wrote:

John Rumm wrote:

wrote:


Mains has the advantages over battery:
much cheaper

yup


Pound for pound the mains drill wins hands down
yes the biggest cordlesses can outperform the smallest mains
Usenet, the home of pedantry.

Sorry had not realised you were going at this just from the bang for
buck angle. I was only saying that on a (reasonable) coredless lack of
power is not usually an issue.

I think you need enough for every task youll ever do with it. Codlesses
are often inadequate, especially the cheaper ones.

Agreed. I was not advocating he purchase the cheapest though.

In reality the sensible thing to do is buy both: a mid range cordless,
and a cheap mains drill.

so pound for pound much more speed.

But then so what? What does it do for you in most cases? Make
screwdriving harder, and increase the chances of burning out a drill bit
in steel. It makes naff all difference with wood. Hard masonry is the
only place it helps on a conventional hammer drill. But the OP was not
talking about drilling masonry big time. If he was I would suggest
skipping the conventional mains drill and go SDS instead.

precisely, the batteries go. I've used too much rechargeable based kit
in the past to want to go back to it when not necessary.

I can understand the feeling, there are times I have felt the same...
however I have found it depends greatly on the quality of the
rechargable kit.

A couple of examples:

Someone bought me a rechargable jigsaw from B&Q once. It is so lame that
I can't ever visualise a time where I would use it out of choice. Even a
10 quid shed special mains jigsaw would trounce it in every respect.

Someone also bought me a green Bosch mains drill - for a time it was my
only drill other than a 9V combi, they both got used in equal measure
since there were plenty of jobs the cordless was not up to, although for
screwdriving it was vastly superior. However I now almost never reach
for the Bosch in preference to my 18V Makita combi - there is nothing
that it does better.

(If the cordless will not hack hard masonry then its time for the SDS
anyway, since that is something the Bosch is useless at).

no, pointing out they do have downsides, and that all in all the cheap
mains drill is a much better tool than a cheap codless.

If you are limiting yourself to cheap then I quite agree. You can't do
rechargable cells of any useful quality "cheap".

I always thought of B&D kit as adequate, if not great, but buying a
megapack of their drill bits really lifted that illusion from my eyes.
A £1 set of bits from teh cheapshop left them for dust. A bit that
cant even make a hole in soft pine is a joke.

Perhaps when they said "wood drill bits" that is what they ment they
were actually made from!



--
Cheers,

John.

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