I stumbled upon Festool after spending years making various things from lumber, including speaker boxes, desks, more speaker boxes, an aquarium stand, even more speaker boxes, and a storage organizer for the rear end of a suburban for sport shooting. One day I needed to cut down some 4×8 sheets of MDF into 12″ wide and 8′ long pieces for shelves in my bonus room. I don’t have enough garage space for large tools like table saws so I started researching a better way than; measuring my skill-saw, measuring my wood, placing a straight edge, clamping it down, double checking I would cut on the intended line, fine tuning and finally making a cut while trying to see through the MDF dust cloud and then fining out sometimes the cut was off.
I quickly found the term track saw and 2 options to solve my problem, Dewalt and Festool. Dewalt seemed to pretty much just offer a saw and track and that was about it. Festool had so many options for tracks, saws, vacuums, tables, routers, the list goes on and on but the part that really got my attention is their focus on systems and everything working together. I quickly found out they supposedly had great dust collection (which i never cared about, or so I thought) and a cult-ish following and some haters as with most things.