paulengr

The truck with all keyed chucks is get the proper fitting chuck key and turn it as tight as you can but eventually they all wear out and have to be replaced which is inexpensive if you do it yourself. The tricky part is always figuring out how to remove the chuck.

First it’s not there for climate reasons. I have used them in lights for hours in 110 degree engine rooms in meat packers. It’s there because the battery can put out very high peak power for short periods of time but if it is used this way for too long it overheats. That way you can get massive starting torque to say break a screw loose (static friction is 300% of dynamic friction) for a couple seconds but if you say bury a cutoff wheel in a grinder it will shut down the tool so the battery doesn’t burn up. If all you use it on is.a light and nothing motorized, POSSIBLY no problem but this is one side only. A lot of quick chargers also work by controlling temperature. They charge at a high rate or crank up the charging until the battery gets hot or they slug it with a known safe current until the battery overheats as a way of detecting that it is mostly charged then backing off to trickle charge the rest of the way. No way to tell unless you are intimately familiar with how the charger in question works. There are many methods of sensing temperature (RTD, thermocouple, PTC, thermal switch). A couple of these can easily be misidentified as just a piece of thin wire. Or the fake battery might just have a jumper in it to fool the temperature protection in the first place. I don’t know if the tools have their own temperature sensors to prevent damage to the tool. So if for instance the battery is far more sensitive to overheating than the motor the tool might just use the battery protection to protect the tool motor too. So if it is disabled it can wipe out your tool under hard use depending on how the tool is designed. My tools are how I earn a living. Think Swamo Loggers because those guys are in my service territory. My job frequently takes me places where Home Depot isn’t around. Just getting onto a log crane is a 15+ minute production, Never mind say prison security. They’re not going to be happy with me if I show up to do a job with a Chinese battery. It’s one thing if the battery fails I’ll just grab another. But if the tool fails I’m looking at two hours or more just to get back and forth to a store in a lot of places. The local saw shop or feed and seed can get nearly anything in a couple days but doesn’t have it on the shelf. I buy and use the most dependable tools I can afford for a reason. If I’m on the job the customer is paying about twice what the other guy charges. That means professional uniform, professional attitude, professional tools. Yesterday the customer was a yarn plant. They were drooling all over my Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

