Biggie

Well it did it again, the guys were pushing the drill pretty hard today and it went dead. No lights nothing. Has anyone experienced this with a dcd996? I mean from the little bit I've used it, it seems like a solid drill except now the electronics have crapped the bed twice. The drills only 2 years old and for $70 on ebay I can get a whole electronic assembly but now I'm debating if it's worth trying to stick another one in the drill or just scrap it and start over with a completely new drill.

This should calm my addiction until the stubby m12 wrench comes out.

Yea I don't get where they come up with 60% more power and up to 2x more speed under heavy load. My first use with the new drill I had about 60 holes in 2 pieces of 12ga steel. There were 3/8" holes punched in the steel that were about a 1/4 of a hole off and I wanted to upsize the hole to 7/16". I was running the drill in high speed as I would on any drill. On all 60 holes the drill would bind one time and shut itself off before drilling through the hole. Now to me this was a pretty heavy load being put on the drill and I'm not really knocking the drill because our dcd996 and gen 2 fuel bind and shut down the same way, I just don't think it has that much more power. The main reason I wanted the drill was for how compact it was with as much torque as the gen2 and it does deliver on that. On a side note, it did seem to do a good job of holding the bit tight without slipping as I know my 2703 and 2704 would have with all that binding but it's also a new chuck so time will tell.

I know the knarling looks like a rohm but when you get it next to a gen 1 or 2 you can tell it's a milwaukee chuck with a new grip sleeve.

I'm not real familiar with sizes of machine screws but I know in the past when I've needed a belt clip screw I just took one out of a tool and went down to my small town hardware store and they match one for me. I'm sure if you have the screw they have a hex nut for it because it seemed to be a pretty common size screw.

Practically the the same size as the milwaukee compact 2701 Fuel gen 1, 2, and 3

Bare tool 2803/2804 should come with a side handle and belt clip. First impression of the drill is I can't believe how small it is for the power it has it feels like a compact drill. I got a 2803 drill/driver and chuck jaws don't have the carbide inserts. Also for all the people hopeful that the new drills would have a rohm chuck it definately is not. I would say the knurl pattern has more grip to it and the sleeve itself doesn't feel as flimsy as on previous chucks. While it's not important to me I find it kind of strange that no ones made any mention of the electronic clutch.

Well one of two showed up today.

Just looked at acme and it says in stock and ships in 1 business day so I would assume we'll be getting them shortly.

Has anyone seen their pre order tools? I know most of the sites went from beginning of July to mid July but I didn't know if they just update the ship dates as they sell or if Milwaukee just delayed production.

Yea they have some tools that catch my attention with their ip56 ratings. But I don't get their marketing strategy, I mean they won't even put their triple hammer impact driver and hammerdrill together as a package in the US. I also can't find a decent 4 or 5 tool combo kit which if you're going to get someone into your tool line I think a combo kit is a good start.

I'm not sure if that's what's going on because now the battery doesn't seem to want to charge on my fast charger either. It flashes normal for a while and then it says it's charged but when I take it off the charger it still only has 1 bar. That being said it's worth a try maybe I'll mess with it some more tomorrow. Thanks

Well now the battery while it says it's charging and charged on the fast charger still only reads one bar so it was a problem with the battery. For future reference it started acting up for like a month before it finally quit.

We have have two dcb101 chargers on the truck with the 6.0 battery. So when the guys got back to the shop and said it wasn't charging again first thing I did was put it on a dcb115 charger and it started charging fine for like 10 seconds so I took it off and tried it on the two dcb101 chargers off the truck and sure enough it instantly started flashing fast "problem pack/charger". So then I took the battery and put it on my fast charger and that charged it up fine. Now the two dcb101 chargers will charge it fine for awhile until I think someone really drains it and then it like you have to jump start it again with a differnet charger.

I have a 20v 6.0 xr battery that doesn't alway want to take a charge on dcb101 chargers. It's happened a few times now where it's like it gets run down too low and flashes fast on the dcb101 chargers in the truck but then it charges fine on a fast charger and on a dcb115 charger I have in the shop. Once it's charged back up it charges fine on the dcb101 chargers for a week or so and then it throws the error again. This is on a truck I don't work out of everyday so at first I thought my guys were overheating it on site and then by the end of the day when they threw it on the fast charger in the shop it was taking a charge. But today they said it was doing it so when they got back to the shop sure enough wouldnt take a charge on either dcb101 but I threw it on the dcb115 and away it went charging. Has anyone else experienced this? The dcb101 chargers charge 5.0 and 4.0 batteries just fine but could they be more sensitive to a drained 6.0 pack. Or is there just a problem with the pack that the other chargers just aren't picking up yet?

