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This is a great price on this tool, even better than Amazon Prime. Tool arrived promptly and in good shape. Tried it out against my Milwaukee 18v driver drill on 3" #10 into a 4x4. Seemed to be about the same, but expect it will work better on lags and bolts than the drill tho.Works great with Lithium batteries, Price is right if it fitss your existing batteries, if not better to buy something that matches your system.
The tool is huge. This is a powerful impact driver with two huge limitations:1. The battery is huge and terrible (see my review of my Milwaukee combo)2. A main benefit of impact drivers is their light weight and small size. This tool is neither.A recommendation is that it may be more useful if are driving huge lags as I have twisted off about 1/3 of what I have tried to drive.
It is great in tight places where you can't use two hands, like on a ladder, or under a deck. I was wrong, this thing does almost everything my Milwaukee 18 volt hammer drill does, but better and stronger. I bought this impact driver thinking I was only gonna use it for lag screws in a deck we are building. I haven't used it for drilling holes yet, but I look forward to. Because it uses torque to drive fasteners, nuts, screws, etc, it rarely strips, or skips the screw head. Also you can use little to no pushing force to drive fasteners, where with the regular drill you often had to position your hand on the back and push with it or risk stripping the screw head. The only draw back would be that it only has a 1/4 hex chuck which doesn't accept all types of drivers. Sometimes you have to buy adapters to use all your drivers, vs a regular chuck which would have been more practical, but might have slipped under force.
useful and thoughtful design.solid tool overall and i'm happy with it, but i do wish that it were smaller. it's plenty powerful.i felt like the makita had a greater tendency to jumpt out of the fastener, but maybe that was my misuse rather than the tool design.
battery life on this tool is better than on the makita, but it's also a larger tool so it's tougher for small spaces and might lead to more fatigue over the course of the day. i haven't had this problem, but i have had situations where having a smaller driver would have been helpful.
i've used the makita and milwaukee, but not the dewalt or any other brand so take this for what it's worth. i've driven 1/2" lags into old wood (pre-drilled) without a problem.
of course there are always going to be situations where you wish you had a smaller driver, but the bigger the tool, the more frequent that situation will crop up.after about a year's use the black plastic nose cap fell off. i glued both portions of it back on and that seems to have solved the problem.in terms of power i've never had a problem with this not being able to do what i ask of it.
other than the size, the only advantage of the makita over this one is the led light which comes on when you tap on the trigger and stays on. if i were buying today i'd probably go with the smaller milwaukee impact driver.
A couple weeks later I tried to remove the nuts. It is stout. I am pretty sure it would have taken less effort to just tighten them and break them off. The first time I used it to tighten 7/16 nuts on 1/4" bolts it sheared off the first one instantly.
With the Lithium Ion battery this thing is the energizer bunny of impact drivers. I thought hmmm, must have been a soft one. I went a little easier on the following bolts and had no further trouble. This is a typical Milwaukee tool. It can break just about anything you touch with it without even working hard. I don't remember ever in my life having to use so much force to loosen a nut on a 1/4" bolt.
I loaned this tool to a friend of mine who built a 24 x 24 deck using composite deck boards with joists on 12" centers. He used it for 5 days on the original battery charge driving about half of the over 1200 stainless steel hold down screws.
This tool needs to be used with restraint. I have several other 18 volt 1/4" hex impact drivers, but I wasn't prepared for this one.
I continue to be very impressed with it. I was very surprised, I had to use my longest box end wrench to get them to turn, they felt like they were welded in place.
I am sure they had stretched. The only drawback I can see is due to its tremendous power it can be real hard on bits and screws if you aren't paying close attention to what you are doing with it.
I love it.
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