Quality of tools

[AES]

Agree with Rorschach 100%, except mine is an 18V Li Po Aldi!

 

[Distinterior]

I have various tools, both hand and power tools and they are used in a hobby and professional manner.
As the years have passed, I have always replaced them with a better quality replacement when the time has arrived.

An example of a "cheap" tool that I purchased 15 years ago from B&Q was a small compressor kit. It came with the compressor, coil nose, tyre inflator, a Brad nailer and Staple gun. The complete kit was £90. Everything still works as well as it did when i first bought it,.......But, I dont use it every day, so it doesn't have a hard life.

The same cannot be said for a power Router or Cordless Drill. These I use extensively and I always buy the best quality I can afford. I do feel that spending my money on these better quality type tools has been worth it.

I've just had new bearings fitted to 2 x Elu 177's routers......One machine I purchased new in 1986 and the other in 1992.....You cant argue with that!!! The amount of work these 2 routers have done in this period of time is extensive....
As long as tools are not abused and used within the parameters they were designed for, quality & longevity shine through.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

I read an article some thirty years ago about a B&D drill that sold at iirc £16.99. It had been designed, apparently, to last for three hours. The rationale was that in an average household, it would be used for five minutes a month, to hang a shelf or something. If it did this type of work, five minutes a month for three years, it was a financially sound investment and people would buy the same brand again when it failed. Most of course worked for much longer.

An acquaintance worked on a major construction site in London and used virtually exclusively Power Devil stuff - he said if anyone used decent gear it was either stolen or dropped of a scaffold, so they priced a set of cheap power tools into the job every week.

I was brought up with the maxim if you can't afford to buy the best, buy the best you can afford.
I find this now no longer to be true - I buy for the job. I have tools I bought twenty years ago (cheaply) to do one job that have been used scores of times since and work perfectly well. Virtually all my better hand tools are second hand anyway. I would not, however, expect cheap power tools/machinery to be accurate - that is what you pay for with better stuff.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

... Now the on/off slide switch is getting erratic to switch on and even more erratic to switch off. It's not had that much use.

The switch on my Bosch angle grinder is starting to play up - I bought it in 1986, so I suppose it hasn't done bad.

(My two routers, half sheet sander and angle grinder are 121 years old between them )

 

[RogerS]

.... As an occasional DIY user I find the batteries are never charged when I come to use them and after being sat unused for months they just do not seem to recharge. ....

My old NiCad Makita battery-operated drills and screwdriver no longer hold their charge. Not surprising, I guess, as they are maybe 10 years old.

But here's the thing...I went to use my DeWalt right-angle driver/drill the other day..battery not used or charged for four years and it was still holding a charge and working perfectly. Similar age to Makita but before DeWalt sold out.

 

[Distinterior]

.... As an occasional DIY user I find the batteries are never charged when I come to use them and after being sat unused for months they just do not seem to recharge. ....

My old NiCad Makita battery-operated drills and screwdriver no longer hold their charge. Not surprising, I guess, as they are maybe 10 years old.

But here's the thing...I went to use my DeWalt right-angle driver/drill the other day..battery not used or charged for four years and it was still holding a charge and working perfectly. Similar age to Makita but before DeWalt sold out.

I had a few Makita cordless drills many years ago....Got rid of the lot and have not purchased any Makita stuff since....The batteries never seemed to last very long. When used all the time, the batteries go through the charge and discharge cycle far more often and I found that Makita batteries just weren't up to the constant usage. It put me off buying any Makita tools ever since....

 

[Doug71]

I was on a job a while ago when the customer asked if I could also cut to size a few sheets of ply for a building they were lining out, I said yes but would have to nip back to workshop for my track saw and rails (Festool).
They produced a cheap rip saw which they had just bought as they were originally going to do it themselves and said you can use this.
I tried the saw and what a shock, the thing really was awful bordering on dangerous. It had no soft start or electric brake, was deafeningly loud, nothing would lock down properly things kept coming loose, the blade had massive wobble and the whole thing vibrated so much it felt like it could fall apart at any moment. I went back to workshop and got my Festool.
I am probably spoilt because I have only bought Festool/Makita for years but wow that cheap saw was awful.

 

[Terry - Somerset]

It seems we have all:

- bought cheap tools only to find they are cheap for a reason
- bought cheap tools - surprised they still function well 15 years later
- bought expensive tools that work no better than the cheap one we had before
- bought expensive tools that are a performance revelation

Personally I generally try to buy well regarded mid range tools as:

- mainly hobby and DiY use, not intensive or work
- avoid the very cheap which are generally disappointment waiting to happen
- accept that I have neither the skill (or depth of pocket) to buy the best

 

[Just4Fun]

Have you used a cheap Li-ion drill?

I don't know. It is a few years since I tried any cordless tools and I don't recall what the battery technology was - if I ever knew that.

I know I had 2 drills that were disappointing. I also had 2 electric screwdrivers, one of which was impressive when new but rubbish when I went back to it later. Those experiences put me off cordless tools and I have avoided them since.

