Evolution Saw Review

Overview of the Rage 3

You may remember our review of the Evolution Rage Circular Saw, well here is the sliding version, the Rage 3.  First, we would like to thank everyone for the feedback we received about the Rage review.  Also, we know some of you purchased this saw and had a lot of great things to say about it.  These saws are pretty amazing.  Honestly, when we first saw the Evolution power line at the HBS, we were skeptical.  We thought it might just be another gimmick power tool out there.  Then, when we got our hand on one and saw the blades, we thought the blade was the key to this tool.  But after testing the Rage, we realized that the blade, working with the torque of the motor is what really does the trick.  After our last test of the Rage, we became immediately believers and put the Evolution saw as one of our top picks.

Well, we wanted to get our hands on a sliding saw and see how well this one worked.  The Evolution Rage 3 is a 10″ sliding multipurpose miter saw.  This bad boy cuts wood, steel and Aluminum all with the same blade.  You can also buy a Diamond blade to cut stone.  As with the Rage, the Rage 3 cuts wood with embedded nails with no problems.  Besides being able to cut through all these material with the same blade, the Evolution Rage 3 offers some other features.  First when you cut steel and Aluminum, there are very few sparks.  Secondly, after the cut, you can handle the material all most immediately as the steel or aluminum is not hot.  I know, you would think with a dry cut like this, the metal would be extremely hot to the touch.

The max depth cut at 90° Bevel is 2-1/2″ and at a 45° is 1-9/16″.  The max width cut at 90° is 11-13/16″ while at a 45° is 8-1/4″.  The speed is 2500 RPM.  This saw comes in on the light side weighing only 39.3 lbs., so it’s pretty easy to move around the shop or from site to site.  Enough of the numbers, lets get into the review.

Review of the Rage 3

We were very excited to get our hands on this saw as we were amazed by our review of the Rage circular saw.  Without going in to much detail, the set up of this saw is not much different than most of the other major brands out there, such as dust collection, locking features, clapping systems and more.

For this review we wanted to throw more at this saw then we did with the Rage circular saw.  We also wanted to test how strong the system was and cut through some good stuff.  On the other hand, we wanted to cut through some weaker material to see how it would handle that too.  We knew it would cut through the weaker material, but we wanted to see if it would leave more burrs or even ruin the material we were cutting.

The first item we reviewed was the accuracy of the cuts at different degrees.  We knew it would cut through wood with no problems.  The accuracy, from what we we could measure was dead on.  The finished cut also looked great.  Nothing was torn up or splintered.

Next  we wanted to cut some wood with nails.  Evolution states that this will cut wood with nails.  After our last test of the Rage it went right through the wood and nails with no problems.  So this time we decided to cut through wood with Rebar and see how it handles.  Not sure how many times in the field we would see wood with Rebar, but hey, what the heck.  As you can see by the video, it ran through it with no problems.  You have to admit this is pretty cool and very impressive.

Next, we cut through some conduit to see how many burrs it produced.  Again, it ran through the conduit with no problems.  The finished cut was great with little to no burrs.  Now in the real world, we wouldn’t be using this to cut conduit because you will have electrical wiring running through the pipes and any small burr could cause problems.  But over all, the cut was great and produced far fewer burrs than we expected, pretty much none.

Next we cut through some corner bead.  We wanted to see if this saw would end up running the corner bead because the saw was to strong.  We were not sure if it would cut the corner bead and bend it at the same time.   Before the cut, we knew it would cut this with no problems, but we were skeptical.  As you can see by the video, it did cut the corner bead with now problems, but to our amazement, it didn’t even bend any part of the corner bead.

Next, we cut through a metal stud to see how many sparks it produced.  Now it is hard to see because we were not thinking and cut this outside in the sun, so it is hard to see on video.  As we cut through the stud, it was easier to see with the naked eye than on camera.  Overall, when we cut the stud, it produced very few sparks, a lot less than we expected.

After the metal stud, we cut through 1 -1/4″ pipe to see how hot the metal was after the cut.  After the cut, you can see we were skeptical and only touched it with one finger to make sure it wasn’t hot.  Again, to our amazement, it wasn’t, so you can see how we took our whole hand and covered where we just cut the pipe to show that is was not hot.

Then for fun we cut through some stone to see if we could get the motor to bog down.  We grabbed a 2-1/2″ piece of stone and put our Diamond blade on the saw.  As you can see the motor didn’t hesitate anywhere on the cut.  Just keep cutting through it like nothing was even there.  One thing we would like to mention is when we cut the stone, we didn’t have the dust collection system on.  When we put the dust collection system on, you could notice a real difference on the amount of dust.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking for an incredible saw, you have to take a look at the Evolution Rage 3.  I know some of the stuff is hard to believe, but as you can see by the video, this saw does everything and more than Evolution Build claims.  This saw beat all the expectations we had for it.  It did it with ease.  At the beginning of the review, we really thought it would fail a couple of the items we were testing it for, but it didn’t.  All we can say is move over big boys, there is a new kid in town and he has one incredible saw.  This is our top pick for Miter saws.