Like most people shopping for a band saw, I spent a lot of time on various websites, user discussion groups, etc. It’s enough to make your head spin–so many choices. When I actually saw the old style (cast iron frame) 14″ band saws next to the Rikon Deluxe 14″ saw, it was immediately clear that this machine is in a separate class–there’s no comparing the cast iron frame saws to this beast. It’s bigger, more refined, has as much power as the best of them, and has a huge resaw capacity (that exceeds the cast iron models with riser block installed). When you start adding up the bit$ and piece$ required to bring a cast iron frame near the specs of this saw, you’ll see that those saws aren’t really cheaper.
Set-up was no particular problem, but the manual for this saw is absurdly bad. It would be a bad manual for a crummy, cheap saw, but it’s an embarrassment Rikon 10-325 to have such a horrible manual for such a nice machine. Instructions are sparse. Hardware does not match illustrations/descriptions (those few that there are). In spite of this, if you are semi-mechanically inclined (as I hope you are if you’re buying a band saw), you can figure it out.
As one would hope, this is a powerful machine that cuts curves and resaws nicely. The fence leaves something (a lot) to be desired–the machining on the fence is marginal, the mechanism to adjust the fence to square with the table is inadequate (and cheap)…but I don’t use the fence much anyway. This is a band saw, not a table saw. I will likely build or buy a better resaw fence when I get into a project that calls for a significant amount of resawing…but the existing fence will do for now. Like the manual, it is strange to have such a marginal fence on an otherwise impressive machine.