Kett KD-1495 Fiber Cement Shear 5/8" Thick, 2500 RPM, A-2 Steel Blades, Electric Shears, Electric Scissors, Electric Cutter, Cutting Tool for Fiber Cement Siding and Backerboard

Great product. Easy to use. Perfect for siding material used. Variable speed a plus. Purchased for my son and he was reluctant to order it due to only 6 reviews. He wants to be sure you make this 7 plus.

I bought the shears to cut cement board siding. No matter what I tried, the shears jumped up and down on the boards and they would break a piece of the siding off at the end. They were impossible for me to use without damaging the siding, so I returned them. Even though it creates a lot of dust, I'm doing much better with a skill saw with a special cement board blade and a grinder with a diamond blade.

These shears make working in cement board a breeze. No more dust, no more noise.These can make precision cuts with ease. I bought these instead of the Makita version on the recommendation of a friend. I can't imagine anything surpassing these in depth of cut or performance.

This thing eats up 1/2 inch hardibacker with zero resistance. I mean you need to find the right angle to hold it at but it works super fast. I was able to cut an entire shower stall of hardibacker in a fraction of the time. A must have for any person who cuts cement board routinely and cares about production time.Update: After many uses I hit some wood with it and snapped the shear so now I need to find a replacement tooth or it. It works well when I'm not trying to cut wood haha.

Love this tool! Quiet, fast, easy to use. Best part not much dust,

got here quick

This is my "tool of the year". I've been remodeling my home for three years, replacing basically everything. With a full time job, and considering that I do everything myself, it has been a relatively slowly moving project with a lot of free-time hours put into it. I installed tile in three bathrooms, laundry room, in the area next to the main entrance, and now working on the kitchen. In all cases, I used Hardibacker as an underlayment. The unusual thickness of the Hardibacker, 0.42" (compared to 1/2"), enabled me to exactly match the height of the tile stack and hardwood stack, so that the transition from tile to hardwood is perfectly flat - but this is another story. In the past years, I used a scoring tool to scratch and then break Hardibacker. This was quite a bit of work, it was slow, and it also was a dirty process, with lots of fine dust generated. The nastiest part of hardibacker installation for me has always been its cutting. This year I decided to buy a power shear and opted for Kett. It was literally like a dream come true. Cutting Hardibacker became pretty much like cutting paper with scissors. Fast, easy, and with much less dust. It made my work so much faster and so much easier.Now about the tool. It looks and feels like a drill with an attachment. To be fair, one has to say that there are several brands of fibercement boards shears on the market, and they all look about the same. This design works fine, you cut with one hand and use the other hand to support the piece which is about to fall off after cutting to prevent its breaking off (if needed). This is the case when you do not need a tool which you hold with two hands. You need your second hand for other things, and you need to see where you are cutting. The tool is not too heavy. The cutting speed is good, just as an estimate, a 3 ft cut across the sheet takes 15-20 seconds at the most. You cannot really make a turn while cutting, unless it is a fairly large radius curve, but you can also adjust the direction of the cut to stay on the line if you start drifting away. If you need not a straight line cut, you have to make multiple straight cuts. If you need to make corrections, you can trim off as much or as little as you need. I was able to trim off 1/8" or less without any issues.Learning curve - basically, none is required. The tool is easy to operate, easy to control. The only thing that I learned by trial and error is that Hardibacker will almost certainly break at the end of cut under its own weight unless I support the piece which I am cutting off. My solution was to cut to about the center from one end, then cut along the same line from the other end of the sheet, and support the loose piece with my other hand when the two lines of cut are about to meet.Amount of dust. Cutting with power shear is not an entirely dust free operation, some dust is there, but much less than when scoring. Preferably, one should still cut outdoors to not breath it.Compatibility with different types of material. I cannot comment on this because I tried it only with Hardibacker. I do not know how well it works with other types of cement boards.The advantage of Kett is that they make multiple tools which share the same motor (which in their lingo is a fancy word for the drill). If needed, one can buy different head sets and swap them on the same motor. I went down this path and got a vacuum head for drywall cutting (KSV) as well. The caveat here is that replacing the heads is a hard work, there is no quick release mechanism and sometimes one can use a mallet to get the head on or off. The fit is very tight. It is nothing like with modern tools, but one can still make it work after some learning curve and it is a cheaper way that buying two tools as full set.Built quality. I cannot tell who and where make the drill for Kett. It is not just any drill because it has a special steel neck which the head attaches to. The cutting head and the mounting hardware used to attach it to the drill are very accurately made, good quality steel with very tight tolerances. They make the impression that they were built to last. Cannot tell much about the drill itself. It does not look fancy, but it does its job.Storage case. None. The tool comes in a carton which is poorly designed for storage because it is long and it opens from one of the sides. A tube of lubricant and some wrenches are included, but without a proper storage case they are easy to lose. This is definitely a low point for the tool. A proper plastic storage container is so much needed!Manual. Since the tool is very easy to use, you do not really need it. For maintenance, the manual is adequate, but very concise. It is a double sided sheet, probably produced on a copy machine, with lots of reference to part numbers indicated on the drawing. Requires an effort to read, but contains all the key information. Improvement is possible for sure.Overall, I am very pleased with this power shears. I only regret that I bought it in my last year of remodeling project. I wish I had it three years earlier. That tool would've been of great help in the last few years!P.S. I have a fairly substantial collection of tools - a lot of Festool, quite a few Dewalt, some Bosch. I have seen how a good tool can improve productivity, but cases when improvement was so dramatic are quire few. This tool is one of such examples.

This is by far the best way to cut 1/2" cement board. Takes about 3 cuts to get a good feel for how it operates than it's a sure winner. My workers today said it's the best tool I have bought in years. The job we did with the backer-board took 2 hours, completely cut and installed. The same job we would have spent all day without this cutter. True time and labor saver. Now I don't know why I ever tried to cut the boards with a knife of jig saw.