TIL that Festool and SawStop are under one umbrella!
For those that don't know, SawStop is one of the most impressive recent techical innovations in tablesaws. It basically smashes a running blade down into an aluminium crashblock as soon as it detects something conductive touching it.
The best part about it is that SawStop went to each of the tool manufacturers asking to license their technology so people could be safer. For an extra cost of $10, they ended up having to build their own hardware because noone took them up on it.
Please cite your $10 fee narrative, only Reference [1] I can find, and this history I know of from my memory at the time the Licensing fees where not even remotely that small
Closer to 3-8% of gross sales was what as demanded on a product that often does not have that much margin to begin with, thus the licensing of the tech would have took a hug part of the profits of each saw sale
Contract Talks ultimately broke down when the companies wanted the inventor to indemnify them from law suits if the tech failed, not over a "$10 fee" like you imply in your comment
"the licensing of the tech would have took a huge part of the profits of each saw sale"
That seems to be assuming that consumers would not pay one penny more for the safer saw. I guess if you're afraid of people relying on it, then suing, you can't really market it. Which seems like a good argument for it being mandated by government, assuming it can be implemented in a way that works.
And sued Bosch over the Bosch REAXX table saw, which is a different implementation of a similar concept. As a result, you can't buy the REAXX in the US at the moment.
My understanding is that US-style cabinet saws are extraordinarily rare in Europe, and sliding table saws (Altendorf, Felder, etc) dominate the European market in stationary installations. I don't know whether jobsite saws exist in Europe, which is the market segment Bosch was bringing their technology into. All that to say, in Germany, the issue may well be moot.
The 2017 Festool acquisition appears to postdate the 2016 lawsuit. I have no knowledge of the acquisition timing beyond the easily googleable press releases and news articles. It may well have begun while the suit was pending.
According to wikipedia they only went to ryobi and wanted 3% royalty of the wholesale price and then decided to go their own way when there was a stall in the licensing.
The benefit to the tool maker of SawStop is clear: not only does it save the fingers of your customers, it destroys a large number of components in the saw after use. This means that the customer must buy a new motor, mount, etc. after almost losing a finger; a trade that I personally would be willing to make.
I can assure you that it does not damage the motor, mount, arbor, trunnion assembly, or any other major components of the saw. The cartridge is expended, but that is the only part of the saw that needs to be replaced as a matter of course. Whether the blade survives or not is a bit of a crapshoot, but the smart money is on having to replace it.
If you happen to trip the saw with flesh, Saw Stop will send you a free replacement cartridge if you mail them your expended one. They'll run diagnostics and verify that it was tripped on flesh, and mail you a new one.
Source: I've been present in two shops for 4 trips on two different saws, all other people. 3 were an aluminum miter gauge fence (Incra), one was fingers. In both cases the saws are known to have been tripped a great many more times than that. Neither saw has had anything but the blade and cartridge replaced.
Worth noting that replacing a blade can be a fairly expensive proposition depending on the blade you were using, but of course the argument is that the cost of that is far cheaper than medical bills and lost fingers. Seems like a valid argument assuming it's not a false trip.
Also, the safety feature can be temporarily disabled if needed to cut through something like damp wood that might cause a false trip.
Generally at around the same cost as a cheaper blade. I'm not sure who the actual market is for hella'spensive blades; the difference in cut quality I've not actually seen; certainly not enough to justify the expense.
Brands like Festool and Hilti are aimed squarely at professionals doing high-volume work. You're paying for the warranty, spare parts guarantee, and system compatibility as much as you are for the tool itself.
In both cases I get the impression that if it were financially viable, they'd prefer to only do fleet sales and maintenance.
Hitachi nailers are another tool I'd add to the "strictly professional" category. Their framing nailers are built like light boat anchors and you can use them the same way you'd use a sledgehammer in some applications. We would routinely use the back of the nailgun to move the wall around if it wasn't quite on target.
For personal use they are a bit overkill, but only if your cheaper tools don't break after 3 years.
The professionals I know generally all use a couple expensive tools from Hiltl or Festool etc over time. They can justify a new machine on a single job that pays ~8k, the time saved with the right tool is often already worth it.
And of course they are smart enough to know when they can use the "best long-lasting & cheap" tools instead of the high-end equivalents. I'm looking at you Makita PJ7000 which I bought for 150.- vs a Lamello that will be >500.- or a Festool Domino for 1k.
"best long-lasting & cheap" is spot on. Often, getting the very best is not worth it, no matter how long they might last.
We had a lot of work done on our house a few years back, and every one of tradesmen used Makita. I asked our carpenter if they were really good, and he said no, but they we pretty good, lasted quite well, but didn't cost the earth.
I think the ubiquity of Makita also made it easy to swap batteries and chargers between kit, and between people.
Electrician here: Last place I worked was almost exclusively Makita (and they were big, thousands of employees), and being able to swap chargers and batteries was both a blessing and a curse. I took good care of my batteries (and everything else), and I had to be careful not to end up with some other guys battery that he'd used to drive nails with.