 

[Rorschach]

Have you used a cheap Li-ion drill?

I don't know. It is a few years since I tried any cordless tools and I don't recall what the battery technology was - if I ever knew that.

I know I had 2 drills that were disappointing. I also had 2 electric screwdrivers, one of which was impressive when new but rubbish when I went back to it later. Those experiences put me off cordless tools and I have avoided them since.

Might well be NiCd tools then.

I had cheap NiCd tools which were truly awful, I replaced them with Makita which were great until the batteries started to die. I then tried a cheap Li-ion drill and it was a a world of difference. I now use mostly budget Li-ion cordless tools and while I admit they wouldn't cut it for a full time professional builder/carpenter they work very well for my needs as a workshop based craftsman and DIY work.

 

[Distinterior]

Li Ion batteries are a vast improvement over Ni Cad or even NiMh batteries. Not only for the fact that they are much lighter but also in performance, life expectancy /cycles of charge & discharge and speed of recharge.

I have 2 Bosch Blue 14v impact drivers that have NiMh battery packs. I bought them new in 2007. All 4 batteries now struggle to hold a charge for more than a day when not being used. The cost of replacing them would be substantial but it is worth doing coz there is nothing wrong with either of the drills or chargers. They get used a lot when the batteries are working correctly, but I bought a little Festool TXS drill as a stopgap as it was on special offer at the time......and it's a revelation with its little 10v Li Ion batteries. So much lighter and nimble by comparison. Hence, why I haven't yet got round to replacing the Bosch batteries.

 

[RogerS]

As it happened, I needed to use my handheld planer - I think I might have bought it during the major part of the house refurb when I couldn't find my Bosch one. It's a Titan. I'd forgotten how truly awful it is to use. I binned it.

 

[AES]

I'm not 100% sure on this Distinterior, but if you go ahead and change those NiMh for LiPo you may ALSO have to change the charger too.

No doubt someone more knowledgeable than I am will be along soon to confirm/deny, but worth a double check anyway before splashing the cash (that's IF you can buy a stand-alone charger that is).

But yeah, my limited experience with both battery tools and laptops is than that LiPo is MILES better than NiMh (which was miles better than NiCad).

If you go that way Just4Fun, you're in for a big (positive) surprise.

 

[powertools]

We all like nice tools but sometimes we just don't need them.
I have recently finished a massive diy project I needed a concrete breaker that would be used on and off over a period of time so that would have made hiring one every time I needed it very expensive.
I purchased a cheap 15kg Titan breaker from Screwfix that did everything I wanted it to do and is still going strong.
I will never have any more use for it so for the price it was the best tool for the job in my situation if I were digging up concrete floors for a living I would have purchased the best.

 

[Distinterior]

I'm not 100% sure on this Distinterior, but if you go ahead and change those NiMh for LiPo you may ALSO have to change the charger too.

No doubt someone more knowledgeable than I am will be along soon to confirm/deny, but worth a double check anyway before splashing the cash (that's IF you can buy a stand-alone charger that is).

But yeah, my limited experience with both battery tools and laptops is than that LiPo is MILES better than NiMh (which was miles better than NiCad).

If you go that way Just4Fun, you're in for a big (positive) surprise.

When/If I replace those 4 Bosch batteries, I was planning to get NiMh replacements. Getting the battery packs converted to Li Ion would certainly make it non viable coz, as you correctly said, I would need to get the chargers changed as well.....I'm torn what to do for the best though, as spending a fair bit of money on new batteries for 2 tools that are 13 years old is a struggle to justify, even though both drills still work fine.....Decisions, Descisions.!!!

 

[AES]

Yeah Distinterior, I fully understand you.

But OTOH I have a perfectly good really old 18V Skil drill & 2 x NiCad batteries (+ charger), both batteries of which (after 20+ years) have given up completely. And I can't find replacements to fit (OK, I know I could have a go at re-celling them, but it makes no commercial sense in relation to the original price of the drill - or to the new price of an Aldi or something).

But still, every time I see that perfectly good drill sitting there "useless" it really does "upset" me! :evil:

I just can't treat tools as "disposables" (not even cheapos). My problem I guess.

 

[Rorschach]

If you buy lithium batteries and a charger from say aldi or lidl it is not terribly difficult to retrofit them into old nicd cases.

 

[D_W]

Second post here, just my thoughts about tools. I retired from my IT consultancy job a few years ago and decided, as a reasonably competent carpenter (all hand tools, as taught to use by my father), to try my hand at raising my game. So, bought myself a sliding mitre saw, a table saw, a router table. All fairly cheap stuff. Got sucked in by the cheap price and marketing. I now realise cheap tools never work properly. Now matter how much you try to tune them they never give you the result your after. There is no substitute for quality tools, there is no short cut

English friend of mine here in the states has superb quality really heavy equipment - he can still find fault with little things - his cast jointer fence is not the same 90 degrees at the front as the back (it wasn't seasoned perfectly and twisted a tiny amount). I wouldn't notice it.

