Released 9th May 2005

Daren Beck, Joiner at Langley School in Norfolk, makes virtually all of the furniture used in the school. For a school of well over four hundred pupils, that's no mean feat – especially when you consider that a few months ago he was cutting his materials with a hand-held circular saw.

"For larger sheets I had to lay them out on the floor and cut them there. It was very hard on the knees," he laughed.

Finding a more suitable tool was not as straightforward as might be imagined. "I needed a saw capable of cutting large sheets safely, accurately, and rapidly. It needed to be usable by a single operator, and able to faithfully duplicate a cut over several work pieces," Daren noted. "That meant I needed a vertical panel saw."

The problem was that the majority of vertical panel saws on the market were too large to fit in the space available in Daren's workshop, and were priced at around £10,000 – well in excess of his budget.