Driving any fastener can put put of wear on batteries fast, the current requirements are high and peaky. Nails are particularity bad because unlike say, driving a screw or bolt you often don't even give they battery a second or two of break time to cool slightly while you line up your bit to the next fastener, just "BAM BAM BAM" down the line of wood as fast as you can until you drain the battery back to nil.
This is one of the the best ways to kill li-ion cells fast.
The converse of Maslow's hammer is such a common scenario that Wera actually sells a ratchet designed to be used as a hammer (think mechanic working under a car): https://www-us.wera.de/en/great-tools/koloss/
You can also get an adjustable crescent wrench with a hammer on the opposite side of the head. It's known colloquially to viewers of the AvE YouTube channel as the "thumb detecting nut fucker"
lol, pretty standard on site mate, especially during demo - some screws are just a bit too captive, quick whack with your battery (in the impact driver) does the trick.
Think of a soldier to use the butt of his rifle in close quarters. This spares a bullet too. Not sure if savings are comparable in case of the battery, but you get the idea.
Makita worm-drive saws were nice because they were about half a pound lighter than even the Skilsaw with the magnesium case(HD77). This makes a difference when leaning out over the second floor of a house cutting rafter tails.
Have you tried the cordless mag 77s? I'm curious to know if going cordless in those situations would make the weight less important, the same way AirPods sort of magically stay in my ear better without a cord tugging on them.
My shop (electrical) uses Makita for the vast majority of power tools, but we have some Hilti hammer drills and Hilti BX3 battery fastener, because they’re worth the money.
Particularly the battery powered fastener (BX3), it can shoot a 22 ga nail into steel or concrete quietly which means we can do that work in occupied buildings during the day instead of at night.
The best recommendation I’ve ever heard was to buy as cheap as you can, and then pay attention to what you actually use. Whatever tools in the “regular use” category break first should be replaced with the nicest tool in that category you can afford.
Of course if you’re a professional carpenter or similar, chances are you’re already aware about what you need to spend more on.
Bad advise for current tools: you need to settle on the battery system, since batteries are expensive. I.e. once you start replacing, it’s going to be a single brand, but the trick that you can get great set of batteries and tools as a bundle at large discount. DeWalt in particular, and others, often have great bundles and sales. So if you more or less know what you need, you can get good quality tools at discount by choosing correct bundle, replacing them one by one would be way more expensive.
They’re getting rarer, but you can still generally find corded handheld tools for significantly cheaper than the battery versions. If you’re working somewhere that has a power feed, they can make good trial versions.
I needed a drill. I wanted to buy a cordless drill, but I chose to buy a corded drill instead. 20+ years later, I am using the same drill. I wonder how many iterations of cordless I would have bought over that time.
Don't go too cheap. Mid grade tools work well in general. Cheap tools are often so bad that the frustration they cause is worse than the help, or worse you think it is you not the tool and spend money hiring someone to do what you really could do yourself if your tools were up to the job.
I don't think anyone capable of doing a job ever hired out a job because the tool they had at the start wasn't good enough. They just went and bought the better tool.
Maybe a few people have done that in situations where the cost of the different tool is thousands and much more than paying someone with the tool (e.g. difference between a chainsaw mill and a proper industrial sawmill or a three bag mixer and a concrete plant and fleet of trucks). It's certainly not a situation most DIYers ever run into though.
I'm currently trying to decide which vendor/battery system to buy into for the long run. Festool/Hilti are too high end for DIY/Hobby. I'm looking at De Walt/Makita and leaning towards Makita.
Honestly for hobby use I would definitely recommend ryobi. Reason being, they haven't changed their battery design in absolute ages. So, you can take a old drill that was originally ni-cad and use brand new batteries without an adapter. They have updated battery chemistry, so obviously you need to change chargers when you get new batteries, but at least you don't need to re-buy all your tools as well.
They definitely aren't pro-grade, but I've put fairly heavy use on mine over the last 9 years and the only tool that failed was a flashlight. Wore out 3 batteries that I took good care of, but buying $200 in batteries & charger is way better than $1k in batteries+tools.
The only real problem is they look cheap, so if you are into showing off then that is a negative.
I used Dewalt tools at my last mechanic job, and I honestly didn't think they were better enough to justify the price (2-3x ryobi). I haven't used makita, but the Dewalt drills would only survive 2-3 5 foot falls onto concrete, and the chucks were really crappy. My ryobi drill has survived probably 5 falls of the same type, and is still functional. The only real complaint I have is that the plastic absorbs grease, so if you use them in automotive/machine shop environments they start to look really grungy.
Also a happy Ryobi user. Even more so after I stumbled on [1] from Slickdeals; they rotate through a ton of Ryobi stock (factory blemished and refurbished) and I haven't ran into any duds yet. Between that site and frequent Home Depot specials, I've been able to build out a solid kit for far less than I expected.
I'm sure other brands funnel factory rejects and refurbs somewhere, as well. But I'm not sure where that is.
