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There comes a time in every woodworker’s journey when moving beyond basic butt joints and starting to play with stronger and more refined joinery methods becomes desirable. However, while options like tongue and groove joints, mortise and tenon joints, rabbet joints, and dovetail joints are all great, they can be time-consuming and have a high margin for error. One alternative is to use a biscuit joiner. This easy-to-use device carves out slots in either side of the wood, allowing you to insert ovular wooden discs called biscuits and glue it all together. Biscuit joiners help the woodworker to quickly achieve an invisible form of joinery with near-flawless alignment. It’s one of many products found at Home Depot that just about every woodwoorker should have in their shop, and you want to make sure you choose a good one.

The Home Depot-affiliated brand Ryobi makes one of these joinery tools. The company used to sell the solo JM82GK Biscuit Joiner, but now the $169.00 JM83K 6 Amp Biscuit Joiner Kit is the only model that it appears to have on the market. However, those interested in picking up one of these essential woodworking power tools so they can advance their skills might want to learn a bit more about it before making a purchase.

One of the first things that most people are going to want to know is exactly what they get for that $170 price. The tool itself is corded, so you won’t need to worry about the extra cost of batteries. It’s powered by a 6-amp motor, capable of delivering up to 11,000 RPM. The blade is adjustable and has positive stops to help you to cut #0, #10, and #20 biscuits with precise depth. The angle can be adjusted as well, allowing you to cut anywhere from 0-135-degrees. This has positive stops as well, for exact 0-degree, 45-degree, 90-degree, and 135-degree angles. This is important if you plan on joining any sort of mitered cuts, rathe than just gluing up tabletops. The tool also has a metal fence with rack-and-pinion adjustment and an ergonomic handle.

As for the rest of the kit, the biscuit joiner comes with a storage bag, a dust collection bag, and a starting set of #10 biscuits. The starting set of biscuits is hard to value, but the Ryobi canvas tool bagthe OEM dust bag generally go for about $15 each, so this is an added value of over $30.

Overall, the set is significantly more expensive than the Wen 8.5 Amp Plate and Biscuit Joiner ($51.96) or the Grizzly Industrial 5 .9 Amp, Corded Biscuit Joiner ($120.95), which are among the lower priced budget options. However, it’s much more affordable than the DeWalt 6.5 Amp Heavy Duty Plate Joiner Kit ($229.99) or the Makita 6 Amp Corded Plate Joiner ($259.00).

It’s also worth taking a look at what customers have had to say about the Ryobi 6 Amp Biscuit Joiner Kit before you get one for your woodworking shop. The kit has a 4.3 out of 5 on the Ryobi site, though it only has 13 reviews there thus far. However, there are 342 reviews on the Home Depot site where it has a flat 4 out of 5, though only 72% of reviewers stated that they would recommend the tool to others and a full 43 of those reviews were only 1-star. This generally seems to be on the lower end compared to other Ryobi power tools.

There are multiple 5-star reviews on both sites from satisfied customers who reported that the tools is powerful enough to do it’s job and functions as intended. That said, there are also multiple complaints about the precision of height and angle adjustment feature, as well as the tightening mechanism. There are also a few scattered reports complaining about the dust bag clogging easily and coming off, as well as complaints about the build plate height, the sharpness of the blade, the slots being misaligned, or the cuts simply being uneven. All together, it makes this a hard tool to immediately recommend, as precision is paramount to the utility of a biscuit joiner.