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…
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 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.
DeWalt for drills, etc… I used to work in a hardware store (a small town store, not a Lowes/HD big box place) and sold DeWalt, so that’s what I gravitated toward when I was buying tools for myself.
For those who hate being stuck with one brand because the batteries are so expensive you can buy adapters to convert between them. For instance I use a rigid battery with a ryobi tool etc and it works great! I’ve seen adapters for working between most of the brands since almost all the tools are 18V. I’ve seen ones that jump between lower voltages and higher ones which is a bit sketchier but are likely fine as well. www.google.com/search?q=power+tool+battery+adapte…
IIRC, that might be because their quality & reputation took a dip for a while. They were, after all, a Sears brand, and Sears got run into the ground by some blood-sucking leadership.
That said, they used to have a great reputation, and were sold to Black & Decker in 2017, who seem to be handling the line up much, much better.
B&D makes tools for people who hang pictures… I’ve never seen a b&d tool on a job site or even handle the bare minimum for anything more than little house projects. DeWalt is like the lowest grade stuff that most guys use in construction, but even those are starting to have QC issues and durability drops.
I landed in DeWalt when their cordless devices became as good as/better than corded tools; I standardized on their battery platform only for them to abandon my battery and roll out a new (incompatible) one. Shortly thereafter my batteries bricked and it seems the business model is to force consumers to buy new tools every so often
FML I hate it that they’re all proprietary and incompatible
I know cords are a bit of a pain, but rotating batteries and keeping them charged is also a bit of a pain, and at least the pain of cords ensures that you always have a tool to use when you need it. Also electrical outlets have been standardized for more than a century now.
Exactly. Cordless drills are super convenient and super cheap. For anything more heavy duty than that, I want something corded (which usually has the added advantage of being both cheaper and available in good condition second-hand).
You can buy adapters for literally any battery to any other battery type. They’re all over Etsy and Amazon. Torque test channel even does a test to see how much performance you lose from them, along with building a monster battery pack that uses all the brands batteries at the same time.
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