My rule of thumb is midrange for battery powered tools, and more expensive for corded tools that I expect to last me a lifetime. I went with Ryobi for the former and I’m really happy with them. I’ve had one battery go bad, but otherwise no issues at all and I love the variety of tools. In addition to the normal set you’d expect we have a pump for our hot tub, a tire inflator, and a handheld vacuum.
My dad used Makita battery tools exclusively for ~30 years of being a self employed radio communication tech. He stuck with them because he could still get chargers and batteries for the oldest drills, the ones with the stick battery that goes all the way into the handle like a handgun magazine.
I borrowed his tools many times over the years, and I've never been let down by anything made by Makita.
So, you've already got the batteries, and you already need a place to charge the batteries - why not get the added bonus of a true 15-amp portable generator while you're at it ?
It's not true sine wave, but it's quite robust - I have powered decent sized compressors, etc. with it.
Makita has had the same battery setup for a good long while now (the 18v batteries are something like 15-16 years old), and they have a ton of really good, well thought out tools in the 18v (same as DeWalt 20v) lineup.
Plus, the higher power tools still use the same batteries, just two, rather than forcing you to but yet another set of batteries. I wasn't as impressed with dewalt's tool lineup.
Makita and DeWalt are more or less equivalent, but I’m using DeWalt 20V (and corded miter saw) for few (subjective) reasons:
* Looks like DeWalt bundles are priced better.
* Looks like DeWalt has better variety of tools in 20V.
* DeWalt is sold at both Home Depot and Lowes, so you run into more sales and has better chance of picking up required tool (and, importantly, accessories) on the short notice.
* Amazon has good DeWalt sales for the Prime Day, etc.
In particular for corded miter saw DeWalt 779 is just a great deal. I upgraded it with the light kit and got DeWalt portable stand.
Since these tools really last, there is no need to get cheaper versions if you can afford it.
For really rare-use tools or accessories I get cheap Porter Cable (ironically owned by same holding as DeWalt) or chinese knock-offs from Harbor Freight.
I went with Makita without a whole lot of research, but I like that have a wide line of tools. I recently bought their weed wacker, and I'm thinking I'll eventually replace my plug-in lawn mower with their battery powered one.
One word of caution with battery powered mowers is they tend to weigh about 2x as much as a gas powered or corded electric mower.
May be a non-issue for you, but bit me hard when I tried to go that route. My lawn has poor drainage and never completely dries, and the added weight of the battery-powered mower led to constant rutting and mower-wrangling.
I think they are more expensive, but I’ve had a Bosch small drill driver that I’ve used regularly for over 10 years now. Still use the two original batteries although I do have to switch them on the charger more often.
At work we use Bosch battery tools too. Our chief electrician just bought his own set because as he pointed out, some of them have been in use for years and oil field roughnecks aren’t known to be kind to their tools.
Whatever you buy make sure it comes with two batteries so you can use one and charge the other.
Any of those will be good the only difference is what tools you can get. I bought Dewalt because a local store carries their chainsaw, and either Milwaukee doesn't have a chainsaw or my local store doesn't carry it. Local store is important because more than once I've needed a new tool for a job today. I'm a fan of makita tools but I can't find them on my small town so I only have plug in tools that I bought well in advance.
My wife bought a Ridgid drill with a promo kit of four batteries. The chuck eventually wore out, but the local Ridgid repair shop replaced it for us for $30 (would have been free if we’d registered for warranty). Because we had all those batteries, we were sucked into the ecosystem: cordless sawzall, impact driver, etc. They sell “naked” tools (no battery) at a significant discount. Definitely worth looking into, we’ve been exceptionally happy with the kit we’ve slowly been growing.
Edit: in Canada. Not sure if they’re the same elsewhere.
They are pricey, but I would describe them more like the Apple of power tools. They have an ecosystem of tools and accessories that work together, and because they have a relatively small and consistent product line 3rd parties also make a lot of accessories that increase the utility of the tools. They are expensive compared to many other handheld power tools, but if you want something that just works and is pleasant to use then it can be worth the price.
I would not call it insanely expensive, if you compare a Bosch Glide miter saw with the kapex, yes there is a difference, but it's not insane. The same goes for other festool tools like their sanders, compare them to Rupes, Flex or any other high quality brand and the differences are marginal.
The Festool dust extractors are similar to what you describe. I got one for list price, a bit over $700. It's quiet, has an accessory outlet that can turn the vac on, has an option for a remote, has big wheels so it doesn't get hung up when you pull it around. Etc.
The Festool is noticeably more than even the very good competitors - I think the Bosch is about $150 less, and there are others that are a bit more than the Festool.
But it's not like there's a $200 shop vac that's almost as good. There are such shop vacs -- but they're a different product entirely.