First a little on my organization philosophy. As a kid I was the one where nobody ever knew that I had carpet. My brother and I just dumped everything on the floor. Mom would always yell at us about cleaning up. I see a LOT of contractors like that. They love bigger vans and trucks, even panel trucks because that means the pile of crap can be even larger! There is organization there, believe me. I knew where almost everything in my room was at and just which pile to dig in to get it. But now the thing is I’m in and out of the vehicle every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Multiple trips to the vehicle, whether neatly organized or using the “pile” system quickly take a toll on my feet, my back, and on my professional appearance. I can’t possibly carry all the tools I need let alone finding the one I need without an organization system. So I’ve been accused of being overly organized but it works much better. I hate it when I have a week straight of jobs that go so late that faced with spending an hour repacking back where it goes or spending 5 minutes throwing everything onto the truck and getting an hour with my kids I end up throwing it on the truck until eventually I’m approaching the pile system again. The thing with a van is it LOOKS like a huge space, I mean width is about the same but a “full size” nonextended van has about 9 feet of length and about the same width as a pickup. A standard long bed pickup is about the same. You get a little more cab for clean and dry space with a short box crew cab but overall about the same square footage. The magic in the van though is it’s dry AND you need to think vertical. A standard height van is about 4 feet and extended heights can be more where on the truck you get maybe 12” side boxes and 24” of bed height so the van has more in theory if you can use it. But normally unless you block the side door (and access) and somehow add shelves, you fit more in a pickup. There I said it. There are other issues with trucks. Security for one in overnight stays and weather for another but Toughsystem boxes help with both. But like it or not for the most part they don’t fit well into most side boxes or bed boxes. I can’t see a practical way to adopt the racking system so the Toughsystem in a truck becomes pile system 2.0. You can organize each box by task, materials, etc., but in the end that’s where the organization stops. The bed of the truck is still the pile system. It’s just a pile of boxes. This works extremely well both on the job site working with a table and a pile of TS boxes but it’s a small pile compared to the vehicle. At most I might have to move 3 boxes to get to the bottom one. So I looked at van storage systems. There are a ton of what amounts to a shop shelving system with metal shelving units running $300-500 each or all kinds of home made versions of the same idea. The trouble is it’s a mobile shop. If I was truly working out of the vehicle where I have the van parked right next to the work, a mobile shop would be awesome. As soon as the job site is on the second floor, 100 yards away, I am stuck pulling tools and loading up carts. May whole organization system collapses unless I can bin/box/bag everything and just carry the kitted tools and materials. I mean just because you have a drawer that holds your hammers, are you a carpenter and you just load your tool belt/saddle bags with the hammer of the day and go? I’m a field engineer so I have thousands of dollars in tools. I basically have the entire tool aisle on my vehicle and then some. If I went this route I’d spend all day just unloading and loading, and I’d be sorting through the big unorganized tool cart every time. No thanks! On top of that is the mobile safety issue. Lots of guys try to adopt shop shelving which is a fraction of the cost of mobile it’s cheap because it only has to hold a vertical load, barring an earthquake or two. But all it takes is one idiot on the road and half your stuff is back into a pile system, and the shelving unit is maybe a pile of scrap too. Hopefully you spent money on the cargo wall so it didn’t all shoot into the cab and hit you. So far it looks like I’m sold on the tool box systems. I like Toughsystem as they’re king if the hill for ruggedness because my customers are heavy industrial plants, utilities, wood plants, mines, the kinds of places that chintzy Sortimo has no place. Many of my 1/2” and larger sockets won’t fit into little T-Stak drawers so I’m Toughsystem all the way. So van racking is a natural. You just grab a box by the side handles and slide it onto the rack. As the handles drop the hole in the handle where your hand goes locks around a bump on the rail and locks the box in. Just bump the box back a little and grab it by the side handles to remove. Very simple and obviously hugely supports my organization ideas. It goes even further. Each rail (one on each side of a box) holds to a 1x2” square tubing rack with two bolts and they are hinged. The square tubing is actually more like a full C channel and there are two pieces with one nested in the other and a set of 3 short pieces of the larger channels included. There are also enough straps to attach to both top and midpoint of each rack plus feet to attach to the floor. The straps are Sortimo “Ecofix” straps. If you measure the boxes they are 22” long (wide) so with space to grab on at best they can be maybe spaced 26-28” apart. This is important because nowhere does Dewalt tell you that you won’t get anywhere close to this and a lot of their photos and YouTube video makes it look that good. On the box it says 39” minimum horizontally and this is the one and only place I’ve seen this number that I can find. Not sold in stores of course so you won’t get this number until you buy one.So in a 9 foot van cargo area or 108” it seems like 4 racks would easily fit on one side. Or using Dewalts crazy 39” number with no overlap of the Evofixx brackets, 2 units at most. But I can tell you this is all lies and so is all the photos and YouTube video. Because if you follow the instructions Dewalt states none of the feet can be on the wheel well “jump” or on the gas tank and they have to go against a wall, not floating. So that means zero racks on the right side of a standard van and exactly one on the left. If Dewalt is listening this doesn’t bode well for sales. Sortimo has the same restriction but they sell a full length racking system with feet at the ends and offset from the center so it just goes right over the wheel well. To be fair I have experience from my wild days four wheeling with big tires and cutting out or reinforcing or extending fenders so I did some reinforcing and some reshaping of two feet. This gave me 3 racks with about 8-10” between each rack, I mounted hooks and filled the slots with ropes, cords, chain, and a small scaffold at the front. So nothing lost horizontally except I really wanted 4+ rows like the Internet photos. Also there is a huge (4-6”) space behind each rack where you can stash some flat stock and underneath where some tool bags can be stashed. I put hose reel hooks over it to hold long tools like levels. Second space issue is theoretically there are holes drilled about every 3/4” and you can hang a box “anywhere”. It comes with 3 rails for boxes. So they show pictures of a huge “wall of boxes” and you can buy spare rails. Again not true! Depending on how flat you can get the Ecofix brackets they may or may not block boxes from sliding in. But the worst is that there are two cross bars that also take up 4 holes worth of space, and they can’t just go on the top and bottom. So boxes need to be above or below them. But you can still stack boxes as long as you pay attention to weight limits on the rails. So without stacking and contending with a wheel well hump realistically you can fit two medium and one small box and squeeze in another small box with stacking. The one full rack can fit a large (carrier) box, medium box, small box, and maybe stack one more small box. I’ve seen some YouTube stuff where guys supplied their own square tubing. Each pair of rails costs $24 right now and you get 3 so that’s $72. The whole kit is around $96 so you are paying $24 for hardware, the 1x2 predrilled box tubing, the mid and top clips. You could supply all that and maybe fix space issues too just buying rails but at $24 per kit it’s a bargain. I just suggest buying one at a time to fit them in the van. But still at $400 invested I’m still way ahead of the off the shelf racks that charge that much for one section of rack. If I did it again though I’d have to think long and hard about the Sortimo design. I’d just run two struts horizontally spaced near the van top and bottom bolted to the top and bottom with strut ends. Then bolt 1x2 box tubing to my strut frame everywhere I want a rack. This would solve the hump issue. Dewalt the check’s in the mail, right? As far as safety on the first day out I was on a state highway out in the country and some idiot “tested” my new racks. I heard a big “slide” from a box and the step ladder on the floor and a predictable clinking and thuds from tools slamming into each other. But other than a box of gloves that fell on the floor from the wood shelf on the opposite wall the Toughsystem boxes and shelves never moved. So all in all I love it. I was disappointed in the overall layout. It’s nothing like the Youtube propaganda. I feel this can and should be greatly improved especially wheel wells. If Dewalt stays with the current design at least ditch the Ecofix brackets for something more space conscious and maybe work out a scheme to make the cross bars either deeper or moved to the ends. But I’d definitely recommend it.

