Bosch impact driver

[sneggysteve]

I'm building a "she shed" for the boss and was thinking of getting an impact driver. Probably will not get too much use after this project so I don't want to spend a fortune.
The BOSCH GDR18V-LIN 18V IMPACT DRIVER (BODY ONLY) is on sale at Anglia tools for £70 for the body only. I have a newish Bosch drill driver but with 2.0AH LI - ION battery. Will this be powerful enough? Not looking for constant use and I have 2 batteries anyway.

Also anyone have any experince of the impact driver?

Steve

 

[Sheptonphil]

Stop thinking about an impact driver and buy it. It will get lots of use after.

I realise now I should have bought one years ago after watching one being used last year. I now have the dewalt brushless version. It is used alongside my cordless drill on most projects, but is soooo much more efficient at driving, there really is no comparison. The drill driver only ever gets used for driving when very fine control is needed.

Putting a decked area together was child's play, 75mm deck-screws all put in with no pilot holes in deck or joists. Similarly the framework all put together with it.

I only have a 2ah battery, it takes a couple of hundred decent drives to come anywhere near using the battery up. 30 mins to recharge and away again, of plan the recharging during cutting downtime, or coffee break time.

Phil

 

[Monkey Mark]

The battery is 18v, so it will be powerful enough . The 2ah rating refers only to how long between charges, not its actual power.

 

[Eric The Viking]

I have the Bosch 10.8V impact driver. It's far too powerful for most screwdriving tasks in softwood, unless you're careful. I don't know how powerful the 18V one is, but at a guess it's more.

 

[TFrench]

I have the bosch 10.8 as well, I love it. I use it for everything! Also have an 18v makita for work which is a beast. drove 30-odd 8" sleeper screws into new softwood sleepers with no problems on a tired old battery. Screwfix sell a handy set of converters to 1/4", 3/8" and 1/2" square drive for sockets as well, which I use quite often at work.

 

[Wizard9999]

I used a 10.8 dewalt when I built my workshop and can't imagine anything I make in said workshop will tax it more than that. For me being a hobbyist working in the shop or house a 10.8 with a battery that may need charging more regularly is fine and it means it is nice and light. For a trade user on site all day I would expect a very different answer.

Terry.

 

[RickN]

I have one.
I bought a twin pack drill driver impact driver combination which came with 4ah Batteries works a treat, it's first outing was building a deck, and I'm currently using it to build a shed.
The only question I find myself asking myself now is why didn't I buy one years ago?
One thing I have discovered is Impact drivers require impact driver bit sets.... yes, I know, Obvious if you think about it, but I never understood why. I do now after 3 pozi 2 bits fractured.
So I got myself a Milwaukee impact rated bit set.

 

[adidat]

Use this set on a daily basis

the batteries are small and light weight, they wont last all day but charge in about 20 minutes, my 2nd fix nailer takes the same batteries so i have 4 batteries all together. Impact driver is an excellent bit of kit, very occasionally it lacks power for really deep stuff but this could be due to low battery. An impact driver saves on all that putting your weight being the driver etc, but be prepared to break driver bits and screw heads!

If i have lots of big drilling or deep screwing then I will use my corded festool drill which is an absolute beast!

this one

The drill unit is pretty good, I find the chuck slips slightly but this is probably more down to using cheap disposable drill bits that blunt easy, depending on what you are doing care needs to be taken with the impact driver is it is very easy to over egg the pudding!

adidat

 

[sneggysteve]

Thanks everyone - order on the way!!

Steve

 

[Eric The Viking]

One thing I've noticed is that battery life is a lot better in the impact driver than the drill/driver doing the same job. Also, if you're doing a big job, torx-headed screws also extend battery life and are easier/faster to use than pozi. I always use diamond grit pozi bits now. I'm not sure if they're supposed to work with impact drivers but they do OK, although with cheap screws they can just "drill" into the head (removing the slots!) when you're trying to remove an old screw.

So the impact driver gets used a lot for assembly stuff, but for dismantling I now stick to the drill/driver as it gives me more control. I have this set:

 

[Sawyer]

A while ago, I was struggling to put hefty 4" screws into oak with my normal drill driver and was on the point of having a re-think, when someone lent me their Bosch impact driver. The Bosch made child's play of it! I ought to think about buying one myself :/

 

[Wuffles]

A while ago, I was struggling to put hefty 4" screws into oak with my normal drill driver and was on the point of having a re-think, when someone lent me their Bosch impact driver. The Bosch made child's play of it! I ought to think about buying one myself :/

Whereas my experience was with a Bosch 18v Impact that couldn't manage the final 20mm of a 120mm fixing into green oak sleepers, Festy PDC managed it with no problem.

Some of these impacts are all noise, and working on a site where idiots seemed to think it was a good idea to use their impact on drywall was painful.

I'm not against impacts, in fact my Bosch is probably a little old to be comparing to a PDC, but the simple fact was, it couldn't manage it. You may find yourself better off with a more powerful, quieter drill/driver instead. Mind you, at £70 for a bare unit it's a no brainer.

 

[petermillard]

I'm not against impacts, in fact my Bosch is probably a little old to be comparing to a PDC, but the simple fact was, it couldn't manage it. You may find yourself better off with a more powerful, quieter drill/driver instead. Mind you, at £70 for a bare unit it's a no brainer.