While impressive, I wish they would have done like other companies have done with their safety innovations (like Volvo for example with safety belts) and either given it away or at least charged a very nominal (small) licensing fee
The creator of the technology created saw stop because the saw manufacturers refused to pay his price for licensing, and has since been very aggressive in enforcement of patents around the technology preventing any competition in the safety space for saws
I can not get behind using IP laws to prevent companies from increasing the safety of their products, for example a few years ago Bosch attempted to bring similar saw stopping technology to market and was prevented do to a lawsuit from SawStop which resulted in a ban on the importation of the technology to the US
But aren't the IP laws in this case evidence of motivation for the creative mind? An incentive of being rewarded and not ripped off? We've had power tools without this feature for 100 years. What's a few more years to give the inventor exclusivity and a chance to profit, and then it becomes public domain?
Volvo's donation of safety patents is nice, but it is a major manufacturer. The inventor of SawStop was not.
at a bear minimum we need something like FRAND for safety devices that require safety related patents to be licensed fairly, non-discriminatory and with reasonable fee's
Gross vs. net sales just means a small percentage adjustment, unless the manufacturer makes a broken product. The other costs of making a table saw also make up a fixed percentage of gross sales, not net, but despite that, the product is still sellable.
> I can not get behind using IP laws to prevent companies from increasing the safety of their products, for example a few years ago Bosch attempted to bring similar saw stopping technology to market and was prevented do to a lawsuit from SawStop which resulted in a ban on the importation of the technology to the US
Bosch could have licensed the technology. This is actually IP that deserves to be enforced. Table saws have been around forever and none of the large manufacturers could be bothered to innovate until sawstop came along?
It's not like everyone can't buy sawstop tablesaws instead if they value the safety of it.
SawStop today refuses to license the tech as it is their only competitive advantage to sell their massively overpriced saws.
They could have 20 years ago when SawStop was trying to license the tech, however the industry (and I concur with them) belived their licensing terms were unacceptable.
I can't really get behind incumbent manufacturers failing to pay the inventor of a technology a significant portion of its value, which is, at minimum, the cost of hundreds of severely injured or completely severed fingers.
It isn't just that they wouldn't pay the license, it's also that they didn't develop the safety tech themselves in the first place. They presumably applied the Fight Club formula, to determine that the company's liability when people slice fingers off with one of their saws was not enough to justify the cost of actually doing anything about it (beyond writing into the operator's manual "let's don't cut any fingers off, mmmkay?").
If one of the incumbents had invented it, the others would have licensed or counter-patented incremental improvements and cross-licensed, recognizing it as a competitive threat.
But since an outsider patented it, that's a minor threat. What can a little guy do against a 100-year tool brand? And if he has to enforce, that means they're not playing by the rules, which are to pay the inventor's license, or wait until the patent expires.
Why are severed fingers part of anyone's business model?
>>>Why are severed fingers part of anyone's business model?
it is, however Millions of people operate normal saws everyday with out cutting their figures off, and contrary to popular belief on here Safety does have a cost narrative to it. SawStop over values their tech for many people, which is why other saws continue to outsell their saw because people buying the saws value other things more than the safety enhancements the SawStop technology brings
It has nothing to do with being an "Outsider" and everything to do with SawStops inventor placing and outsized value on the technology.
The manufacturers respond to consumer demand, and many consumers would refuse to pay the extra money (for some saws it would have amounted to several hundred dollars more retail price) for the technology
In which case the inventor of the technology would be remunerated according to the consumers' choices, and not by the choices of a handful of manufacturer gatekeepers.
Perhaps at some point, shops that only use blade-stop safety saws would recoup that cost on lower employee health insurance premiums?
Licensing the technology does not mean it must be put into all models of saw! You don't have to buy the heated seats and built-in backseat entertainment center when you buy a car, either.
>>Licensing the technology does not mean it must be put into all models of saw!
Saw Stop is actively engaged, and has been for more than 10 years, in trying to get the government to mandate their technology to be in all models of saw
In this analogy, one company has patented the seatbelt and demanded royalties on every car sold, while lobbying congress to make seat belts mandatory, and aggressively suing anyone else who implements the seatbelt.
And how much was the seat belt actually worth while it was patented? How much of that value should go to the inventor of the seat belt?
Is 10% reasonable? Too much or too little? How much value should be captured by the consumers that wear the belts? How much by the manufacturers that licensed them voluntarily? How much from compulsory installations? How much value should be captured by unlicensed installations?
Should the value of raised speed limits count, or just the direct impact of reduced collision injury severity?
Are we discounting the possibility that the patent licensing fee demanded by the saw-stopping inventor was actually reasonable in the US, thanks to hyperinflated medical costs, and the saw manufacturers were basing their decisions on international sales in countries with sane healthcare systems?
I think that for many (most) tools that are not battery powered or (have a preference/requirement to be) lightweight, older is better. Or at least last longer. I have a Kenwood A701A mixer that's about 50 years old and going strong. Things did cost proportionally more back then though.
"Back in the day" engineering things to last a precise amount of time was expensive. You couldn't just make your simulation software figure it out, you had to test, consult data, etc, etc which was often not done (or done less) and designs relied more heavily on data from past examples, tribal knowledge and educated guesses. Several expected lifetimes of the object later the only stuff left in service is the good stuff.