Versastak and T-Stak will periodically go through refreshes and upgrades but no chance good sellers are going away. Just as Toughsystem’s drawer unit is now on its 2nd iteration. The first TS drawer units had big problems with sagging. The second generation has somewhat fixed that. Each time HD and Lowe’s will clearance the old inventory. The big hassle is following how they stock. All of these systems take up a lot of shelf space. If you have a full selection of any of them it takes up more space than say the whole Makita cordless section AND these things aren’t cheap so they don’t sell that well. So Lowe’s and HD are more reluctant to sell so SBD has to do some arm twisting to get product placement and inventory. Online sales as far as I know are quite good because they are frequently sold out and SBD keeps refreshing the product lines. They seem to carry it at Christmas then drop it after that relying on online sales only.

Dewalt and “Craftsman” (but not Sears-K-Mart Craftsman) are both brands of Stanley Black and Decker (SBD).The old Craftsman we knew and loved was mostly ATG (Apex Tool Group) and the USA made tools were made in multiple plants mostly concentrated in the Carolinas. After the Sears Holding thing ATG was cut out and everything got sourced from China with zero quality control. After acquiring the Craftsman name,SBD is making an attempt to relaunch Craftsman as a midrange value priced brand similar to their Porter Cable brand for instance. That meant cranking out engineering and everything else for thousands of tools. So obviously they almost cloned the T-Stak, leaving Toughsystem as the Dewalt premium system. In fact I’m surprised about the clips. I just assumed looking at them that Versastak is just T-Stak in red and grey instead of black and yellow since as you said they are 100% interchangeable.

They get something like $20 from the manufacturer for warranty work. That’s not even enough to cover the labor. We get warranty work from motor and drive manufacturers. It’s vastly cheaper than flying out a factory rep and they pay decent.

Look at the Harbor Freight Generals too. I have another bench/chest in the garage. If you are working on flat concrete in a limited area and have room to work around it great. All the shop guys at my work have every brand out there but they aren’t really mobile. They are always parked except when somebody changed jobs. At Firestone they use them a lot but it’s all flat concrete and they modified them to hook up to a Cushman cart, Useless for me. I’m a mobile tech. I have a Keter folding work table and it’s very handy. If I went that route today I’d get the Dewalt (lighter). But I’ve moved on. I just use a cheap Metaltech mini folding scaffold. It’s about the same price. It’s a scaffold so if I need a short “ladder” I’m technically not standing on a table. It can be a bench seat with a table. It has more bench space than a table and is just as sturdy as a folding table. It adjusts up and down. But the point that seals the deal for me is wheels. Unlike folding tables I can load it up with all my tools and wheel it in to most plants. The third option is a Rubbermaid cart. They hold a lot of stuff but they take up a huge amount of van/truck space. No adjustment and the 2” lip makes it an awkward table. Very popular with a lot of mechanics but doesn’t cut it for me Another option is the Olympia folding table. Works really good and I like it overall but three issues. Very small wheels get stuck on everything. 150 lb. weight limit, and the folding bars get in the way of using the shelves. Another runner up is the fold n go. Basically it’s the Olympia table done right. But they sell to military and it’s priced accordingly which means 400% markup. Out of my budget. Don’t forget the Dewalt Toughsystem especially with the hezz as by duty hand truck. The top box becomes a table and your tool boxes are essentially a drawer system. Just take the drawers you need for each job. Ultimately I’d love the Dewalt or Keter with wheels but no such animal,