+1 to all this. I don't own an impact driver any more, stopped using them when the noise had woken sleeping babies and terrified toddlers, and haven't found anything that a decent drill/driver can't handle - that includes driving a lot of decking screws and more than a few 10" timbadeck coach bolts.

 

[Eric The Viking]

I was expecting mine to be, well, not rubbish exactly, but not wonderful. It's actually brilliant, more so considering it's relatively tiny and running on 3 AA-sized Lithium-ion cells (i.e. 10.8V). I like it being lightweight, and being small it can fit places other power tools won't. I get the feeling that the Makita equivalent is even better.

As others have said, getting a cheap set of square drive adaptors (1/4", 3/8" and 1/2") makes it even more useful - unless I have a big project on it probably gets used more for the socket sets than driving woodscrews.

 

[DiscoStu]

If you want a cheap put powerful impact driver then I believe that the Ryobi is the most powerful (Torques) on the market. It is certainly more powerful than the latest Makita. I read an article about the Makita being the most powerful impact driver so I thought I'd see how far behind the Ryobi was and it was more powerful and not by a tiny bit either.


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[Wuffles]

If you want a cheap put powerful impact driver then I believe that the Ryobi is the most powerful (Torques) on the market. It is certainly more powerful than the latest Makita. I read an article about the Makita being the most powerful impact driver so I thought I'd see how far behind the Ryobi was and it was more powerful and not by a tiny bit either.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Some manufacturers are more liberal with the specs than others.

 

[Alexfn]

The battery is 18v, so it will be powerful enough . The 2ah rating refers only to how long between charges, not its actual power.

A tool with a 4ah battery will have more power than one running a 2ah. The 4ah battery will have 10 cells vs 5 in the 2ah so peak voltage is higher. Its a not a huge amount but its measurable.

A few videos on YouTube to demonstrate it

 

[Eric The Viking]

The battery is 18v, so it will be powerful enough . The 2ah rating refers only to how long between charges, not its actual power.

A tool with a 4ah battery will have more power than one running a 2ah. The 4ah battery will have 10 cells vs 5 in the 2ah so peak voltage is higher. Its a not a huge amount but its measurable.

A few videos on YouTube to demonstrate it

There are many things on YouTube. Evidence for breaking the laws of physics (and chemistry) will be hard to find though ;-).

The voltage of cells (a) varies with their state of charge, and (b) is determined by the cell design and their electrochemistry, NOT by their capacity.

With a larger capacity cell, you _might_ see a higher voltage for longer when the cell is fully charged, simply because it won't discharge so quickly, but overall, the voltage swing between fully charged and discharged will be exactly the same for any given number of cells and the same chemistry.

The 4Ah battery should NOT have twice as many cells, if it is supposed to work in the same system, otherwise it is a very poor design, and in the case of Lithium Ion, potentially dangerous. If it did, pairs of cells would have to be in parallel, which will knacker the weaker of the pair very fast, and have a propensity to explode on charge.*

It is far more likely to be the case that a 4Ah battery will either have physically bigger cells, or batch-selected ones that work better (or both).

I agree that you will probably see much better performance with the bigger batteries, but not for the reasons you suggest.

E.

*If they really do have twice as many cells, they can be made to work, but probably not for long (unless there is a very smart battery management circuit built in. And anyway, if that's the case they'd last longer but not be obviously more powerful.

 

[Jake]

I am pretty sure the high Ah batteries (from high end manufacturers) are series/parallel with sophisticated management built in, such that they can deliver higher current (as well as or instead of the same current for longer).

 

[Alexfn]

The battery is 18v, so it will be powerful enough . The 2ah rating refers only to how long between charges, not its actual power.

A tool with a 4ah battery will have more power than one running a 2ah. The 4ah battery will have 10 cells vs 5 in the 2ah so peak voltage is higher. Its a not a huge amount but its measurable.

A few videos on YouTube to demonstrate it

There are many things on YouTube. Evidence for breaking the laws of physics (and chemistry) will be hard to find though ;-).

The voltage of cells (a) varies with their state of charge, and (b) is determined by the cell design and their electrochemistry, NOT by their capacity.

With a larger capacity cell, you _might_ see a higher voltage for longer when the cell is fully charged, simply because it won't discharge so quickly, but overall, the voltage swing between fully charged and discharged will be exactly the same for any given number of cells and the same chemistry.

The 4Ah battery should NOT have twice as many cells, if it is supposed to work in the same system, otherwise it is a very poor design, and in the case of Lithium Ion, potentially dangerous. If it did, pairs of cells would have to be in parallel, which will knacker the weaker of the pair very fast, and have a propensity to explode on charge.*

It is far more likely to be the case that a 4Ah battery will either have physically bigger cells, or batch-selected ones that work better (or both).

I agree that you will probably see much better performance with the bigger batteries, but not for the reasons you suggest.

E.

*If they really do have twice as many cells, they can be made to work, but probably not for long (unless there is a very smart battery management circuit built in. And anyway, if that's the case they'd last longer but not be obviously more powerful.

If you spent as long reaserching this as you did writing you would have found that you are wrong.

yes 4ah batts really do have more cells and yes it really does result in slighty increased tool performance. Its only slight leading to some manufacturers to list it others not.. Also you will find that due to the peak voltage of the cells some manufacturers (dewalt for one) will list their batts as 20v even though they are the same 5 x3.7v cells that everyone else is using

Btw those li-ion 18650 cells max out at 3600mah at the moment, most manufacturers are using high discharge 2000mah cells.. So 2ah or 4ah are the standard