ToolBane

It doesn’t. In the product description it explicitly states it only charges sequentially. But that’s perfectly fine in my book, as I seldom need to charge more than one battery at a time anyway. The primary boon to me is fewer outlets and less work space taken up with chargers and tangled wire. Also, it’s rapid charging for both platforms is particularly relevant for CXT. While Makita’s default LXT charger is quick, their default CXT charger is annoyingly slow. They have a quick charger available but it’s never included in any kits; you can only buy it separately. Purchasing this particular charger on the other hand is killing two birds with one stone.

As is typical for the HD webpage, it’s appearing out-of-stock, but at least it’s there. Hopefully it comes sooner rather than later. I’d like to clean up my charging area.

Wow that’s a cool option going forward for companies using slide packs on their 12V tools instead of pods that go in the handle.

I’m glad you caught that I hadn’t even noticed

Which impact wrench? This isn’t something I would know precisely but 1.5Ah is likely to be not be “compatible” with any of the stronger ones. Although you can almost always simply remove a tab somewhere to allow the pack to slide in and the tool will run. That voids the warranty on the battery (if still even applicable) and the tool may not perform as high as the manufacturer ratings.

Honestly, if you really think that’s the extent of your use then a used corded drill is not a bad idea for what you’re talking about. Or even ask a friend if you can borrow one.

Makita, Dewalt, and Milwaukee all frequently have sales where you can buy either a drill or impact driver with compatible 18V battery and charger for $100. I saw a number of such Makita kits lingering in a Home Depot a couple days ago leftover from the last sale. They are more expensive platforms though and you were saying you didn’t want that, so I wasn’t going to mention. Something else to be aware of, if you do get whatever tool with a lithium battery that you seldom use more than once a year or whatever, is they are best stored at roughly half-charge. A few days or whatever doesn’t matter but weeks to months can/will shorten the longevity.

Well, if you really want a cord, maybe look at a used drill. I would imagine it to be quite easy to get ahold of a nicely-built Dewalt on the used market for cheap. As long as it isn’t too horribly abused, honestly I would probably trust it over a new budget brand model anyway. Especially if you have the know-how to take them apart and service them yourself, which might be the case for you. Personally I always felt cords were constrictive and wished for cordless as a junior high kid before cordless was even yet a thing. But I held off for ages even after they came out because the limitations of NiCad. Now the technology is finally settled in and capable for just about anything. Not being tied to a wall, having to fuss with extension cords, looking for which outlet is closest, having the cord flopping around on your project, catching on things causing you to scuff up or damage work pieces...it adds up. Being able to avoid all those things is so easily worth the price, even on something as straightforward as a drill. That’s my opinion.

Well buying a cordless drill ties you to a battery platform whether you like it or not. Just like buying a corded drill ties you to...a wall. But you can get a battery platform that ties you down less. If you get more then great, if you don’t you haven’t lost anything. If you’re really confident you won’t care then just get whatever’s cheapest. The only thing I see that’s potentially an issue is as you said, forstner bits for an 8V Ryobi. I have no direct experience with that product but speculatively I can see that being a problem for a low-budget 8V tool.

Ryobi, easy. Do the 18V. Even though the tasks you’re describing here can largely be handled competently by just about anything these days. Besides being cheap to get into, their 18V platform has SO many useful products with SO much everyday and/or outdoor utility. Even ignoring most of the “standard” home project-type tools, they have products like their mattress inflator which is so useful for camping (additional utilities of helping to build campfires, clear dust out of hard-to-reach corners etc), or their power inverter, glue gun, tire pump, Dremel station, or soldering iron. Then their outdoor One+ stuff that uses the same batteries like their lawn mower, hedge trimmers, etc. It’s such a huge selection and so inexpensive. Black and Decker comparatively is a complete dead end. It will definitely do the job but if you have no regular use for it you’ll just end up leaving it in a shelf for years lamenting the space it takes up. Then when you finally have another use for it you’ll pull it out only to find the batteries are shot and probably had been for years.

Also some sales prompted me to expand my 12V Makita line a little bit. These have been sitting around a couple weeks actually and I have yet to use them. The current project should allow me to mess around with them a bit though. For the sake of comparison, here are pics of the 12V CXT brushless drill-driver next to Makita’s compact drill (left) and full size (right). This CXT is just diminutive. My plan is to use them for travel as my parents frequently have repair projects for me to do every time I visit them. The jig saw is not terribly different in size from Makita’s brushless 18V, so I didn’t bother taking a comparison pic of it. I’ll be interested in seeing how much power it has. The 18V LXT has more than enough for my usual jigsaw purposes. This CXT costs less than half as much and is brushless, so if one isn’t bothered by the soft-start feature it’s probably a really good deal.

I’ve not been doing very well keeping up on these things, but here’s a pic of a Ryobi vacuum I got today. While I was previously thinking I’d bother getting a fancy-schmancy prosumer-grade unit (Makita X2, of course), ultimately I decided I don’t use my tools regularly enough as a DIY guy to justify all the bells and whistles for mere dust-clearing. Plus I have a project I have to hurry on and don’t want to have to order then wait for it to arrive, so I just grabbed what was in-stock. Perhaps predictably none of the coupling was going to work. What’s up with having tons of “universal adapters” available that aren’t compatible with anything? “Universal” is supposed to actually MEAN something? Way too much latitude allowed in marketing these days I dunno. Luckily I found a coupler in the plumbing section that fit the bill just fine. If anyone finds this useful. My previous vacuum couldn’t hook up to my tablesaw at all so this was a game-changer. Hooks up nicely to my miter saw too. My garage is actually cleaner now than it was before I started cutting.