With drills there are two issues. The first one is most people go WAY too fast. If you run the speed too fast in wood most of the time you just burn the wood. In steel you melt and dull the bit almost instantly. So find a drill speed chart and follow it religiously. In practice if it’s not on the edge of chattering it’s too fast. Second is pressure. If you got the first part right you don’t need much. You should get nice chips or ribbons. It will cut much faster. Now for bits if you are in a store and all you see if gold colored bits, those are all junk. This is TiN costing. Real TiN does not cost $50 for a box. It costs more like $50 per drill. The reason TiN is used is it’s super cheap in thin coatings and makes dull, ordinary looking HSS bits bright gold color so it looks nice. Do not be fooled. You can’t sharpen these and you don’t want to because it’s just gold colored cheap Walmart grade bits. In fact they might even sell good bits but since they are selling cheap garbage just walk out. You can’t see all the pits and the fact that it’s low grade carbon steel, maybe not even high carbon tool steel. Just cheap Chinese high sulfur medium carbon garbage suitable only for wood peckers. What you need is machinist grade. So here’s the secret trick. HSS is good for your job. You could get carbide but you need a drill press to control it because if it chatters or squeals at all it shatters. It’s completely unforgiving. At best maybe a little cobalt but that’s it, Your bits will be dull looking from the high carbon content. That’s good. Shiny is bad. So go to either Reid or MSC or these days even Amazon. MSC is trying to be a Grainger clone so don’t bother unless you know where to look. Look for jobber length HSS drills. The word jobber is just a machinist term for standard length but this key word screens out non-machinist junk. You will easily find American made brands like Viking. Expect to pay around $100-200 and if you followed step 1 right they will last quite a while. In terms of metallurgy 90% of new high grade iron ore comes from American ir Canadian mines along the Mesabi range surrounding Lake Superior. It is mostly smelted here mostly using coke made from low sulfur and low phosphate Appalachian coke. You cannot add enough lime to get rid of the excessive sulfur in Chinese coke nor clean up the low grade steel, nor remove the high phosphate in German steels. This is one time where American made is important not just for some union flag waving but because quality drills start with quality ingredients. There is no way around the fact that Chinese and European steels are inferior because they don’t have access to quality iron ore and coke where it is mined, Don’t bother with 135 degree points. In stainless the slower 118 degrees is a much better choice. Just hit it with a centering or prick punch first so your bit doesn’t wander to get started. Follow this and you will have bits that easily cut stainless with little effort and last quite a while. Hand sharpening is best but if you don’t know how a drill doctor is inexpensive. A jobber set can last for years if you sharpen them.

Grinders LOOK impressive because they throw a ton of sparks but the fact is they don’t really cut, they melt and abrade material away. That is why reciprocating saws, cold saws, shears, and nibblers are MUCH faster. Recips are ok for rough/demo work and saber saws are a little better but pretty much straight cuts only. Shears are much faster on flat areas but very hard to use on seams and ribs. Even the cheap Harbor Freight ones aren’t bad. But the speed kings by far are nibblers and cold metal cutting saws. Unlike an abrasive saw cold saws transfer most of the heat to the chips and throw chips big time, and scream like a banshee but are straight cuts only. Nibblers can do anything BUT cordless have very limited thickness like 16 gauge or thinner. Pneumatic is very affordable but well there is the darned hose and high CFM. Corded is very good but powerful ones are outrageously high price to the point that pneumatic is attractive. If you are doing roofing you really need pneumatic nailers anyway so the compressor and hose are already on the roof. I do a lot of panel (industrial electrical) work where we use the same tools all the time. I own all of them except an electric nibbler.

Probably but it’s going to collapse it in the process. I have the Greenlee ECCX Pro and I can cut 1/2” rebar with it.