That's kind of what I figured. I'm at a point with batteries where if I feel a power loss and the batteries at 1 bar I typically just change it versus trying to get that last bit of runtime out of the battery. Its just not worth killing a battery especially if i know ill need a new battery anyhow. That and I wont push this saw like a carpenter would.

Well I went ahead and ordered a 570 but I was watching a youtube video review and a guy said he thinks his has killed some 5 amp hour batteries and thinks you shouldn't run anything under a 6.0. Has anyone else had an issue with the saw killing batteries or did this guy just have some bad luck.

We use a lot of 6in metal sawzall blades. We had always used dewalt blades but about the time we started buying milwaukee tools we had our supplier ship out some milwaukee blades. Now these weren't the torch blades or anything but we were going through the milwaukee blades about twice as fast as the dewalts and at that time the dewalt blades were cheaper so we went back to dewalt.

Really how bad is this saw? I've been debating getting a circular saw for awhile and I wasn't real sure which way I wanted to go. I don't typically work with wood but I have a few shelving projects I want to do around the house and at my business we occasionally we do some concrete flat work where we form with 2x6 wood forms. I know the 575 is more than capable for my needs and I have a few flexvolt batteries but we have two trucks running on 20v at work so I would prefer to stay in the 20v just for simplicity of batteries. My only previous experience with circular saws were the old 18v dewalt cordless which were pretty much garbage. I had been going back and forth between the 575 and 570 as cpo dropped the price to $150 and $130. When I looked today I see they have a free 6.0 battery with the 570 as well as free shipping. I really want to pull the trigger on the 570 but after reading this review I kind of got scared that maybe I should be getting the 575.

If I'm reading it right the ridgid kit actually has 1- 4.0ah and 1- 2.0ah battery. As a homeowner this might be perfectly fine as you should get pretty decent runtime on the 4.0 battery but if you run out your 4.0 you will probably see pretty poor performance running the two saws on a 2.0. On the other had the 2.0 is nice to have on the drill and impact as it saves some weight and size. I probably shouldn't even say this because I have no experience one way or the other with the lifetime warranty but there was a time when I looked at ridgid for that reason but I found a lot of mixed reviews. It seems like some people have zero problems getting things warrantied but then you hear the horror stories of things not being covered or taking months to get a tool back. As a business I didn't think it was the way to go because if I had a tool fail I wouldn't want to wait a long time to get it back but as a homeowner that might not be as critical. On the other hand I've heard stories that if you have the right home depot you can pretty much just walk in with a broken tool and walk out with a new one. One thing that is for sure if you go with this kit make sure you register it. All that said I would still pick the Ridgid kit if I were in you're situation, I think it is the better kit.

I'd second a drill driver if you're really worried but we run #10 x3/4" tek screws into 14ga steel with impact drivers all the time and rarely have problems with striping. I have no experience with one key but the 2753 impact driver has a self tapping mode but I've never been able to get it to work right because it's designed for tapping into like 20-24ga steel. I have a surge but to be honest I've never tried using the self tapping mode so I couldn't tell you what gauge steel it's optimized for. I was kind of excited to see that the new impact that's coming out in July is supposed to be optimized for 14-10 ga steel so maybe it'll work better for me. I personally have found the auto modes on impact drivers and wrenches to be finicky at best but once you learn how to run one they're not that hard to control in just a normal mode.

I'm thinking I'll probably wait until I get my gen 3 drill and then I'll try send it in to see what happens. They did change the side handle design on the gen 3. It's not like dewalt but it looks like a more solid design. If I remember right in one of the videos from nps2018 the milwaukee rep even comments about how the side handles a new tougher design. So obviously they've had some issues with the gen 2.

In their defense I was pushing the tool hard when it happened. I had a 1/2" slotted hole in a 1/4" plate of steel that I had to upsize to a 5/8" for an anchor bolt. I had 14 holes to drill and I knew the bit was going to catch multiple times but I was in the field with no other real options. So I don't really feel the need to push the issue as to weather or not they should fix it I just thought if others had sent it in and got it fixed with no issues I might send it in.

One thing to keep in mind when looking at all of these brands is that most of the outdoor equipment is going to run best on their higher amp batteries. I'm just guessing that coming from black and decker you've been using 2.0 or less a/h batteries so even a 5.0 will give you a good bump in run time on the trimmer. But as a maintenance/homeowner you might find that a slim pack battery is all you really need/want on a drill. Long story short you might find that while you can run both on the same battery you might be happier having a couple different size batteries.