His giant commercial planer had a knife head with chipbreaker (strangely enough, most of those large straight knife planers came with instructions to set the chipbreaker and they will do well if you learn to use them (he bought a spiral head instead - he's not satisfied with the accuracy of the readout, so now it has a second readout on ot).

He wasn't happy with a US dewalt chop saw (they used to be made here - the older ones are pretty good, and they're accurate). He sold it to me and bought a kapex to find that the kapex isn't really any more accurate (but to me, they're both very very good).

depending on what you make, the answer will differ. My first table saw was a delta hybrid saw. It had right at 2 1/2 thousandths of runout at the arbor - guess what the spec is. exactly that. you cannot do clean work with it, it leaves a swirl on every board.

I bought a bandsaw after that (Jet JWBSX-18 - a saw that was supposedly improved). The top wheel had almost a hundredth of out runout, causing the saw itself to sand the cut. If you tried to set the guides tight enough to mask it, it would run them loose and they'd come completely out of tension.

Both of those things could be fixed, but why should you have to when you buy new tools? They were "in spec" according to the manufacturers "thanks, we don't need to do anything for you, they're still in spec". yay.

I learned to use hand tools to do the finish work, and now I no longer have either of those saws. My work fit quality has gone way up, and in the rare instance I need to use power tools at all to make something fast, stuff like a bosch contractor saw (if it doesn't fit on there, I can just saw it by hand) can do well enough, and so can a cheap dewalt thickness planer. I have no jointer (that doesn't require human power).

my point to you is I chased this thing for a while. I am *so glad* to have gone a different direction than solving the problem by trying to buy more expensive equipment like the pros use...

....except the pros here don't even use sliding table saws. Everything they cut is generally roughed out with a CNC after the wood is rough milled.

 

[DBT85]

All the Lithium ion tools use the same 18650 batteries that live in your laptops, teslas etc. It's a much better battery tech than all our old nicad crap many of us are still used to in our heads. As more and more car manufacturers use them in their cars in the coming years it might even bring prices down as they can be hideously expensive.

Tools will always vary. An Lidl/Aldi driver will do wonders for probably 95% of us on here as we aren't demanding much of them. They are also a commodity now and so the price at the low end has come right down. Major manufacturers have had to switch to brushless as an excuse to keep the prices high.

I have an Evolution tablesaw that has a fence that I prefer way more than the one that came on my Bosch site saw. It's actually possible for me to set it and forget it unlike what I had with the Bosch which was twice the price. It doesn't have soft start though so you will cack your pantaloons as soon as it fires up and leaps half an inch to the right.

But it works, it can make nice cuts (though I've swapped the blade out). The top is thin metal and the default insert isn't adjustable to the top and it's thin plastic so flexes. That's not a problem on larger cuts but it is on small ones as things will tilt toward the blade. I'll be replacing the whole saw in time, but it's a "right now" tool. Right now I wanted a saw that was cheap ish and that would do a job when I needed it.

Its the same for the Titan P/T. It has issues, but it was also £160 for a planer that with a little time in the workshop will have a jointer (Mike is watching me!) with a useable fence. The planer part is just fine, if loud. It too will be replaced in time.

Most of my power tools are Bosch blue as I do a lot of DIY and wanted stuff that I felt confident in for a decent period of time. Others have sworn never to touch the brand again because of issues they've had. Same with many big brands. My brother loves his Ryobi One stuff. A £65 cordless palm router seems a good deal even for me as I have one of their batteries knocking about.

I'd love a ts55 or the makita equivalent. But the titan one with a new blade does me just fine... right now.

Don't buy a cheap (new) tool expecting it to perform like one two three or five times the price. It often won't for obvious reasons. If you can accept that and accept that you might need to fettle it, adjust it, replace the odd bit like a crappy fence (and plenty of people do that on expensive saws too), you can get an awful lot done with a lot less money. It will still never be the expensive version. It'll not work all day every day for a few years with no hiccups, it might need more work getting it flat or straight or whatever. That's the price you DO pay when buying cheaper new tools, but even then it's not always.

Sometimes you'll get a complete lemon of a machine even when everyone else says it's great.

But you absolutely can get work done on cheap tools. Paying work even.

That's not to say we don't all want better kit that makes life easier or faster or smoother. Be it a nice cast iron tablesaw with a great fence, a latest festool pencil or whatever.

 

[Jasper42]

Is this not about what you are willing to pay! I started off cheap as I had a family that came before my hobby/DIY. Now if it is an tool I’ll use a fair bit I buy quality, after a lot of research at cost does not always equal quality.

I see a lot I’d like to buy but sometimes find it hard to justify the price to myself for the amount of used I would get out of it. Now if I was in the trade and my income depended on my tools that would be different, plus I would hope to claim the costs against the business. But I still see quite a few tradesmen with ‘cheap’ throwaway tools!