy even if you want, but the minimum sizes are pretty big for typical workshop tools. The base comes with 2 longer and 2 shorter guides and these 2 longer guides are too long to fit snugly on a full size body saw or a heavy duty shaper or a large floor belt/disc sander or a large drill a typical band saw, an iron gang saw on a closed base, all very typical of a hardware store and judging by the photo packaging above this is certainly the market it was intended for. I had to cut rails on everything I put it under and the holes were drilled so that you end up and even get to the end of the pre-drilled holes for each of the above uses. Both ends of the rails need to be cut off to leave enough pre-drilled holes and they are molded holes so you will need to drill and tap the threads and as the factory holes are stamped with distortion you really can't replicate and get this the same thread engagement. Personally I think if it came packaged with two sets of shorter rails and longer ones were available as a budget option it would be a better product or there would be more pre-drilled holes on the inner rails as through. instead of several at each end. I'm just not sure what specific product they had in mind when they found the sizes they even sell an extension table boom for which can be purchased as a kit with this base which you think is the Delta Unisaw will be , or a Powermatic 66, or a Sawstop Professional, or one of their Offshore clones, or one of the many hybrid saws, but they all have roughly the same base dimensions, dimensions smaller than that base can accommodate. Speaking of the outrigger, which I also have, it's oddly oversized too, it's 32 inches front to back, and none of the above saws have tables that deep, let alone a leg rest that requires those dimensions. Even the industrial saw fence is only 30 inches deep and the footprint is significantly smaller. And it can't be shortened properly either, since the wheel carriers are welded at the ends and you run the risk of stumbling somewhere. The outrigger mount is weird too, it has some sort of weird clamp on one end that clamps to the main base's inner rod and a flanged end that bolts to a large support for the table legs, which by the way has holes in it so don't mind the spacing between the holes on the main base rods. Things could have been simpler if they just drilled holes across the main base and used the same spacing on the boom and just gave you 2 identical brackets. it would solve many problems. Interestingly, the outriggers don't have the same quaint packaging as the base and arrive well packaged, non-slip and in perfect condition. from the Delta mobile base I had on the Unisaw, which sagged midway on a single climb and didn't get very mobile. With 4 rotating casters, it is easy to move, it is firmly fixed, it is easy to level, it is easy to control with your feet, it seems that there are too many displays and counter in the package. productive generosity in its dimension. I really wish they would make it less generous and sell me kits to make it incrementally expandable for both products. Overall it's a well-designed product, but I can't say it's a particularly well-designed product, at least not in terms of versatility. No matter what tool you have for this, but this just seems like a bit of a crappy hack for a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place. Especially when you consider that this product is from a company that makes the base out of the piece of plywood you provide and if you really want to glue your gear to the plywood you would buy a 3/4 ton Super Duty. steel base? So, Bora, if you're reading this, either A) drill more holes in the tracks, or B) make them smaller and sell me something to make them bigger, or sell me something to make them smaller, either way. Oh and just make the lace patterns the same all over and you will have fewer unique parts to make, then even the additional parts for sale will be the same. You could sell me all sorts of rails of different sizes just cut from the same solid blank with holes, and finally get better (and cheaper) cardboard and put a label on it if you want a picture for the retail space.