Thread by @gravislizard

I bought a Milwaukee Fuel cordless hammer drill and I'm honestly tremendously impressed by the thing. It's a marvel of technology.

I'm coming from a Ryobi that was probably $30 on its own and several years old. I was fully aware it was cheap and underpowered when I bought it but it was a starter tool and did fine.

I'm not doing much that needs power tools right now, but I wanted to get a Milwaukee partially so that I'd have the batteries already when the day comes that I could really, really use a cordless power tool - like an impact wrench or sawzall.

What I really wanted in the short term was Milwaukee's cordless shop vac, and that doesn't come with a battery or charger - the cordless drill kit comes with two batteries and a charger, which makes the batteries basically 30% of their MSRP. It's a "killer deal" as it were.

The vacuum works great, by the way. It's small and weak and doesn't have a lot of accessories but it does perfect for exactly what I bought it for: collecting sawdust. I love it already.

ok, the drill tho
i'll admit I don't know how things worked in anything except a bottom of the line ryobi from several years ago. but i'm PRETTY sure the mechanisms in this thing are ridiculous

in the Ryobi, and most other drills that I've been around since 2002 or so, there's a ring that sets the maximum torque. It seems to be a simple spring loaded clutch, and the ring adjusts the tension. When torque exceeds the setting, it slips and produces an awful ratchet noise

This drill has the ring, but as soon as I tested it I could tell it had nothing in common with the ones I've seen before. At first I thought it was a different clutch design, but now I don't think that's the case at all.

This drill has a brushless motor, which (in short) means it has an electronic controller of untold complexity. I believe the torque ring is simply programming the motor driver - and the decisions it makes are complex.

First: when it hits torque limit, it first slows down, then stops completely. It doesn't sit there ratcheting, it just quits. The feeling is very odd - I think it's the motor controller experimentally tapping the coils and checking resistance to double check that it hit limit.

This right away tells you that the motor controller is reading the torque ring position. There's no other way to do it, obviously. And I thought that was all, but it does more.

I grew up with a 110V corded drill for years. When my parents got a Ryobi cordless, the first thing I noticed is that the motor started and stopped instantly. It didn't have any spinup or spindown time.

The quick stop is (i believe) because the triggers in these drills are already very complicated - to enable variable speed - so they have room for an extra mechanism to short the motor windings together, creating a magnetic brake. The fast spinup is weird though.

We had this ancient aluminum Black & Decker and it took a while to get up to speed. Idk why modern drills don't have that issue. Anyway, this one has complex behavior.

Above torque level 5.5, it's like any other drill. But below that level, it takes a moment to get up to speed. You can hear it ramping up the PWM freq. This is so it doesn't start rapidly and instantly overrun torque before the limiter has time to notice.

I also found that the motor picks different starting rates and final speeds based on your torque limit. 3/4 of the ring settings have different maximum speeds. The gear shift also affects maximum speed, not just final output, but motor RPM.

So this thing is packed with sensors and technology, and I'd love to take it apart, but I'm confident I'd never get it back together - and I'm not wealthy enough to risk voiding the warranty.

It's also, of course, at least 50% stronger than the Ryobi I had. maybe more. It has a deceptive kind of strength. I put a 2" hole saw in it and ran it into a 2x4, and... it was like nothing was there.

It was weird. It obviously must have applied just as much torque as another drill would have, but I didn't feel it. It didn't twist my hands the same way. I put the saw in the Ryobi and it was much harder to operate. I don't know how to explain it.

"more power" is meaningless - the amount of torque it takes to push the teeth through wood is a constant, and that torque is applied to my hands. It's impossible for one drill to apply less force to me.