re: New Impact Driver Recommendation

A vote for 20V Dewalt Max here too. I’m strictly a weekend warrior, but they are plenty of tool for me

quote:

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Bought a couple of adapters off Amazon and use the 20 volt Max batteries on my old 18 volt tools they work great with limited money spent.

I’ve bought old 18 volt tools off Facebook for cheap. 18 volt grinder, jigsaw, circular saw, nut drivers. With a 15 dollar adapter they all now run on the big 20 volt batteries

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The one thing to be careful of, when you do this:

I THINK the "correct"/new tools have something set up to keep you from over-draining the battery. You lose that protection with an adapter.

If you drain below a certain level, the charger will not recharge it; you have to set up a way to bump charge it back up to there.

I have a few different brands, and one of my Ryobi batteries is prone to this. I had to pull the cells out of the casing, and do a quick series of tap-charges with a car charger, to get it back up to around 13 volts... the normal charger can catch it there and finish the recharge.

BTW there's no actual difference between Ryobi and Milwaukee 18v, and Dewalt 20v. 18v batteries are listed using nominal voltage, 20v are listed using maximum voltage.
The improvement you're seeing with the older tools, are that the Lithium batteries are much better than the old Ni-Cad batteries.