Excellent tool for board-by-board scratchbuilding. I keep all my wood scraps and weather them with Weather-It and use them for junk piles.
I own, and am very happy with the Chopper I – the masonite board version. My own experience, as with some of the other commentators above, is that from time to time the arm skews slightly but in nearly every case I find that the ultimate cause is that I have allowed the blade to get a bit “old.”
When you consider how often you change blades on an Xacto type knife if you want a clean crisp cut – and that’s often – I suspect most of us try to get too many cuts out of the Chopper blade. So my advice is, have plenty of blades handy, flip the blade once to take advantage of the less used far end, but don’t be afraid to switch out the blade on a regular basis.
Thanks Guys…
More reviews to come…
D
Very handy product, indeed.
Just happens to be “on sale” for $39.98 plus S&H in the latest(June) issue of the Walthers Flyer . It’s on page 66 in lower left quadrant. If you don’t subscribe to the Flyer, you can order it at walthers.com.
James McDonald:
It takes regular old single edged blades that can be bought in bulk at any tool place.
I don’t know what happed here, but I just received my Chopper and was very disapointed with the latest one. Workmanship has definetly dropped off signifiantly since the buy out. Poorly cut parts, thread inserts that were loose out of the box, handle that was not at a 90 degree angle, corners of the masonite curled up even the name plate was skewed and not “glued” down all the way. Returned it and bought a Micro-Mark unit at substantially lower cost that I received yesterday and it performed as I wanted without all the above problems. Who ever is overseeing the quality of the “new” NWSL better get on the ball or they are going to lose a lot of business. (I know…I can’t spell very good, but no spell check on this forum)
Hi William,
Sorry you got a “bad apple”. Lets hope they get the message. Mine is a wonderful tool.
Avevo il vecchio modello che non era perfetto ma costava poco.Il nuovo Chopper II costa molto di più ed ha gli stessi difetti del precedente.Taglio non perpendicolare .il braccio leva troppo corto lame che flettono ecc.Non lo consiglio a nessuno