I got the Bluetooth speaker from Menards online. I love it. I charge my cellphone and listen to podcasts while I work. The small battery gives me nearly a day of audio.
Some of the bigger tools, like vacuums or table saw do. Unfortunately the little tools are too cluttered with miscellaneous Bluetooth circuits to fit both AC and DC motors or more reasonably AC to DC converters.
I think the main issue for the companies is that power adapters have a nearly unlimited lifespan in comparison to lithium batteries, so it would be less profitable for them to sell you a direct attached power adapter than a bunch of batteries and a charger where you have to keep crawling back to them when the batteries inevitably give out in three years.
It would be trivial to design a blank battery attachment with a DC jack, and just have it hooked up to what is essentially a beefed up laptop charger. There are plenty of applications where a corded tool is perfectly adequate and even superior to cordless tools, so the fact that none of the manufacturers have it as an option hints that it was a business decision as opposed to merely an oversight.
I imagine the same as every single laptop in existence. A big brick that sits on the floor and a very long cord.
Why couldn’t that work?
Other tools are way more power hungry than a drill. Someone gave me a m12 Vacuum as a gift and it can’t run for more than 15 minutes on battery which makes it extremely limited. Inside a customer’s home that is all I need but at home it’d be great to run it as a dust collection for a table saw.
I wonder how easy it is to DIY something like that. Like would it be as easy as picking up an off the shelf power supply with the right voltage and current and 3D printing an attachment that fits into the battery slot with a DC jack on the side (or even just gutting a dead battery pack and taking out the batteries and control electronics, soldering a DC jack straight onto the main contacts, and drilling a hole for it to poke through)? Or do modern power tools actually need to authenticate the battery with some kind of tool DRM?
Yes, Festool do one for their sanders. A battery tool is usually more expensive and less powerful than a mains powered tool though, so I’m not sure what the advantage of this would be.
I think I have a pancake air compressor from Wen. It was the cheapest I could find on Amazon and the gauges are broken from shipping but it does work so…
Couple years back I went to the graduation party of a kid my step daughter was friends. The dad had an entire wall pegboarded out with every possible Ryobi cordless tool. It was honestly impressive. And he had one Makita tool. Made me laugh.
I’m in that fifth house that no-one ever seems to talk about: BOSCH.
J/K, I’m mostly Bosch, but I look towards whichever manufacturer makes the best version of a tool I currently need. For example, my chainsaws and yard/orchard power tools are Stihl, my lawnmower is Husqvarna, my circular saw, worm drive saw and abrasion/steel cutoff saw are all Skilsaw (not Skil!), and my oscillating multi tool is Fein.
Plus, many of the domestics are vintage, from before production was outsourced out of America, which makes them much more reliable and robust than modern tools. Even some of the other tools are vintage – my Stihl 076 Super can cut through a 60cm log like a hot knife through butter. And I have both 36″ and 72″ bars to go with it.
I always lean towards Bosch where possible, mainly because of their charitable work. The founder set things up so that it’s perpetually funded from the company profits. That just appeals to me as the tiebreaker when deciding between a bunch of similarly priced tools that will otherwise do the job well enough.
That said, I tend to go for corded options where practical. I have some corded tools that I’ve owned for over thirty years now that still get occasional use. Battery tools are convenient for their portability, but they do have a limit to their useful life.
That would put me in the Sixth House (seems like we’ve jumped ship from the Potterverse to the Locked Tomb series now?) as a Metabo HPT user – at least for battery-operated tools. I’ve got no allegiances when it comes to corded power tools, though – got everything from Harbor Freight only-need-it-for-one-job specials to DeWalt saws and routers, and a big ol’ Craftsman drill press I inherited from my grandfather.
Corded can be great! I have corded Bosch for anything in my workshop - why would I need batteries for a location with dozens of sockets? - and use batteries mainly in the field or where cords would start to get impractical. Plus, where the manufacturer only makes a battery version of the tool. The Bosch PROFACTOR GDS18V-740N, for example, only comes in a battery version. No corded version exists.
But when it comes to battery power tools, you have to pick a brand and stick with it, unless you’re John D Rockefeller with 6 types of charger and a billion battery packs.
Even within a brand, you usually contend with at least two different battery packs - 12v and higher - and even more if you keep your tools in good condition and their connection types are obsoleted before you buy more tools.
But Ryobi and Milwaukee are both owned and manufactured by the same company TTI, they’re practically the same tools just with a different plastic shell
Owned by same company does not mean same tool. I own a bunch of m12 fuel and some Ryobi too. My Milwaukee stuff kicks the pants off of Ryobi but it is also a lot more expensive.
The AEG sub compact cut off tool, for example, is also sold as an M12 tool, and under the Ryobi name. Most of the AEG sub compact stuff shows up elsewhere in the TTI range, if you know where to look.
My battery drill, for example, had identical specs to a Milwaukee drill.
We have Volkswagen and Skoda at our place and there are a lot of common parts under the skin. The towbar electrics module I added to the Skoda is badged Audi.
I wasn’t talking about skoda/Audi/seat/Volkswagen because those are similar. I was using different examples to prove my point that not “all” things owned by same company is the same shit
Notice in my example they are all VAG brands but make completely different types of vehicles.
On top of Ryobi tools, when my Dyson cordless vac battery stopped holding a charge, I bought a Ryobi -> Dyson adapter, and now my Dyson vacuum also uses Ryobi batteries. Wife was really impressed with it because you can just swap out a new battery and keep on vacuuming. Also the vacuum actually make use of that battery way more than any of the actual power tools I have.
I’ve found that any project my Ryobi isn’t suited for is a project I would have opted to hire a professional anyway. 99% of people can get away with Ryobi 99% of the time. That remaining 1% really isn’t worth the increased price from brands like Dewalt.
Maybe I am a gorilla but every time I buy Ryobi - it breaks before the first job is done.
I got a Ryobi pressure washer and not even 2 hours into washing - it exploded like a fuckin bomb. Home Depot gave me a refund for the pressure washer but not my pants.
Same… it’s hard to justify getting the most expensive tools when I only use them once every 3-6 months. If other people want to spend their money keeping up with tool brands that’s a competition I’ll gladly lose. Got better things to spend my money on.
They are fine for anything which doesn’t require precision. I have a Ryobi bench sander and it’s a complete waste of time. Same with the chop saw I unused to have. It was basically impossible to get flush miters from it no matter how much you adjusted it - the tolerances were just too low. My DeWalt table saw and Chop saw don’t have the same issues. They cut sub-mm precision on day one and still do years later. The table saw in particular is technically a worksite saw, buy you can use it to build cabinets with the right blade.
This was me, with my few random ryobi tools, until I needed something new and saw one of those big combos of several tools from DeWalt was half price. So I lucked out being in the right place at the right time and got the best of both worlds.
Fortunately I already have like 4 DeWalt batteries. Somebody gave me a couple as a gift some time after I got the tool set. We definitely still have a Ryobi battery or two around as well!
Interestingly I have a first generation Bosch Uneo (green consumer device, non changeable battery). Uneo is a consumer level cordless screwdriver and pneumatic hammer drill hybrid, it will easily put up to four to six holes into concrete walls (enough for home use when hanging something, but afterwards it’s empty and needs to be recharged)
The Uneo is one of my most useful tools for occasional use, and I know of no other brand which offers a similar tool which fulfills those roles in a non-craftsman home.
If you regularly build stuff its battery is too weak, but I use it a few times a year. Hang a picture, lamp or a wall cupboard in my apartment (which partly has concrete walls in this high-rise building) - not a problem.
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