It has been too quiet here. Likewise I don’t have much personal utility for this but it’s nice to see Makita is embracing brushless on a lot of new tools even specialty units that others are unlikely to release competing products against. I would like to see them release some current tools in brushless. I saw somewhere they’re releasing brushless versions of all their handheld vacuum cleaners. Hope they plan to do the same with their regular orbital sander (among other tools).

I’m interested in hearing more about this one too. What are your preferred speeds, and what are the run times on whatever size battery? That sort of stuff.

Well maybe you just gave them an idea. Email them and make sure they know where to send your bonus check. 😉😁

Well that’s too bad. Although I haven’t bought a damn thing from them I kinda like the idea of them thriving and growing into a bonafide rival to either Ryobi or Ridgid. Their range is narrow but their power tools are brushless and have pretty solid specs.

I expect this to be really unlikely. Since one of the most critical functions of impact wrenches is to break bolts loose that have been toques above a certain spec, these fluid-based impacts would give up way too much of their function with larger bolts. I supposed they *could* always do some for smaller nuts used for general, little things under the hood. But forget about taking lug nuts off or suspension work, etc.

I’m not sure if by “torque option” you mean variable speed, but if so their basic brushless has almost the same torque (1500vs1550) for cheap, especially as of this moment in this combo kit: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Makita-18-Volt-LXT-Lithium-Ion-Brushless-Cordless-Impact-Driver-Kit-with-1-Battery-3-0Ah-XDT131/301444914

I don’t know how prices go outside the US, but in the States, 3Ah and 5Ah are the value propositions. Besides simply being better values for the dollar out of the gate, they are the ones that go on all the sales and come in all the combos. It’s such a huge disparity I don’t know why anyone would buy either 4 or 6 at all. The 6Ah costs essentially twice as much as the 5Ah sans any discounts. The disparity doubles to 4 times when the sales go on. On top of everything else a decent number of people note the 6Ah doesn’t even seem to have as much “burst” as the 5Ah. Unless they’re on the verge of a pricing breakthrough no one knows about, I think they should discontinue the 4 and 6Ah units. Then adopt a spread of their range that loosely follows the golden ratio. Release an 8Ah that doesn’t price-gouge buyers. If it comes to make sense to release something after that, make it 12Ah. Unlikely to think they’ll need a 20Ah after that, but that would be the next step.

Well the Ridgid “Octane” unit is awfully recent and that was only shortly after the Gen-5 as it was. I doubt they’d have a larger one coming all that soon. Would be nice if they did though. Then maybe they’d get out of Ryobi’s way so Ryobi could release a 350-400ftlb brushless unit.

They do need to make some forward progress on this. In my book it wouldn’t take much. With X2 out there they don’t at all need 12Ah batteries. But a number of their single-battery tools would benefit from say 8 or 9Ah units. I really think they should take that step.

I totally understand the budget thing. How long, how frequently, and for what kinds of projects do you expect to use this? I have no familiarity with Lotus; what little I see on a brief google search suggests it doesn’t look so cheap I’d be uncomfortable with purchasing it. The tolerances of the plastic molding isn’t sloppy looking. It appears to have decent venting. Of course pics can be deceiving. Would you be buying from a store or online? What are your options to return if you check it out and find the real product does appear inadequate? I used my Dremel on and off for many years on tasks that were honestly probably too big for it. It’s worked consistently and is a safe purchase in my opinion. But I’d be much less concerned about a lower-price product being used just a few hours every other weekend, to clean edges or trim little doodads on plastic models or whatnot. Also, the less it costs, for better or worse I tend to have a lot less anxiety about yanking things apart to repair myself. I have a number of “premium”-ish tools these days and while it’s hard not to like the extra ergonomics and accuracy they have provided, when I look back on the days I used to mostly run less expensive tools due to budgetary constraints (which, to be honest, has been most of my life), it’s not like they ever couldn’t “do the job”. At my hobbyist-level of usage I’ve hardly ever had even budget tools outright fail on me. And this being a rotary tool, it’s not like there’s much there for a manufacturer to get wrong. You just have a motor, a switch, a plastic casing, maybe a speed adjustment...a lot of which they probably source from the same suppliers that their competitors are using. Sure there will at some point be a price below which they will likely have used excessively brittle plastic, cheap electricals, or a motor that isn’t up to the voltage/current it’s being asked to pass, but as long as you don’t see a bunch of online reviews citing frequent early failures with a product it’s hard to go seriously wrong in the grand scheme of things. Don’t run it too hard and back off the tool if it seems to get hot. And heck, even if it does fail say in a couple years, sometimes the fact that you’re left with a bunch of still-useful peripherals ends up making the money spent worth it anyway. Not trying to steer you in the direction of the Lotus but you probably don’t have to be too terribly afraid of it is my point. My opinion at least.

I’m not a rotary-tool connoisseur but some people say positive things about the Milwaukee 12-volt cordless. Also Ryobi came out with a cordless rotary station which is a different take on things but possibly very pragmatic for some. I have a Dremel (I believe an old 3000 model) and really liked it for a number of years but my desire for cordless inclined me to replace it.

I know that my cordless die grinder has a 1/4” collet available for it but it comes stock with a 1/8”. You could check and see if the part number is the same for both models. You could also try calling Makita’s service people directly. I’ve heard they’re extremely helpful.

Yup