Between sale price and coupon, the price was low enough that I took the plunge and bought the HF 2HP DC.

--Starting with assembly:--

You end up doing quite of bit of assembly with this unit, not just 2 or 3 connections.

The very first thing I did when unpacking the unit was to plug the motor in to make sure it ran. Sometimes with HF, you can get little surprises and I din't want to assemble the whole thing and then discover the motor didn't work. It fired right up, no problems. I've seen talk on the internet that the motor can be wired for 220v, but it's a 115v motor, not 220v. However, that said, I didn't look extremely close at the motor. If someone really wants to know, send me a msg and I'll be happy to go out and take a closer look

The casters were solid, the base plate is painted metal (black). The the main bag for the hardware (screws/nuts/bolts, etc) was ripped, so I spent a few minutes digging it all out of the crevices of the box. It was all there barring a couple of screws and bolts. Fortunately, I had what was missing. The overall paint job on the unit was pretty good.

I could make a bunch of jokes, but I'll state that the instructions aren't written well at all and will leave it at that. But between the instructions and looking at the exploded diagram at the end of the manual, it was all logical enough. The assembly is involved, but wasn't really difficult. I went slow (mostly because it was Saturday and I was still tired from a week of overtime at work).

The manual speaks of bolting the collector supports (item #14 in the exp diagram) and then tightening the nuts underneath. However, the holes in the black base plate are threaded and no nuts were supplied. This isn't reflected in the manual. The bolt protrudes through the plate enough that nuts could be added. I'm thinking I will do this as the supports, while reasonably secured, still have a little sway. This makes one want to be careful when pulling the DC around by the supplied handle.

One thing I would suggest that when mounting the fan housing (item #38 on the exploded diagram), loosely bolt the "motor base" (item #5 on the exploded diagram) to the fan housing THEN bolt down the fan housing to the black base. Bolt the "motor base" to the black base, then tighten up the bolts that you loosely bolted the "motor base" to fan housing. Keeps everything lined up. Makes it easier. Manual isn't that clear about this. Again, the manual speaks of tightening the nuts when mounting the fan housing and motor base to the black base plate, but the holes are threaded in the black base and no nuts were supplied.

When connecting the bottom collection bag, there are 3 little black tabs that are supposed to hold the collection bag while you install the clamp. The tabs don't do a good job of holding the bag, but 3 or 4 small pieces of masking tape held the bag just fine until the clamp was on. I would suggest doing this. It made clamping the bag easy.

Unit comes with a 5 micron bag. Many have suggested replacing with a 1 micron bag (available on Amazon.com for ~ $25 at the time of this review). I'm thinking I'll get a 1 micron bag, but I wanted to wait until I had the DC assembled before purchasing.

---Operation---

The Inlet is 4" and I hooked it up to my BT3 using a 2-1/4" hose. My shark guard was wearing out so I replaced it with the original blade guard and replaced my zero clearance plate with the original throat plate.

I fired up the unit. It's not that loud, considering. I ran some cuts on MDF and cedar. I must admit that I was really impressed. There wasn't any dust on the saw table and I could see it circulating around in the collection bag. It definitely out performed my shop vac/cyclone can combo. My shop vac was one of the bigger units and did a good job in the past. The DC was a definite step up.

If the DC continues to function w/o incident, I can definitely recommend it.