Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I received this tool from Amazon today and couldn't wait to start stripping the multiple layers of paint off the wood lap siding of my 1917 bungalow. The machine arrived promptly, as it always does from Amazon, and it looks and feels like a nice quality piece of equipment EXCEPT for the often mentioned plastic side blade covers--they look like trouble before you ever fire up the machine. I'm a carpenter and own machines from Bosch, Porter-Cable, Hitachi, Dewalt etc....I know rugged machine design when I see it. I hooked it up to my shop vac and did a test. Once I got the cutting depth dialed-in, it worked great. It performs like a powered carbide scraper, so you can can work it back and forth if you need to strip away multiple layers and it'll take off a fairly uniform layer with each pass and leave a nice workable surface. The side blades, however, seem mostly useless in that you can't adjust their cutting depth and they don't take much at all off in a pass. Maybe there's a trick to it, but I'll never find out because I'm sending this thing back. Anyway, since the test went so well, I decided to jump right into the first part of the project. It went great for about 10 minutes until I noticed paint chips suddenly flying all over the place. Was the dust collection port clogged? No...one of the *&##$%# side blade covers had already broken off! Another reviewer noted that this would not affect cutting, which is true, but it defeats the dust collection almost completely. Yet another reviewer stated that he fixed the problem with a piece of metal flashing. I'm sure that works, but I'm not going to pay $300+ for a tool and then rig it up to keep it running. Not to mention not being able to use half the blades the machine is designed to provide. I commend Metabo for improving the technology of paint removal machines as compared to the older Porter-Cable machine. The ideas of dust collection and using carbide blades rather than an abrasive are great, but this machine is not quite there. The side blades need to be made more useable and the covers are downright dangerous. I figured I'd give the Metabo a try since it's roughly half the price of a Paint Shaver, but there seems to be a reason. My hunch is that Paint Shaver has taken the good things about the Metabo and made them better. Plus it is said to work much faster. I'll find out soon enough, since I'm returning the Metabo and ordering a Paint Shaver Pro tomorrow. UPDATE AS OF JUNE 30,2005 I now have a Paint Shaver Pro, and it is a FAR superior machine to the Metabo. Another reviewer noted that the Metabo gets closer into corners than the Paint Shaver, but that has been resolved with the Pro model. Not only does the Paint Shaver remove paint faster than the Metabo, but the blades for removing paint from the edges of lap siding are actually adjustable in depth and they work. I paid almost twice as much for the Paint Shaver Pro as the Metabo, but if you look at the used market for them on Ebay, you can't go wrong because you'll get most of your money back out of it if you sell it. Sorry Amazon, I love ya, but I cannot recommend the Metabo when a better tool is available elsewhere.