That could be part of it. But I think survivor bias generally gets much more credit as an explanation than it deserves, and I strongly doubt that older generations of tools would have been designed like modern tools even if, say, simulation software had been available then.
It could be just relentless pressure to reduce costs, after the people who knew why it should be done a certain way had all retired, and a customer base that changed into one that either didn't know how to recognize quality, or valued it less.
Maybe we can do without heat-treating the surface? Maybe just give a quick grind instead of hand scraping the ways? Maybe outsource the castings instead of doing them in-house using the process we'd honed over decades?
If you dive into the history of Stanley's woodworking hand planes, you'll see a 140 year history of bamboozlement going on. A sort of tug-of-war between consumers valuing quality and Stanley cheapening out on designs. You have their subpar Definance line, their Handyman line, and probably others from them. They possibly sold under other names as well. Their main line also went under various changes through the years. They've been putting out junk hand planes since the 1940s and perhaps earlier.
A modern Lie-Nielsen is easily as good as the best Stanley planes.
Old tools are hit or miss. Sure, the design on a drill press hasn't changed in 50 years. But the newer model probably has less runout and a better motor. Bandsaws are the same. One old tool you could never pay me enough to use is an old table saw, or radial arm saw. I like my limbs, and the only saw worth paying money for right now is a SawStop. It's like asking someone if they want to drive a car without seat belts or airbags.
The Kitchenaid mixer is practically a trope in the "buy it for life" subreddit - how the old ones were built to last and the new ones are pieces of shit because they have plastic gears that'll break if you even look at it wrong. Well,
1) those plastic gears are sacrificial gears that will break if you drive it too hard but they cost nothing and are easy to replace; the "properly built one" may have a burnt out motor at this point and may be too costly or impractical to repair - and
2) you don't see the lot of them that haven't survived to this day and whose owners have thrown them out and forgotten about them already. And
3) people keep comparing the lowest end appliance from the 50s with the lowest end appliance today, and obviously the modern one is going to be a piece of disposable garbage. The disposable garbage tier didn't exist back then so compare the quality tier then with the quality tier now, and you'll find that modern quality stuff stands up just fine, if not better because of material advances and minor innovations. Yes, sadly, there are probably categories where the quality tier has gone away and there's only garbage left, that is unfortunate.
Yeah older tools that have cast iron bodies are more stable because of the weight, important in lathes and tools that you definitely don’t want to move around while working!
There is an amazing culture of tool restorers on YouTube that show restores, rebuilds, mods, and others. If you like old tools checkout Hand Tool Rescue (a real purist), and recently Fireball tools has a series fixing and modding an amazing 100 year old bandsaw to make it safe and easier to use.
Drill presses and (wood) jointers are also largely unchanged over decades.
You can still get good use out of a Buffalo drill press from the 1940s. A lot of those machines were made and went into small machine shops, and are just out there circulating around because the basic tool is so simple. (E.g., this well-known woodworker's shop: http://penultimatewoodshop.blogspot.com/2013/05/shop-tour-mi...)
Lots of random downvoting happening on this page. It's curious. Yours is perhaps one of the most innocuous posts I've ever seen on HN. Don't take the downvote to heart :)
Interestingly, Snap-off (also known as Snap-on) still owns itself regularly. That may or may not be a Good Thing™.
And moar AvE teardown vijeos needed because you know corporate overlords always be hollowing-out once proud brands. Craftsman hand-tools had a lifetime exchange warranty should they break, not that wooden-handled screwdrivers would ever do such a thing.
Back in the 1970's my father worked at a steel fabrication plant building bridges and other humongous things. They would custom order some gigantic socket from Craftsman, use it on some high torque wrench until it shattered, take it back and get it replaced.
At a former employer, a fresh CADdie designed a brake housing with a bolt circle too close to the outside diameter for a socket to fit over the bolts. Oops.
He'd apparently turned off some constraint check without noticing, and, never having worked in manufacturing, didn't think twice of it.
The workshop foreman had to have sockets machined down in order to install the brake packs effectively.
That designer didn't dare venture into the assembly hall for years!
I'm amused that they skip Harbor Freight despite it being an industry colossus through sheer volume. It's like trying to write an article about what grocery stores sell what brands of milk and skipping Walmart.
And before anyone tries a "no true tradesman" fallacy, go ask some people who work in the trades. There are select items they likely buy from harbor freight, probably not any "required to do the job" battery powered power tools but lots of hand tools, consumables, shop equipment, etc are likely sourced through them.
I would suspect this is because HF doesn't actually manufacture tools, they're a distributor with some white-label brands (all with hilariously "American" sounding names). This is also true of companies like Grizzly, which also aren't included in this article.
In my experience HF's "higher-end" brands, if you can call them that, such as Bauer or Hercules have performed at or slightly above the level I'd expect from Ryobi or Kobalt for prices that seem consistently lower. Definitely fine for hobby work.