Never had that issue and I’m using the smaller XC 5.0s. Back off on the pressure. I can bury my Dewalt corded grinder too so must mean I need 240 V? Seriously with ANY batteries we are working with essentially the same 1.2-1.4 V Lithium ion cells. For a given motor more voltage means more torque and possibly speed up to a point. Brushless DC means we either have we apply AC and rectify it into DC on the rotor. Current on the rotor equals torque minus a small counter EMF. Since resistance is pretty much fixed torque = voltage. But I can get a bigger motor which usually means longer fir these kinds of motors where effectively I’m “stacking” motors in parallel on the shaft. This is more efficient than just cranking the voltage up on a single motor. For the battery it has a true resistance limit and a nasty problem of cooling as we convert stored chemical energy into electrons flowing. So at some point if we want higher current we must parallel cells or battery packs. There are issues though with parallel strings the worst of which is stronger ones shift the load onto weaker ones and cause them to fail early so electronics or bigger cells must be involved, Finally there is the wire/connector problem. The reason that utilitities run much higher voltages on power lines is that for a given piece of wire I hit a thermal limit at some point because losses and heat are proportional to the square of the current. With voltage as long as I can insulate against arcing there is no upper limit so I can put as much power as I want through the same size wire. So with 18 V I have to keep adding more contacts to get higher currents out. With Flexvolt i use the same contacts but jumper (rewire) more batteries in series. But there is one important difference. More batteries in parallel increases the load on the wiring (connections) but not much else. More batteries in series greatly increases the series resistance of the overall battery which limits output current. So I can get more power out if I accept a voltage limit over higher voltages. Finally we get to electronics. Every power tool has some electronics to if nothing else prevent the tool from catching on fire if it shorts out.’with brushless it must convert DC into AC AND it has the option to easily convert it into higher or lower voltages in the conversion process. This is called an inverter and the reason you can plug a small box into your vehicle 12 VDC system then plug your 120 VAC charger into it. So it should be obvious...we don’t really care what the battery voltage is up to a point. So the question is are we going to go low voltage high current or high voltage low current? It changes our connectors. It changes the battery internal resistance. But not the motor side since with brushless we are freed from voltage limits. If it was so great Milwaukee would have stuck with or increased their 28 V tool line that they’ve all but killed off.

The boxes stay stacked most of the time as long as the feet engage. Only time guy need the side latches is for transport so they don’t fiy. In practice in the back of a pickup as long as they’re loaded with tools they don’t move anyways. Only tube I had one get loose was 45 mph gusts at 70 mph with an empty tote not latched down,

Here’s an example 80,000 lumens 530 W “1000 W metal halide equivalent”. 40 lbs. All passive cooling. https://www.phoenixlighting.com/sites/default/files/products/specification-sheets/n5499723f_highland_series_spec_sheet.pdf Honestly the only real thermal problem with LEDs in general is the problem with pulling the heat off the LED die itself. After that point you just add thermal mass and plenty of cooling fins. Look at the Phoenix fixture. Or look at one of the Milwaukee fixtures in HD up close, what jumps out at you is that very little of the fixture is actually covered in LEDs. The vast majority is heat sink. The only guys not using big heat sinks is Hollophane. https://img.acuitybrands.com/public-assets/catalog/364529/phst.pdf?abl_version=10%2f29%2f2019+06:06:47&DOC_Type=SPEC_SHEET Instead they rely on lots of vents and use passive convection (hot air rises) so their fixtures are very light. I really don’t know anyone doing liquid cooling or even fans. Ok maybe I have. Don’t want to waste left over liquid nitrogen. If you chill a cheap LED the non-high power kind in al the electronics in the 90s then hook it to rectified 120 VAC it will act like a 1000 W metal halide lamp for about 10 seconds before it fries. Just make sure there are plenty of spare LEDs because it’s so much fun you can’t do just one.

EGOs 56 V batteries work good with outdoor power equipment. I’ve used 8D batteries on boats, dozers, fire trucks, generators, you name it. Very reasonable price. I know they weigh 120 lbs but if my scrawny 180 lb butt can lug them from pickup to dock to work boat to dredge, they are plenty portable and don’t cost megabucks for lithium ion.

If the motor stalls most likely one of three things. If it has brushes they dry out in storage and chip/break and need replaced but that’s more of a DC thing and you sound like it’s corded. In AC motors if it’s stalling it sounds like a failing capacitor. They only last about 10 years. There are up to 2 capacitors. One boosts voltage and offsets the phase angle to a starting winding to get the motor running then cuts out. It sounds like that is working or maybe not cutting out. The second makes it run more efficiently so you get a more power when it is already running which is what I suspect has failed. It can be the motor varnish is shot and the motor is burning out too but you can smell that. If there is a funky battery smell I’d definitely think capacitors. Finally I’d lean strongly towards a bearing seized up and robbing power, 10 years of sitting isn’t good for bearings. Motor capacitors and brushes are cheap (under $20) and even motors aren’t bad but labor isn’t. So if you take it to a tool repair shop which you can easily find in major cities, expect about $100-150. You might find a great deal on a new/refurb while you are there. If you can do it yourself you wouldn’t be posting here. If it’s just a cheap one (under $250 current dollars) might want to just get a new one. If it’s an expensive high accuracy, sliding full bevel, etc., it’s worth repairing.

