Castle versus Ritter

[guy knight]

its time to upgrade to a production pocket hole machine i am wondering what the major difference's are between the castle 21 and the ritter 201t are and would the ritter 202t with the 5 degree pocket versus the 14 degree be an advantage
if anyone has used them i would love your pros and con on them

Guy

[Stephen Cherry]

Guy, I looked at the differences between pocket holers a while back, and it's like a Hatfield vs McCoy fued. Some people like the pocket of the castles, made by two cutters using a router bit and a high speed drill bit. Others like the simplicity of the process of the basic ritter and kreg machines with a single stepped drill bit. It looks like the ritter 202t takes the castle approach. If you look over at woodweb, they have a thorough debate on the topic. The low angle michines claim to have less shift while the screw is inserted. The ritter 202t has a computer to control the cycle. Good luck if that goes bad or looses it's brains in 10 or 15 years.

I've got the kreg dk1100, a pnumatic single hole, single bit machine, similar in function to the ritter 201t. It's a great, light weight machine, built with all good stuff in it. I've also got a ritter line boring machine, and can tell you that the ritter machines are built much heavier. If you had the kreg machine with a low base, you could carry it to a job site, if that's important. The kreg machine drills a hole about as quick as you can imagine. My impression is that the castle machine would be a little slower, but that is not to say it would be slow. Maybe the difference is between very fast, and super fast.

[guy knight]

pulled the trigger on the castle 21 3199.00 should have got it at the show lol
i asked my guy about the ritter and he said they might be having a problem he has had trouble getting items from them and has heard the same from a few other vendors so i went with castle should be here n a week

[Stephen Cherry]

Whoo hoo. I don't think you could have gone wrong either way. Once you use the machine for a few pocket holes, you'll be glad you took the plunge.

[Charles Brown]

I've used both and think the Ritter, in my opinion, is a bit of a better machine. The one annoying thing about the Ritter was finding new replacement drill bits as they were a weird size. Once dialed in, it was pretty simple to use. One thing I did not like the ritter was if you left your foot on the pedal, the drill bit would stay engaged and spinning. If you were really cruising through the production process you could get into a rhythm and it was alright. I just hated shortening the life of the tooling unnecessarily.

I didn't like the Castle because after a while the pneumatic trigger wouldn't always fire (more like slam) the router into the workpiece and you wouldn't have a pocket drilled. You'd hear the release of the air but the machine wouldn't shake the same way as it did when the router properly worked. I found the Castle to be fussy. It was later replaced with a Kreg version that worked fine.

Either machine made pocket holes just fine. From what I could tell, neither one pocket was better than the other.

[Stephen Cherry]

Either machine made pocket holes just fine. From what I could tell, neither one pocket was better than the other.

There have been huge debates on all of this, with fighting words exchanged. Bottom line, they will all drill a hole. My opinion is that the castle would drill a little nicer hole, and the cost of this is a little more complicated machine. All machines need to be looked after though, so it would be expected that a little tuning would be in order occaisionally. It took me several hours to go through my kreg machiene, but now I know how it works.

[Rick Fisher]

I have the pneumatic Kreg .. Never tried the others. It works fine but uses a pile of air ..

[Larry Browning]

I think all that needs to be said is that anybody with the last name of Knight, the obvious choice is the Castle. I just sayin!