Cordless drill / driver needed

You will come to regret not spending the extra £40.

 

How much are you spending on the house?

 

Can't help thinking that these nippers are spoiled for choice nowadays. When I was first married,all I had was a Bosch DIY hammer drill. Just look at all of the kit available now. Even as an installation fitter, all that I had to install hydraulic pipe clips in a concrete trough was a Rawlplug jumper & a lump hammer.

 

The first trade rated drill I bought was a dewalt 18V xrp 2.5nicd. Came with 2 batteries, but bought another at the time.
I had this for about 10 years (only light use), the batteries started dying and eventually went flat. The other battery came in use. I eventually sold it online as there was some interest in it (as new drills cost cheaper), cost about £290 when new, still have the receipt!



this is the picture before being sold about 2 years ago.

 

Trust me mate,you are ! I'm 69.

 

My DeWalt drill is now 20 years old and on it's second set of batteries. The Hitachi that was bought a couple of years ago already has a dead battery and has been hardly used.

 

What you will find is that once you have an impact driver, you will rarely use the drill/driver for anything other than making holes. The DeWalt impact guns are very good, the lower end drills not so. The beauty of the kits is that you can build on them bit by bit - a high end "naked" Dewalt drill is £90 by shopping around and it is pretty impressive.

For an SDS drill, if you are going to have a short blast of chipping at stuff and occasional drilling and the budget is limited get one from one of the german mini market shops £29 and come with a 3 year guarantee. It will probably fail in that time but you can take it back and get a new one

 

That is a really good point, I bought my recip saw from one of them and it's been used alot and surprisingly still going strong.

 

Wouldn't but the Lidl impact gun.

Yes the Dewalt you can buy much bigger batteries I used the new Dewalt Xr batteries and I have several 1.5 and bought 4 and 5 AH batteries separately for £40. The smaller ones are very useful because they are much lighter - so if you are working on ceilings or fit them in torches they are ideal and don't run down as quick as you would think.

Dewalt are also bringing out a new range available in September so you should see a lot of deals at that time to extend your kit.

 

from £29 and you can eventually get the new 54v monster which will be compatible

http://www.powertoolworld.co.uk/brands/dewalt/dewalt-batteries-chargers/dewalt-18v-batteries

 

My first combi drill was a DeWalt with 1.3ah NiCad batteries, which I bought in a similar situation to you - house renovation. I didn't have a huge issue with it, even though eventually I was going through 3 - 4 batteries a days as their capacity wore down. I got the 4ah batteries in my new set, which last days on end. Would I go back to 1.3ah batteries? No. But were they a problem before I ever experienced the higher capacity batteries? No, because I didn't know better. If you've never had pro grade drill or even owned an impact driver before I suspect the power and versatility will knock your socks off regardless of what you get.

The biggest choice may be what battery platform you want to be on - DeWalt, Makita or Bosch. Personally I went for DeWalt. I do rate the Makita kit as better, but when weighing up the quality verses cost, I find DeWalt is about right for me, so I'd probably go for the Dewalt - I recon you'll be happy with it.

SDS - go cheap. The Titan from screw fix (if corded is fine) is cheap, and holds up to competition from much more expensive SDS drills. I also have one of the SDS drills from one of the german shops, and it's lighter, and pretty solid, I wouldn't go as far as spending 3 figures on one for the work you'll likely use it for, it just isn't worth it. The Titan is more powerful, but heavier. I'd go for the Titan, it's reliable, and will drill / chisel through pretty much anything.

 

Do you really need cordless,apart from a drill /driver for quick jobs? I bought a great 240v Makita impact driver from Ax***ster for about £70 odd . Great bit of kit. I love it.