No. It's not. I read the article and then when I didn't see it I ctrl+F'd for "harbor" and didn't get any hits. They have a section on big box store tools yet they miss the only big box store that is involved in its supply chain to the point of engineering (I don't know if it's in house or 3rd party) tools tailor made for them.
Ryobi is barely mentioned, but is definitely the most popular amongst the people I work with. Generally because it's volunteer stuff and everything gets broken so there's no point in getting something extra nice.
I know contractors that use Ryobi because if it gets ripped off, broken, or lost it's nothing to replace. Site theft is tragically a too common thing when the economy sucks, like now.
The useful thing I've found from this is that "AEG" in Australia is the same as "RIDGID" (orange) in the US and the batteries are compatible.
So I've been able to buy tools that are not available as AEG tools in Australia (ie they're not offered in the product range here). I purchased them skin only to avoid any charger incompatibilities (and use the AEG batteries and charges with the RIDGID tools).
It might work in reverse that buying AEG from Australia is now a cheaper way to get RIDGID tools because the Australian dollar is quite weak compared to the US dollar.
All of these manufacturers make awesome tools, despite what many people claim, all of the hand tools are better than they were 20 years ago.
There's a couple things you need to realize: most of them are fighting to have a good name, which means they'll do their utmost to squeeze value out of every cent they spend manufacturing a device. If you buy a $80 Makita drill, it's going to be just as good as a $80 DeWalt drill, or a Bosch or Metabo one. It's more about whether you like the colour scheme, the feel of it, maybe some feature tradeoffs.
Want a better drill? Simply spend more. Yes, Hilti and Festool exclusively make $200 drills, and they're worth it to the professionals. But the $150 Makita/DeWalt/Milwaukee/etc drills are also better than the $80 drills those same manufacturers make. More money means more value. You think a carpenter would spend extra to get a $150 Makita instead of a $80 one if it wasn't worth it? Those brands would be nowhere if they couldn't get the pro's to use their tools.
Looking purely at the brand can bite you in the ass. You might lift your nose at modern B&D, Ryobi or Bosch Green, because they only sell cheap tools, but then you'd miss the fact that DeWalt sells crap as well, they just don't switch the color schemes. Bosch has the same brand, but two colorschemes (green being the cheap ones). Makita sometimes sells batches of cheap powertools in big box stores that are bad and seems to be magically missing from their global marketing.
Before buying a powertool, go to the store and grab it. Feel the weight of it, rub the plastic, scratch it with your finger nails, shake it hard to feel its sturdiness. Turn it on and notice the power, and the control. Go on youtube and see what the pro's use. Lots of pro's don't have any sponsorships, and even if they are sponsored, they wouldn't use the sponsored tools if they couldn't accomplish the work at the level they need to entertain their audience.
Personally, I've got a mix of brands and qualities. When I started out everything I had was shit tier, and any time something either broke or annoyed me with its crappiness I replaced it with a better one. If you've got the money, you could skip that step and just buy good tier everything (just don't buy the DeWalt combo deals, they're a scam) and upgrade to S-tier when you start noticing some things that could be better.
(about old tools: the old tools that are better are all the things that get better when they're heavier. That's decidedly not hand held power tools)
As other commenters have said - look for very similar specs between the more halo brands and the lower end stuff. Like a lot of things, it's possibly the same thing in a different suit, or only slightly detuned. You can save a pretty penny.
Personally I use this in terms of trickle-down technology. If a feature appears on a Milwaukee, it will shortly appear on A Ridgid or Ryobi soon. This was the case for hydraulic impact drivers, that first came out on the Ridgid then Ryobi and Milwaukee soon after. But it's really about the entire tool family and how much does it fit you. Since you're not buying a single tool but more about buying the battery format. So if you need garden tools maybe down the line, check out a tool lineup that offers this, even if it's a remote possibility. All of the tools IMHO are well built and I doubt there's a huge gap in performance.
There's a pretty huge gap in durability. I had a Ryobi starter-set drill blow out its MOSFET midway through taking an Ikea bed apart. The starter-set Milwaukee M12 I replaced it with is considerably better built, notably in having a much higher-rated flyback diode and better heat sinking. As a bonus, it has a sprag clutch behind the chuck, which makes it a lot nicer to use.
That said, I'd still point at Ryobi as a good place to start, or to move up from an Ikea toy or whatever. They're fine for occasional, light-duty kind of use, and they have a wide range of cheap 'n cheerful stuff that'll take the 18v One+ batteries - the drill might be dead (until I get around to resurrecting it), but I'm still getting good service out of its batteries in the $100 weed eater I use a couple times a year.
(Also, that $50 Ryobi starter drill, plus a cheap rotary scrubber head off Amazon, makes a great tool for getting rid of stubborn mildew. That's the other thing I like about them: they're cheap enough that you can try dumb shit and not be too upset if it blows up on you, or not really mind running it to death if it doesn't.)