We have one. It’s slower but you can use it one handed. It’s a lot lighter. The vibration level is much better. And it can get into really tight spots. The only thing I know of smaller is those little pneumatic reciprocating saws but you need to lug around the compressor and air hose and oil to feed them. So unless you are doing demolition all day or trying to go through say 1/8” steel where the extra power and speed count, it beats the bigger one hands down. I think the Milwaukee non-Fuel one compromises a bit too much and then again their super Sawzall trumps everyone in the speed/power category but in the Dewalt line in my mind I think the smaller one is a better choice overall. I would put it up against the “standard” big red as an even match and it beats the mini but not the super.

First in terms of Milwaukee and Dewalt you don’t know what you are talking about. Your response sounds like trolling for Sechzuan Province. I have Milwaukees and my crew also has Dewalt equipment. The Milwaukee rockets for instance have nothing but aluminum on the “head” and an aluminum telescoping pole. The only thing plastic is the base and some trim. Rockets are not light. Neither is the Dewalt one. In fact even their 18/20 V “flashlights” which I would hardly place in that category have a sizable aluminum heat sink.No fans involved. Those eat a ton of power. By way of example the first all LED power shovel and dragline excavator were projects I did. Pretty cutting edge stuff at the time almost 10 years ago. The “headlights” had 180,000 lumens output all passive cooling (no fans) with 200% heat sinking (it is after all a dirty mining environment). Each light weighed 120 lbs., nearly all of it heat sink. So fans are nice but not necessary at any lumen level, As to dimming, they don’t and I doubt they would except at full discharge 2+ hours later. This is total BS. Do you have a domestic (European or American) battery operated LED work light? Or are you just an Asian troll? There are three design issues with power LEDs. The first one is it outputs light all forward in about a 120 degree beam angle. Reflector optics don’t work. You need lenses so just putting LEDs in existing fixtures like putting LEDs in a Maglight is really inefficient. Second they put off a light of heat, also unfortunately right at the surface of the diode, and the diode life quickly vanishes if it gets more than beach sand warm. So massive heat sinks, with or without fans, are an absolute must. Early on you could tell the Asian knockoffs by the size of the heat sink. Third high output LEDs exhibit negative resistance and also variable resistance with temperature. That means that as voltage gets close to the operating point resistance decreases with increasing voltage leading to a runaway thermal failure issue and that controlling voltage is useless because resistance varies. You can get some output with a simple series resistor (and horrible efficiency) but nothing like full output. The key is controlling current, not voltage. Most are constant output but some have on board temperature sensors so you can run them even harder by controlling current at the measured thermal limit. They need about 6 Volts minimum. So dimming should not happen until the batteries are almost completely dead. But the obvious thing here is that until that point battery voltage does not matter. Finally one of the big problems with China is they do not have product liability or truth in advertising laws. So if the light output is say 2500 lumens at the LED itself under optimal (not achieved) conditions ignoring the lenses they will just round it up to 10,000 lumens. That is the situation the domestic companies found themselves in 10 years ago which is why we kept seeing “60 W EQUIVALENT” advertising instead of actual lumens. Eventually they started leaking actual test results and the Chinese manufacturer lies were exposed along with a lot of domestics, too. Today it doesn’t matter if it says a million lumens. You can pretty quickly tell what works looking at what other contractors are using. I retired my Chinese no name stuff once the brand name stuff started beating it. What I find truly funny about all this is that the better drivers are mostly designed and built by Phillips, a European company. Chinese designs are mostly low quality knock offs of their boards. The best LEDs and the majority of the high power LEDs are made by Cree. However unlike Intel, AMD, etc., Cree has their chip fab plant in Durham, NC. And yes I see plenty of cheap Chinese lights on the job site. It’s the guys that have a lighting budget. You know, they have a different light every time you see them. I paid twice as much but it lasts 3 times longer and doesn’t burn out in the middle of a late night emergency job: So sure I think 10,000 lumens is easily possible with Makita blue plastic trim over cast aluminum passive heat sinks. It’s going to be heavy but it’s an area/site light. As a task light it will supplement a backhoe or truck loading but if you need a light in a cabinet, better use a 200-500 lumen flash light or a 1000-1500 lumen task light. Or better still get two to reduce shadows. I have a few Makita crew tools but my work load is mostly electrical and mechanical. The Makita tool line is more geared towards carpenters. Hopefully lighting will only get better. I’m getting close to 50 and my sight isn’t what it used to be. If Makita makes something better though I’m sure I will get one or my crew will.

