is this a good deal?

In my 50 years experience with scroll saws I have used/owned many. To me, the old scroll saws are door stops when compared to the newer designs available today. The old saws used a spring to pull the blade up and machine power to pull it down. If you bind the blade while making a tight corner the spring fails to pull the blade up, but the machinery keeps pushing the blade up from below. The blade buckles and frequently breaks.

The newer design scroll saws don't use the spring to pull the blade up. The machinery pulls the blade both up and down. This lets you run much smaller blades and the blades almost never break. This concept is light years ahead of the scroll saw technology that existed before about 1985.

I suggest that you do considerable research before buying this saw and compare the designs of the DeWalt, Excaliber, Jet, etc. scroll saws of today to the technology that existed in the 1940's. Go try out that saw or one like it, then go to a Woodcraft or similar store and try out one of these newer saw designs. Yes, they are more expensive, but if you know what you are looking for you can find one of these newer design scroll saws on Craigslist for very little more than that Powermatic saw is selling for. I frequently use #1 and #1/0 blades on my DeWalt 788 and Delta Q3 saws to cut tiny 3D ornaments and jewelry. My blades almost always become dull before I need to replace them. I almost never break even these tiny blades. A #1 blade is about 0.010" thick and usually about 0.036" from tooth point to back. The old saws used blades with cross pinned ends which also limited the hole size that you could pass the blade through when making inside cuts. The minimum hole was about 1/8" diameter. With these #1 and smaller blade sizes they attach to the saw with clamps because there is no cross pin for the saw to grip, so the drilled hole size can be just a bit larger than the blade dimension. For the #1 blade I use a drill bit about 0.045" diameter to make the starter holes for it.

I have posted many of my tiny reindeer and jewelry projects. I just tried to attach a few photos of them here, but my crappy internet service isn't letting me upload them this morning. Do a search on my posts and look at some of the projects that I've posted over the last few years. You couldn't possibly cut any of these with that Powermatic scroll saw.

Charley