Not sure why you're downvoted, but perhaps apropos for the maker/hardware hacker-inclined, the packs I've seen are just 18650 cells (same as used en-mass on original Teslas) inside of a 3D-(re)printable plastic shell, and some hackable electronics. #righttorepair
If you find a tool you like, check the offerings of the sub-brands from the same group. The mechanical difference between them might be little to none, while the price between them may vary wildly. Unfortunately you aren't going to be allowed to take them apart before purchase so its still hard to compare the internals, but you can check reviews and comparisons of those products.
I mean, my intuition from owning a shop and buying a fair number of tools (and researching them) for heavy use is reinforced by this chart. The best tools are made by the corporations with the least siblings and the most specialization. As someone who had a fleet of power tools for an industrial operation, I prefer Makita over dewalt, for example. A number of more niche "best in class brands" weren't even on this list, for example Fein grinders are what machinists buy, Boeing uses Hutchins air tools, and most Arborists I've met reach for a stihl. Fascinating regardless
AvE comes to mind, very informative. Although I don't like his dad jokes and sexist phrases at all, they got old and annoying really quick. Sadly useful information to bad joke ratio is about 1:3 in his videos.
Yeah, the man churns through equipment and tests at a rare pace. So much I'm concerned for his sanity sometimes. So clear, so to the point.. pure service.
One great channel is the aptly named "Tool teardown":
Still a better ratio than any of my actual uncles, by a couple orders of magnitude in most cases. Besides, there's nothing that's not funny about seeing a half-in-the-bag jackass put a hacksaw through an 18650 and then be surprised when it shits the bed.
I'm actually surprised there are this many different umbrella corporations over the listed brands. Judging by other industries (e.g., personal care/grooming products) this industry seems ripe for more consolidation.
I've seen the Chinese brand TACKLIFE show up on Amazon a lot. Very inexpensive and decent reviews. I'm looking at their 10" miter saw. Then I see the Bosch one for 3x the price. What does that get you?
If you don't care about it being square, durable and trustworthy, than something like TACKLIFE might work, but for a miter saw I would pick something just a bit more expensive, or buy something second hand.
I've owned a cheap one, it failed, bought a festool one, its still square, doesn't fail and the cut quality is great. You don't need to buy a Kapex (the festool miter saw), but something like the bosch, milwaukee, dewalt or makita will survive way longer.
I've bought too many cheap tools to do that ever again.
I don't think a miter saw is a good place to economize unless you're doing only un-demanding work (e.g. rough framing). You really want it to keep a square adjustment and to have zero play. And it's a tool you might use a lot for a long time.
I have a 10" Delta that's about $160. It's not a slider. It advertises as compound, but setup is not repeatable, so I only use it for 90 degree cuts. (Perfect example of a "feature" that turns out to be useless in practice.) I have used it for rough carpentry and it's perfectly OK for that.
I also make furniture and do finish carpentry (DIY, not for sale), and that miter saw can only be used for rough cutoffs in such work. I have to do all final cuts on the table saw with a sled or a miter jig. So in truth, the miter saw is 90% useless for that work, because even awkward rough cuts on long stock can be done very quickly with a hand saw - just a basic Japanese-style pull saw that costs about $20.
Some of the Tacklife saws that are about $200 are sliders as well as compound miter. I'm skeptical that you can do anything more than rough carpentry on such a machine, because the slide mechanism introduces even more play. Of course, I haven't used the saw.
One of the merits of using machines in the shop (as opposed to hand tools) is that a quality machine is repeatable and predictable. You can't allow a 44 degree miter or a cut that's 1/16th too short in finish carpentry, so you can't use a mediocre miter saw.
The reason you can't ever be making 44 degree miters is that you may have already milled that piece to final dimensions in width and height, and a mistaken cut will require repeating all that work. In fact, such a mistake might not be recoverable if you were trying to achieve a grain match in un-painted work.
Many of the above factors are not relevant if you really just want to do basic framing!
What really is "basic framing"? I'm thinking of build a rectangular desk with a rectangular "apron" of 2x4's for stiffness. Would this be along those lines?
I mean like framing a house, shed, or garage with 2x4s. Not furniture!
If you have ever built a picture frame that you intend to hang on a wall and have people look at, you will know how hard it is to get good miters off a "just ok" miter saw.
A saw with a decent chance of lasting more than half the job. If you want the kind that doesn't, get it from Harbor Freight (Princess Auto in CA), at least as long as they still have the 90-day NQA warranty. It'll be about as good as the Amazon junk, which is not very, but also a lot quicker and easier to replace when the MOSFET blows up after thirty or forty total inches of cut.
This always happens with durability testimonials. Everyone justifies their premium purchase (Le Creuset cookware, GoRuck backpack etc.) saying how much it's been through, without ever having tried the much cheaper alternative.
I mean, okay? Sometimes you get lucky with cheap stuff. More often, you don't. If it works for you and keeps working, great! Congratulations on winning the lottery.
