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Originally Posted by hharvey13
I too would love to hear more about the Makita BO6040.
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i've had mine forever but never got much of a chance to use it for car polishing (remodeled a house, got married, sold a house, bought a new house, all in the past six months). i've used it a few times so i can give you my impressions of it from that, but it's by no means an exhaustive review.
first, you can't use any of the backing plates that you would use for a pc without fashioning some sort of adapter. but the plate that comes with it seems sturdy enough. i've used a number of my lake county pads on it with no problems. the pads stick out far enough from the plate that i never felt nervous about it around curves.
the vibrations on it are pretty smooth. it's smoother to run it in forced rotation mode than in orbital mode. not sure why this is, but it definitely feels better. compared to a pc i'd say it has about 1/3rd of the vibes. i can definitely feel the vibrations of a pc after an hour or so. i'd say that it roughly breaks down and polishes out my
menzerna ip nearly twice as fast as my pc. i can't see much of reason to ever really use it in just orbital mode unless i was really trying to finish something out gently. it's also quieter than a pc by a wide margin. it's not quiet overall, but pc's make my ears bleed.
there's a large ribbed grippy pad at the top front of the unit that i use to hold and maneuver it. i
think it came with a side handle, but i've never been a fan of those since it seems to be too far outboard from the center of the pad. the overall construction of the unit is very sturdy. the cord seems like it will hold up well and the dials, buttons and switches all feel right. my only complaint is that sometimes it's hard to turn it off since it has a slider switch for power.
in forced rotation mode, the polisher does tend to "walk" on you a bit until you get used to it. i'd suspect this is probably the case for all forced rotation orbitals since the pad's turning it acts like a wheel since nobody can hold a pad perfectly flat all the time. it's much less forceful than a rotary obviously, but if you're only used to pc's you'll find it odd-feeling.
it doesn't bog down in my experience. i've done some car polishing and also some sanding on stone floors, wood and drywall texture. in some of those situations i've leaned into it fairly hard and never felt it was straining with the pressure. so i've never had a concern with its power. it's certainly held up to more pressure than i would ever use on a car without ill effects.
that's about it. i do recall when i first bought it there was another poster on here who bought one and he used a few parts from a hardware store and a bit of machining to make an adapter for the edge pad system. if that's your preferred pad system, then it's worth searching for. i might still have it saved somewhere if you can't find it.
i'm generally a fan of makita products even though the rest of my power tools are dewalts. zoran claims to have read many failure issues with bo6040's but i've never seen them. to be fair, i've never looked that hard for it either, so i suppose it's possible. but i'm not going to worry about it. makita is a big brand and they likely have pretty good support. i'm intrigued by the
flex, but to me, i'd rather have a machine that can also do actual sanding and is from a well-known (to me) brand.
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