Well in theory 300 lumens per Watt can be done. https://www.cree.com/news-media/news/article/cree-first-to-break-300-lumens-per-watt-barrier But realistically that’s a lab number. Workibg it backwards Milwaukee claims around 2 hours of the same 5 Ah battery at 3000 lumens on their flagship 2135-20 rocket. So if we can get 100% out of the battery, we would get 5 x 18 = 90 Watt-hours, dividing by 2 hours gives us a 45 W draw so they are getting roughly 3000 / 45 = 67 lumens per Watt. I’m reasonably sure the LEDs are more efficient than that but this is kind of an “end to end” comparison with all inefficiency lumped into the lumens per Watt number. Obviously there is room for improvement. So with 10,000 lumens we can guesstimate 333% more power draw so with two 6 Ah batteries the largest officially available that gets us 1.44 hours run time. Realistically it’s probably less than that since battery output (Ah) is less as current demand increases. There is certainly room for improvement and a full two hours run time might not be impossible.

I think Milwaukee and Dewalt top out at around 3500 lumens currently. Battery life at 3500 lumens is terrible even with large ones. 10,000 lumens isn’t going to be very practical except plugged in but that’s ok because we need that too on some jobs, I’m slowly coming around to the idea that having 2 or 3 lights is much better than one big one though. More uniform lighting with fewer shadows.

That’s the idea. Toughsystem is more for mobile such as tools that you don’t need every week. Regular racks and drawers are fine in shops.

Forging is blacksmirhing. You can automate to some degree but it does not change the fact that forging is hammering low carbon steel or iron into shape. Since it develops laminations and grain structures it can be stronger than casting or extrusion but the cost is the slow process.. The only way you will get a forged fence is from a forge...blacksmith. They are around but there are as many blacksmiths today as in the 19th century. I would go to a living history museum site like colonial Williamsburg. What you are talking about is hundreds of hours of labor if you can find someone willing to do it. If you do it let your mind run wild because every part is hand made so no reason to be symmetrical and identical. As to critters fences stop deer. In Kentucky they use a double fence 4-5 feet tall spaced about 6 feet apart on the million dollar horse farms. Deer are thrown off by trying to jump both fences so they don’t try. They use limestone dry stacked which is a nuisance in that area they just have to remove and stack up anyway. On deer farms they use 12-16 foot fences. For rabbits dig 12 inches down and put in hardware cloth or chicken wire 3 feet tall so 2 feet is above grade. With birds same material over the top. Or just use a green house. Or do what farmers do. Grow plenty of extra and hunt the local animal/food population too.

Wow, very nice prizes. No holds barred.

Works good. But it’s not that much shorter. You didn’t say if you mean Milwaukee stubby or Dewalt Atomic stubby. The other option is the right angle “wrench” thing but it is kind of a dud. It is shorter yet. If you use it correctly though all it does is speed up tightening and loosening. Then you still have to use a hand wrench for final tightening. Used incorrectly you ignore that and use it as a bulky wrench but the gearing gives out quickly. A guy on my crew had one but not impressive at all. It seemed like a good idea but he eventually gave up and went back to traditional impacts. The window where the compact length helps doesn’t justify lugging another tool and we work out of service trucks so every tool has to be hauled to most job sites. Thing is both get in MORE places while not sacrificing enough torque in a mid range 3/8” impact but in today’s compact world where every fastener is a pain, there is still a lot of hand wrenching. You have to ask yourself if you already have a compact impact how much shorter is it really. If you need a new compact impact then go for it but otherwise I wouldn’t buy it just for 1/4”. It’s not like the difference between a high and mid torque or 1/2” vs 3/8” or even brushed vs brushless. It’s 3/8” vs 3/8”. No real downside either so it becomes your daily driver not the special one you use rarely. Automotive and AP mechanics are always searching for yet another tool to get to yet another poorly designed fastener. They are happy when it gets them another 1-2% of the world. Glad I’m doing industrial work where my big problems are when we have to break out the torque multipliers and hydraulic bolt stretchers.