Of course, it's a bit silly to say that, because you won the lottery, everyone else will. But that always happens, too.
As near as I can tell, the 20" planers differ primarily in what color they're painted. I say that having used and wrenched on both in various shops I've worked in.
I also have firsthand experience with HolyTek's 24" thicknessing planer (no direct link, because god forbid the web actually worked the way it did in 1998), and it sure looks to be the same machine as Grizzly's offering in that size and horsepower rating:
Grizzly may be organizationally and financially independent of the other vendors, but they sure seem to share manufacturing or sub it out to the same foundries and machining outfits.
Used to do a bit back in the day, every time I got out my Black and Decker 18v drill I'd get a few mocking comments that it wasn't a "proper" tool. Kept my mouth shut about it being a rebranded DeWalt for half the price. They didn't deserve the tip.
Makita was always the highest regarded - assumed they were still a group-brand though, interesting to see them and Hilti are basically their own companies.
How did you discover it was actually a rebranded DeWalt (as opposed to a drill manufactured to less demanding specs by a company that also happens to own the DeWalt brand)?
I own a good number of power tools, mostly DeWalt, though I usually check Consumer Reports and other reviews and have bought from other companies when the DeWalt option didn't look like it was holding up well. If I could verify that a homeowner-oriented brand (as opposed to a tradesman-oriented brand) like Black and Decker was literally just re-skinning a higher-end tool and selling it for less, I'd happily take the cost savings, though.
Don't have any strong evidence to back up my claim unfortunately. We compared it visually, looked identical, specs sounded identical, and it put up with the same abuse over an extended period of time (I'm still, 10 years later, picking bits of concrete out of its air holes).
I'll backtrack then and say "it's as good as the offering from their much more expensive stable mate, to the extent my daily use with it was exactly the same". Their QA might be lower then, so not sure whether it's a glowing recommendation of all their units, or just I won the drill-lottery.
Will caveat and say this wasn't a bog-standard entry level drill - it was pretty much B&D's top of the line from their offering at the time.
SBD and TTI each have various tiers of tool offerings, and while they may share outward physical design aspects, they are pretty clearly stratified when it comes to the parts inside. Using B&D vs DeWalt as the example here, you'll typically find the following on the DeWalt part over something that might look very similar from B&D:
Whether or not these differences are worth the cost delta for each tool and for each tool user is up to the user. Check through some tool teardowns and you'll see what's happening here. Typically it's not the exact same tool from the same factory line with a new label.
Not only this, but I've always found that for Milwaukee and DeWalt, there's a significantly higher chance that there's parts and information available for repair and overhaul of the tools, especially after the model stops selling, compared to many cheaper "consumer" lines or the kind of stuff that comes from Harbor Freight.
I used to tease a colleague that his Lexus was really a re-badged Toyota.
There must be some difference between B&D and De Walt, tradespeople wouldn't take long to figure out they could save s few bucks and get the same quality from B&D
I don't doubt there is on some, or even most of their ranges. But you'd be surprised as to how much brand loyalty and brand prestige plays out with some tradespeople.
Especially if you're starting out with your own firm, having to interact with other types of trades regularly you want to have the look of a pro. B&D doesn't inspire confidence to those in the know as much as Makita or DeWalt.
Your comment is hurting me the same way it hurts to read people say wearing a bike helmet is more dangerous because cyclists will feel invulnerable and take risks.
It's like, people can invent a reason for anything, and either convince themselves their reason is the higher probability cause, or disregard probability entirely.
Honestly, what do you think is more probable: That professionals throw away thousands of dollars buying conspicuous tools every year, or that equipment used in high impact, mechanically challenging situations for 8 hours a day is designed to a different standard than equipment for homeowners who might use it a couple times a month?
My mind rebels so hard against internalizing how people make up so much illogical stuff to suite their preconceptions. I don't want to learn the lesson, but everywhere I look I'm being taught it over and over again.
I've been there on-site and seen it play out. This isn't me being an armchair enthusiast sat with my DIY kit judging the pros. I've talked to them, used their kit, they've used mine, consistently, on real, fully-paying jobs.
> That professionals throw away thousands of dollars buying conspicuous tools every year
That's exactly what I'm saying in my experience with general construction tradesmen. Now, the argument isn't that a crappy little 9v drill from Amazon will work the same as a proper engineered brand for specialised equipment, but that I have actual real-world experience of a whole number of pros who have explicitly told me they buy light, named gear for visual purposes more than it being better than some homebrand kit for their needs.
I'm not sure what you mean by "pro" but many/most construction workers I see working use milwaukee tools. I don't think I'v ever seen fein in the wild.
For those that don't know, SawStop is one of the most impressive recent techical innovations in tablesaws. It basically smashes a running blade down into an aluminium crashblock as soon as it detects something conductive touching it.
It's great to watch it work: https://youtu.be/rnlTGndRi38?t=158
Also, the list is missing at least Mafell and Fein, but they are (like Hilti and Makita) simply owned by themselves. Edit: and Lamello!