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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is the one tool you will always turn to!, August 1, 2001
It is light, well balanced, and very very powerful. I have turned perhaps 50 different subcontractors onto this tool and everytime I bump into on of them, they mention even more people they have converted. Makita is doing a poor job at advertising this tool. Another review refers to using the impact for drilling and he is right. In wood. When ever the impact driver sees resistance, it shifts into "impacting". This is fine in wood but in metal, the drill bit slows down grabbing too much material and the impact driver dutifully drives the bit, rachet by rachet, through the metal. This usually results in broken bits and the hex style drill bits get expensive. However, I keep a set of those drill bits for convenience and wood drilling. In an emergency, I actually used a hex drive mandrel (dewalt dw2591) and drove a 3" hole saw through oak in the back of a cabinet. It was slow and I almost went deaf, but the power of the impact driver is truly unbelievable. I also agree [...] that the 9.6 volt and 12 volt impact driver are nearly identical so get the 12 volt. There is no savings on weight for the reduction in power. However, the new 24 volt stuff is very heavy and only for someone who needs to do something like remove tires, not drive drywall screws. The beauty of the 12 volt is the incredible power with so little weight. We use them all day long. Another helpful hint. The grey/black batteries are Nickel-Metal Hydride. They can be charged more randomly with less risk of battery memory (which ultimately ruins a batteries' ability to take a full charge) and are more powerful. But, the charge has bad shelf life. In other words, if you plan on using your impact driver and then putting it away for two months, and then pulling it out again, your batteries will be low or dead. The original flourescent red batteries I think are Ni-cad. They have incredible shelf life but are prone to "charging memory" so always wait until they are low before charging them. My suggestion is to buy the more powerful battery set and purchase a spare red battery as a back up. I actually found one of those red batteries left on a job site for 6 or 7 months, and because we only charge red batteries when they are dead, we started to use it. It still had 50% of the original charge of usable power! I hope who ever is reading this ends up giving this tool a try. I bumped into a makita rep a few years ago and I started hassling him about Makita's underadvertising of this great tool. He said the tool just isn't popular enough for a big advertising campaign. What! Carrage before the horse! When I told that to my friends in the construction business, we all went out and bought additional units (as spares) because we were worried that Makita might discontinue the impact drivers. If that doesn't tell you how great a tool this thing is, then nothing will. Best regards.
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