Cordless Drill

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Thought I'd have a look at the Lidl one on offer this week.

It's a lot smaller (and lighter) than most,so I thought I'd give it a try as a supplement to my larger ones. But still has a 10mm chuck.

Good points:-

Keyless chuck. Two speed gearbox Speed control Locked when stopped. Reversible with off position. Chuck removes easily and reveals a standard hex tool holder. Variable torque limiter. Feels nicely balanced in use. Battery level indicator.

1 hour charge. Low price and good money back warranty. Seems to be built to the usual Lidl standard - ie very good and especially at the low price.

Bad points

Only one battery and little chance of buying a spare.

[Capitol]

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:>

If it is a Parkside, spares are normally available from DES.

[Tony Bryer]

They exist, at a price

Like the fact that it includes a bottle opener!

[Johny B Good]

Perhaps its _most_important_ function, after all, it's very important you avoid dehydration when working hard (not quite so important when hardly working, especially here in the UK). :-)

[John Rumm]

The main difficulty these days is going to be the transition from older NiCd and NiMh style batts to LiIon - basically meaning any charger radio would need two completely different charging controllers, and also a multitude of connector options for the different pack terminations currently in use.

Time was Makita used one battery termination for all their tools - made it easy to do a universal charger that could do them all. Now they have the original format, two versions of the LiIon slide in, a 7.2V Lion push in, and 10.8V LiIon push in and possibly others.

[charles]

with the Ryobi One+ system that I use, the 'new' charger will handle both LiIon & NIFe. Agreed my old charger will only deal with NiCad.

[dennis]

The charger on my Ryobi does nicads and li-ion at 18v and 14.4v so its not exactly a difficult problem.

[John Rumm]

The charging is not the difficult bit - you just need some way of sensing what type of pack is connected, and then use the appropriate circuit (which can be dealt with using the one of the "smart charging" ICs these days).

The multitude of connection options is a bit more of a pain though.