Comments by "Paul Frederick" (@1pcfred) on "Let's Settle This! Are Cordless Power Tools REALLY Better? Torque, Cutting Speed, Noise, Vibration" video.

  1. Hedge trimmers are the nemesis of extension cords. They're practically made to cut them.
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  2. Electricians are team red and carpenters are team yellow. That is what is best.
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  3.  @kstofkos  corded is good if you have power. But battery power is convenient and portable.
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  4. Cordless tools can use regenerative braking. They short the motor out. That turns the motor into a magnetic brake. Or there's just less mass in the armature of the motor. That would make for less inertia. Electric tools benefit from spin down because the fan in them keeps turning. That helps with cooling.
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  5.  @AKADriver  pneumatic is still the king of the hill as far as impact goes. But cordless performance is pretty impressive. I do not think it is possible to supply a reverse current to a motor that's spinning down due to the back EMF that the motor is going to generate. Instead what they do is short the windings. That we can do. The back EMF generated is going to be higher voltage than supply voltage. Which is why you can't put the paltry voltage you have into the motor. Physics denies you! It's weird stuff.
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  6. Tools have universal motors in them. That means they have brushes and commutators. You can only speed control an induction motor with a Variable Frequency Drive because they're synchronous motors locked to the frequency of the current they run on. A phase fired chopper circuit like a triac dimmer will not work with an induction motor.
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  7. Power is Volts times Amps. European tools are higher voltage and lower amperage. So they produce the same power. 120*15=1,800 Watts. / 745 = 2.4 horsepower which is plenty for a handheld tool.
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  8.  @Scott6794  electric car packs are large because electric cars are expected to do a lot. They have to move a lot of mass at a high speed for a long distance. That's a lot of work. The energy storage density of batteries is fairly low too. It's about 32 times less than gasoline. The only saving grace EVs have is their efficiency is higher. About 9 times higher. An IC engine vehicle still has better range though. The efficiency can't close the energy gap.
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  9.  @Doobie603  with cordless tools sticking with one battery platform is sensible. Maybe you won't have the absolute best of every tool. But you should be able to run all of your tools. Having a fleet of battery chargers is pretty excessive.
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  10. Worm drive saws are more of a western thing. If you don't have the 8 1/4" I don't see the point to worm drive.
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  11.  @N1rOx  worm drives gain you more cut depth but it doesn't help you out any unless you get a 8.25" blade. That can through cut a 4x4. A 7.25" can't. Past that you're better off with a sidewinder. Unless you just like humping around heavy tools.
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  12. Corded and cordless tools go about making power very differently from each other. That difference makes it impractical to run a cordless tool on line voltage. Converting high voltage AC to low voltage DC at high current is not an easy thing to do. The way we'd go about doing that today the PSUs wouldn't last for too long themselves.
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  13. Loads draw current. What they do when there's higher voltage is make loads more resistive. Then they draw less current. Otherwise they'd burn up. When you plug a 12V bulb into a 120V outlet it goes pop. It just couldn't handle all of that voltage. In a motor what they do is put more windings of thinner wire into them. Or if it is a convertible motor you run it in series for the higher voltage or parallel for the lower voltage. I guess in Europe they don't have those? Because our single phase is 240 VAC here. We just center tap it for 120V circuits. 120V is either hot to the neutral. It's 240V between the two hots though. I have 240V outlets in my shop. Because Murica!
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  14.  @Biketunerfy  It is 120V on either hot coming off the utility transformer to the center tapped neutral. It is 240V between both hots. I do electrical work so I know how it all works. I've wired up whole services. There's 3 bus bars in our service panels. Two hots and the neutral. A 120V circuit would just be one hot and the neutral. A 240V circuit is both hots. We do not use resistors at all in our electrical work besides using them as heating elements. If you have an electric hot water heater the heating elements are resistors.
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  15.  @Biketunerfy  they're gonna have to pry my hot water heater from my cold dead hands!
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  16. That's not really true. The shoe is there as a convenience feature. If you can hold the saw it'll cut anywhere. If you want to get full use out of a blade often you need to work off the shoe then too. Wear out some different teeth on the blade.
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  17. You might be right. I have some vintage corded tools and they're beasts. But I don't have any new tools to compare them to. So I don't really know.
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  18. You're supposed to tie the extension cord to the tool. You don't count on the plug holding things together. What's the matter with you! You tie cords off.
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  19. Corded tools do not have to face the challenges cordless tools do. A corded tool can count on unlimited voltage and current from the line. It never varies. The voltage is always high and the current keeps flowing. Batteries are much more limited in their energy storage capacity. At high draw you can measure their delivery time in minutes. So you have to make the most of what a battery has in it.
