Tool: 18V Brushless Cordless Compact 1/2 in. It might be easy to criticize those drills for their lower numbers, but there’s nothing wrong with technology to prevent damage and extend the life of the tool. The results reflect how many holes they drilled prior to the safety measures being engaged. Those three, the Hercules, Hoto, and Milwaukee, were perfectly fine after cooling down for a short time. Half of the drills we tested drained their battery entirely, and the other half were stopped by heat cutoff sensors in the drill. Here again, the current crop of drills completely outperformed their fore-bearers. Instead, we ran them at low speed with the clutch set to drill mode. The self-feeding spade bits we picked up were pulling too quickly for the high-speed setting on every drill, causing them to stall. The second part of the test, drilling 1 “ holes with a spade bit, ran into a bit of a snag from the start. Since no other drill suffered this issue, we let the results stand as is. The highest clutch setting didn’t have enough torque to drive a single lag screw. The Bosch came up with a big ole zero in this test. Even the sole brushed tool in our test, the Hercules, just kept going and going. The combination of half-full battery meters and sore arms made us cut off testing at that point. All of the testers drove those 60 screws, unscrewed them, then drove them an additional time for 120+ lags driven for each drill. We had a bag of 60 lag screws for each drill. They even beat the average number of screws driven in an 18v comparison from 2008. Every drill (except one, more on that in a moment) drove more lag screws than any of the 12v drills we tested in 2009. The results were impressive, to say the least. Then to stress test the motor and battery, we would see how many 1 “ holes could be drilled into 1 3/ 4 “ poplar at the highest speed. To test battery life, we would see how many 1/ 4 ” by 1 1/ 2 “-long lag bolts each drill would drive into poplar on the lowest speed, and highest clutch setting. We decided not to reinvent the wheel with the testing regiment. Our goal was to try and find out if there was a new Goldilocks zone in the drill market. We weren’t looking to see if the 12v drills would match the more powerful tool but instead to see if a compact 18-volt drill could match the ease and comfort of the smaller drills. Supply chain issues meant a few would-be competitors had to miss out, and we decided to throw in a wildcard with a bigger drill. We reached out to all of the usual players (and some new ones) and ended up with five 12v drills and one compact 18v. Twelve volts is all most people need, and the smaller, lighter package means they’re easier to work with as well. We decided to look at 12v drills, which are still the underdogs of the power tool world. Maybe it was the lack of perceived technological advancement, or maybe interest just dried up, but it’s been 13 long years.Ĭlearly, it was time to get the band back together and see what was new. And then, for whatever reason, we stopped doing them in 2009. There was an almost comforting familiarity in seeing the latest and greatest put to the test every 18 months or so. There was a point in time when drill comparisons were ubiquitous in the pages of this magazine. We take a look at six drills to see what sort of progress these tools have made in the past decade.
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