On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 06:41:27 +0000, Peter wrote:

Anyone got any experience with either of these?

Peter

It's a case of you get what you pay for.

I have purchased some at various times and found that I've had to
return them through failure or being underpowered. B&Q routers were a
prime example of this. The cordless tools tend to have poor
quality batteries and poor motor control, especially the cordless
drills and screwdrivers.

I tend to use the majority of power tools that I buy quite a bit, so
I'm also looking for accuracy and ease of use. Unfortunately this
doesn't seem to come either in my experience.

I don't subscribe to the notion that because something is for DIY
purposes that it has to be cheap. While part of the purpose of DIY
is to save money relative to using a professional, I think that the
other aspects are to get a job done when and as I want to do it and to
achieve a result equally as good, if not better.
Unfortunately I have found on several occasions that the own-brand
tools fall short in one way or another.

The DIY chains' marketing policy is to deliver products to a price to
attract buyers and to move a large volume of them. A keen eye is kept
of turnover per square metre in retail operations of this type. In
order to address customer perception problems, a 2 or 3 year warranty
is given. However, no service operation is provided. The retailer
plays the numbers game and simply replaces faulty product with new,
tossing the defective one in the skip. They have acceptable return
rate clauses in their supply contracts. At the end of the warranty
period, the tool has to be considered scrapped. The stores do not
generally have spares or service operations for the products.
B&Q were quite clear to me about this when I called their help line
recently.
Occasionally, one might be lucky and find that the same tool or one
close enough to it coming from the same private label factory in China
is being sold elsewhere and there is parts backup but this involves
time and detective work.

Of course, one might be lucky and with occasional use a tool might
last longer than the warranty period, but it would be prudent to
budget replacement at the end of the warranty period.
Another factor is that I don't particularly want to waste time and
fuel returning defective products to the store for replacement - that
eats into the DIY cost equation as far as I am concerned.

Having said all of that, I am not against the notion of buying store
brand tools, per sec. If it's a question of budget being an issue,
something is for occasional use and limitations are accepted, then
fine. I am just surprised when people expect to buy something
cheaply and expect high quality and reliability, and are shocked when
they discover that there is no backup.

If it is a choice between having and not having, then there are
certain types of tool that will do a job that is worthwhile and save
time. I would count a chop saw and a portable table saw in this
category. There are sometimes total duds like B&Q's router and their
collated screwdriver. However, inadequacy generally becomes
apparent quite quickly.




..andy

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