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  20.  @connelly6375  induction motors are frequency locked. Universal motors as their name suggests are pretty flexible. They run on AC, DC and different voltages too. Which is how they got their name. You can speed control an induction motor with a VFD but they don't all like it. It depends on the motor's construction how well it'll tolerate running at different speeds. They're really engineered to run one speed. When they put the cooling fan in the motor they assumed it'd be going a certain RPM. That dictated rotor vane construction. Get too far from that sweet spot and it won't perform right. Some motors can shrug off the extra heat and some take up a bad smoking habit. It really depends on what they're made of.
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  21. Corded tools don't need the efficiency though. They're corded. So you'd be paying for a feature you don't really need.
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  22.  @ProjectFarm  Test high temp RTV. I've run that stuff on an exhaust manifold and it worked. Plus it's sexy orange. The blue stuff just looks tacky. Nothing says slob job like blue RTV oozing out. Oh and Indian Head Shellac. That stuff is legend. I won't do a water pump without Indian Head. Not unless I want to do it again.
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  23.  @billynomates920  if it absolutely cannot leak then what you want is 3M below the waterline adhesive/sealer. You're going to pay for it but that stuff will seal. It only comes in one ugly color too. The other problem is it doesn't keep. Once you crack it open the clock is ticking.
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  24. If you ever have to work underwater then pneumatic takes it there.
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  25. The one test I didn't see is run time. If Todd paid his electric bill then my money is on the corded tools.
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  26. Someone made something like that years ago. Was like a bandolier of batteries and an adapter you plugged into the tool. I forget the name of it now. It was more in the nicad era.
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  27. You can run corded tools on DC. They're universal motors. The universal aspect is the kind of current they can use. Though a tool with a speed control won't like the switch. But if it's just on or off universal motors run fine on DC.
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  28. I have a vintage Makita corded circular saw. It's OK.
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  29. There's always time to run a cord if it turns into that kind of a job.
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  30. I have a big pipe on my triple reduction Milwaukee D handle HD drill. Because she's got a bit of torque to her.
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  31. The gap in price is widening though.
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  32. No one does it because it isn't as easy as you seem to think it is to do. Wall current is a lot different than the power batteries deliver. Converting wall current into current with a power curve like batteries can deliver is not trivial. It'd cost a fortune and it probably wouldn't be very reliable. It'd be big, bulky and be of questionable safety too. If they tried to do it you wouldn't like the results.
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  33. Proprietary batteries are definitely a scam. If there was any justice in this world the manufacturers would be forced to standardize battery packs. Could you imagine the chaos if every appliance had a different plug? It may be down to patent law though. Because some jerk granted Milwaukee a patent on lithium ion battery packs. Not that they invented anything. They just had the bright idea to patent it. That's where 20V battery packs came from BTW. It was companies trying to evade Milwaukee's patent. No our batteries are different they're 20V not 18V They're no different.
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  34. Line driven tools really do not need to be brushless. Brushed motors are far cheaper and more robust. Cordless had to go brushless in order to close the gap in performance with corded tools. You can draw current from the power line all day long.
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  35.  @kevinthompson2308  many a cord's life was cut short by a hedge trimmer. That having been said though there are strategies to avoid such a fate.
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  36. Power = Volts times Amps. Cordless tools are lower volts so they draw higher amps. Cordless are also more efficient to make up the rest of the difference. A brushless motor is less resistive than a brushed motor is. Resistance in a power tool is just power loss. But corded tools have power to burn. So they take a brute force approach.
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  37.  @BL-yj2wp  yes but with what electricity costs in Germany today who can afford to use it? 1800W is our lowest power line circuits. That's 15 Amps. We only run those circuits in living spaces. Like bedrooms and living rooms. I have 50 amp 240V circuits in my shop. By code you have to run 20A circuits in kitchens. So you can power a toaster or a microwave oven. 15A don't cut it. I guess the average residential service here now is 200A 240V No one's looking for any more either. But if they are you can certainly have it.
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  38.  @dcmirk  I don't need innovative tools. I just need tools that work.
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  39.  @Scott6794  high drain lithium ion batteries can supply over 30 amps. They can output that for most of their charge.
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  40.  @Scott6794  I don't know much about EV battery packs but I think they are arranged in banks. The pack isn't just one big battery pack. It's a little more sophisticated than that.
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  41.  @Krobear  sacrilege!
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  42.  @Doobie603  I can agree with that. No company can design the top performer of every tool. In general what they offer is acceptable though. With some notable rare exceptions. A while back I can recall DeWalt putting out an impact driver that everyone testing it found to be very underwhelming.
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  43.  @tiredoldmechanic1791  I remember when cordless first came out. We had the 9.6V Makita driver. It was pretty revolutionary. Most construction workers are just felons that haven't been caught yet.
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