Pro tools? So they are going to sell brands other than Craftsman crap? Or wait for it, going above 1” electrical fittings as an example?How about wrenches exceeding 3/4”? Ok here’s an easy one...will the new pro desk clerks be picked the same way Menards does it? Maybe sort their lumber once in a blue moon so their “top grade” or whatever they call it isn’t all the crooked and knotted ones? Is it too much to ask to carry professional tool brands not made by SBD? The only pro moves I’ve seen so far is they added parking spaces around the lumber entrance making it even more crowded, clearanced out the remaining Kobalt tools I used to actually buy once in a while, shrank the Dewalt section to smaller than the one at Tractor Supply, and changed from Southwire to more Crescent or Ideal (forgot which) labeled tools in the electrical aisle. No Klein, Greenlee, or Milwaukee to be found, except at HD. I even had to buy Schlage locksets at HD because all Lowe’s carries now is plastic Qwikset and some off brand and equally cheap line. I don’t even comparison shop there anymore. They’re ok for maybe light bulbs and charcoal when I don’t want to deal with Walmart but no serious contractor bothers. Meanwhile if you need anything and I mean anything not in the stores chances are HD Supply carries it. Or you can check HF or Northern or your flavor of supply houses. While HD has become less and less homeowner oriented Lowe’s seems like they don’t even know who their customers are. I’m sure converting all their employees to hourly and cutting hours so no benefits either was a winning move with the employees that don’t give a crap either now. They used to be able to hire semi-retired or injured contractors. Now it’s just kids out of high school that don’t know what a 3/4” elbow is other than a skinny part of the body. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Manufacturing and consumers in the states are a mixed bag or Milwaukee would be out of business. In a true free market such as commodities with no competitive advantage it is purely a supply and demand game. This is great for consumers because nobody makes any money and the price is as low as possible. It is awful for manufacturers though because they will have maybe 2-3% margins at best when the stock markets demand at least 10% or better. They will soon be out of business. That is where a lot of Asian tool brands are at and what you see all over ebay and Amazon. They pop up and disappear for a reason. What you want/need as a manufacturer is a competitive advantage. You have to sell your name and reputation, superior product, better customer support, something. This is the opposite of a free market. Lower prices only works long term as long as somehow nobody else can beat you on manufacturing costs. There has to be a reason and it has to be some kind of natural geographical feature that cannot be duplicated. Otherwise that is strictly a short term game. This is why Australia beats the world when it comes to delivered price for coal and iron to China...shipping cost advantages being “next door”, even though those are commodities. Australia is home to BHP for a reason and BHP is the largest mining company in the world. Premium tools are an oligopoly. The market is dominated by a small number of competitors. In that market we get Sweezys kinked demand model. Prices are set by watching each other. If you lower prices so do your competitors and everyone loses money instead of picking up market share. If you raise prices the competitors let you and you lose market share. This keeps prices in line. Occasionally competitors will run sales or threaten a price increase and test the water to see if the competitors will follow. Or something happens to raise or lower costs and then everyone tends to go up or down until they all settle down again. It may appear to be a free market but in reality it is right on the edge between a true free market and an unfree one. Hence as s consumer you can see how free markets keep everyone honest and the system is as fair as possible. As a manufacturer the goal is to constantly find new ways to “beat the system” to make more money. I’ve worked for years on the engineering side of things. I am really good at lean manufacturing... finding ways to reduce costs. But I have never, ever seen a company cost reduce themselves into profitability. That is the sirens call of lean manufacturing but it is an illusion. Again your competitors will just follow your lead. My competitors can’t hide their secrets from me for long and vice versa. It is a big financial benefit and worthwhile to improve manufacturing but to make large margins you have to have a competitive advantage, some new technology or something. Cost reduction alone is a proven failure. Harvard MBAs have been pushing this idea of squeezing every last drop of profit out of everything across the world and they have absolutely nothing to show for it but the dried up husks of once powerful and innovative companies they left behind them. When these locusts move in the first thing they do is get rid of all “extra” costs. Not just wages and benefits. They also dump or strip R&D, all new product development, all customer support, and strip sales down to a web site. They grind down and remove every spare clerk, foreman, you name it. They infest the company with low paid cheap staff that either can’t or have no interest in product quality. They get rid of accessories and add on products or price them off the market. After a few rounds of this the company is sold off or deemed unprofitable and goes bankrupt. They even call themselves manufacturing efficiency consultants. There is some good in all of it but largely it’s a scam. Ever heard of Engelhard, Griffin Pipe, or Dravo? Those are ones I worked at. Or the king if them all, GE? All eaten by Harvard locusts. So I understand your attitude that price rules everything. Price is very important but if it is all that matters then both the manufacturer and the consumer eventually lose.