Kreg 520 Pro vs 720 Pro

We use pocket hole joinery in the classes I teach all the time. And one of the things that's come up in classes is the 720 system and the 520 system, and what's the deal with this? So I wanted to take a second, and I figure if people in my classes are asking me this, other people are probably wondering the same thing. So 720 here, 520 here, and one broad brush stroke way to separate them would be bringing the work to the tool, bringing the tool to the work. So in the 720's case, we can set that up as a bench top pocket hole machine.

And with 520, it's a little bit easier with this one to take it to whatever it is that you're trying to do. So let's go over a couple things. One, at the end of the day, they're both going to very effectively drill pocket holes for you, so you can do pocket hole joinery. Let's look at what's cooking with this 720 right here. The way I've got this set up, this is crazy simple.

The wings are out here fastened to a plywood board. So you can imagine now I've got a pocket hole station. I could add this clamp here, and I could secure this to a bench. And then let's take this a step further. If this was the top of a small cabinet with drawers in it, I could have all of my pocket hole accessories in that cabinet and really have a complete pocket hole station.

What's neat about this is it's modular. So this can come off, like this. And one of the things that's cool about this jig is you can use it this way, and you can also use it this way. So that ability to remove it from the mount easily still gives you the versatility of being able to use it in either configuration. And in this one, there's still accommodation here for clamping it.

So I still have that opportunity. But if I was setting up in my shop a spot where I'm gonna bring my face frame components, my project components to the jig, I would wanna set up the 720 like this. With the 520, just looking at it and the manner in which it works, it's pretty intuitive to see that if I had a large panel, and I needed to take the jig to the panel, rather than the panel to the jig, it would be easier to bring this to work in progress, get it in position, drill the holes, than it would be with the 720. The 520 also offers a clamp capability. So we can still secure this to a bench or whatever we need to secure it to, but the ability of this to not only be more portable, but also what we get from being able to manipulate the handle in different configurations is gonna make this much easier to use in an onsite type setup.

So again, I think it's real important to understand that both of these are set up to make it crazy simple to do pocket hole joinery. Love the self-adjusting feature on this one. But again, broad line in the sand here would be setting up a station, I would prefer to do that with the 720. Having this on hand so that I could take it to the work is gonna be very, very convenient, and it's gonna give you that versatility from that product. So there's some separation, some lines in the sand, or in the pocket holes, between these two products.