Dan Shapiro

I wrote this for my wife’s weblog at www.personworks.com/weblog. It’s written for a non-toolie audience, but may be useful anyway.
Executive Summary:
* If you think you might like to have a cordless screwdriver/drill around, but you’re not sure if you would use it, get a Porter-Cable 9820 9.6-Volt Cordless Drill/Driver Kit
* To get a bunch of useful tools cheap, get the Ryobi 18 Volt Super Combo II from Home Depot
* To get everything you need in one box and have it last you forever, get Porter-Cable 9887QP Network 19.2-Volt Quad Pack
* Don’t buy anything from Black & Decker, Skill, Ridgid, or Craftsman unless you’ve researched it exceptionally well.
Part 1: What tools do you need?
You can buy just about everything cordless these days, but that doesn’t mean you should.
A cordless drill/screwdriver is absolutely essential. This will let you mount pictures, stir paint, fix railings, and on and on. You may want a corded version as well; if you are thinking about drywalling all day or for some reason you need major power, batteries can’t hold a candle to a wall socket. But the cordless version is so handy that you should get that first and get a corded version later.
A cordless reciprocating saw (or “Sawzall”) is something you may or may not use often, but when you do, you’ll be very glad if you have the cordless version. These are excellent for felling small trees, minor house demolition, and rough-cutting just about any kind of wood or siding. The only time you may wish for a corded version is if you have a full day of demolition–they run through batteries faster than a drill, so you’ll need more than two to last all day.
A cordless circular saw is a common choice, but it has some serious drawbacks. Circular saws go through batteries incredibly fast–you can drain a battery in 15 minutes or less depending on what you’re doing. Battery powered circular saws have much less torque than their corded counterparts. And I find that when I’m using a circular saw, I’m usually in the middle of a big project, so it’s not too inconvenient to run an extension cord. All that being said, I do have one, and I use it, and it’s certainly handy from time to time.
These, plus the inevitable flashlight and dustbuster that get thrown into the combo kits, are the most common battery powered tools. Some others are:
— Chainsaws (get a corded or gas one, or get a long blade for your reciprocating saw instead)
— Jigsaws (never tried one, seems like it would be handy)
— Rotary tools, a la Dremel (I use a corded one, but a cordless one could be handy)
— Boom boxes that run off the tool batteries (cheaper to just buy one of these like I did)
Part 2: Which Brand to Buy
There is a significant difference between brands of cordless tools. The quality and price tends to be consistent within the brand. Also, batteries don’t work between brands, so it makes a lot of sense to have all your tools be the same brand. Each brand has its own color that is used on all the tools; I’ll identify that so you can spot them.
Expensive and high quality
Porter Cable (gray) and DeWalt (yellow) are tried-and-true here. You pay big bucks for the brand, but the quality is usually perfect. Hitachi (green) has some budget items, but most of their tools fit in this category and get solid reviews. Bosch (light blue) doesn’t seem to sell as much as Porter Cable and DeWalt, but the reviews are as good or better and the prices are similar. Makita (also light blue, easily confused with Bosch) is better known for its saws than its drills, but comes in at the slightly cheaper side. Milwaukee (bright red) is a contractor’s favorite, expensive and indestructable. Panasonic (black and gray) rounds up the batch as being the most high-tech, featuring things like NiMH batteries that offer more power with less weight. Price, of course, is also on the high side.
If I was getting a tool from a company in this category and price was no issue, I would get a Milwaukee. In general, though, going with the most inexpensive tool from these top-end manufacturers is a fine plan.

Inexpensive and lower quality
Skil (dark red) makes tools of wildly varying quality at very low prices. Black and Decker (reddish-orange) is scraping the bottom of the barrel; they charge the least and, in my experience, offer the very worst quality tools. Actually, they used to be the same tools as DeWalt. If you heard they used to be great that’s true; they went downhill. Craftsman is all over the map; they’re unreliable enough that you have to do a lot of research on the particular tool to know if it’s any good (and the good ones tend to be way more expensive). Again, they used to be reliably good, but went downhill. Last in the “how the mighty have fallen” category is Ridgid, who started out producing very high quality tools at medium-high prices. According to articles I’ve read recently, they just outsourced all their production to China, sold the company, and reduced their warranty from lifetime to 2 years–but didn’t lower their prices. Stay away. Ryobi (dark blue) is the big winner in the budget category. Carried exclusively at Home Depot, the tools are about as cheap as Skil and B&D, but are actually quite useful. A contractor I know put it to me this way: “I can buy a Milwaukee and it’ll last me 10 years, or I can buy a Ryobi for a quarter of the price and have it last 3 years.” What will last him 3 years of heavy-duty work will probably last you or me 10 years, so I’m a big fan of Ryobi.
Part 3: Getting a deal
There’s a few simple rules to getting a good deal on cordless power tools.
–Buy combo packs. You save a ton of money. Example: Ryobi 18 volt battery, $50. Ryobi 18 volt drill with two batteries and a charger, $99. Ryobi 18 volt drill with two batteries, a charger, a circular saw, a reciprocating saw, a dustbuster, and a flashlight, $169.
–Costco sometimes carries the expensive brands (Milwaukee and DeWalt). They’re a good deal when they have them there.
— For expensive brands, all the major tool shops (Lowes, Home Depot, Amazon.com, Tool King) carry them, and they all promise to beat the competitors by 10%. There’s a catch here. Say you find it at one place for $100 and somewhere else for $110. Some stores like Amazon will beat the price by 10% of the DIFFERENCE, for a final price of $99. Other stores like Home Depot and Lowes will beat the price by 10% of the TOTAL, for a final price of $90. Find the cheapest price, then go to Home Depot or Lowes and show it to them, and you’ll pay 10% less than that.
— For Ryobi, only Home Depot carries them, so there’s not too much room to haggle. Check their web site for occasional specials.
–For any brand, they tend not to go on sale except when a product line is being discontinued. This usually happens when they phase out one combo pack and introduce a slightly different one (adding a radio or swapping one saw for another). When that happens, it happens everywhere, so don’t jump at the first such sale you see. Use the 10% trick above to get the very best deal.

(Note that the cheap/expensive difference is not so black-and-white for corded tools. Porter-Cable makes cheap mediocre compressors (I have one), Craftsman makes some dandy stationary powertools, etc.)
(Since I wrote this, Consumer Reports published a study on cordless drills. Their results match my recommendations, including Ryobi as a top value for the money, with one exception–they like the Skil drill. I recommend against it anyway. Even though the drill is OK, the other Skil cordless tools are, in my opinion, of varying quality. You want to stick with one brand for your cordless tools so that the batteries are interchangable. Better to sign up for Ryobi, which is consistently good across their line of tools.)

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