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11/01/2012

The drill - this is a spectacular drill.

Oh do I ever love this set. I would have never bought this for myself, not in a million years. That impact driver would have confused me, and I would have passed on it. Wow, am I ever glad my wife went shopping for my boys and found this kit.

To start off, the batteries are incredible. I've never seen batteries charge this fast in my life. In a roundabout way, this kit is over kill for the kinds of projects I do around the house. But there is something great about having a high quality tool in your hand. I don't use this every day, or even once a week, but the batteries hold their charge. I never have to worry about the batteries being dead. I just finished a couple hour job in the garage, and neither battery even remotely thought about being used up.

The drill - this is a spectacular drill. There are times where my corded Bosch hammer drill would be necessary - like the time I hung a whole cinder block basement of Elfa shelving (this is 1920's hard cinder block that required a hammer drill to get through). But for most any other job I'm going to do, there is plenty of power and battery to do that job. With three settings, hammer, screw driver, and drill; and two speeds; the drill does everything in the world I could ever imagine. The light is so darn handy. One criticism is that the chuck casts a shadow and it isn't always easy to see the exact spot where the drill bit will start. I was working in a poorly lit garage tonight, and was off a little bit with a few holes.

Now here's the amazing thing that took me a while to figure out, that darn cool impact driver. I was all excited this Thanksgiving - I was going to use the impact driver to remove the lug bolts on my car when I changed snow tires. Oh dang it to heck, this thing would not break the lug bolts loose. Yes it got a few, but generally, nope it didn't work. Still it was hugely useful, after using a breaker bar to loosen the bolts, I could jack the car up the whole way and then use this to spin the bolts off super fast. Then I used the driver to spin the bolts back on. I then finished up the tightening with a torque wrench. It still saved time.

But here's where this thing shines - use the drill for a pilot hole, and the driver to actually install and seat the screw. It takes a lot of getting used to; this thing will crank a screw down really tight. But the best part, the driver is so light weight. It just makes super fast work of any screw, tightening or removing. Who would have thought, this combo would be so perfect.

This tool box is worth every singly penny of its high price. I think this is the last cordless drill I will ever buy (the previous one lasted me about ten years - it had NiCad batteries). The clips are really helpful, belt, or coat pocket to hang the tool while you're not using it.

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I bought the set at HD in NH and paid $299.00 for the LXT211

So far these have been good tools, but the batteries tend to fail early, after maybe a dozen charges. I checked around on the web and found out there is a design bug in the battery that makes them fail early. Makita knows about it and will quietly replace batteries with under 150 charges on them, regardless of warranty.

They seem to fail if left unused for a while, then put on the charger. The symptom is flashing green and red lights on the charger, with a fairly new battery. The reason is a design bug in the control board of the battery. It's always the first cell that fails, gets deep discharged, because its the only one used to supply power to the control board. So it shows a deep discharge, while the other cells are charged. If you try to charge it 3 times with a deep discharged cell, the control board bricks the battery. It will register as bad, even though there is plenty of useful life left.

So if this happens, send them to the Makita Service Center for replacement.

If Makita won't replace them, you can probably charge them and use them on a clone charger that doesn't read the control board. Clone chargers cost about $60 on the big auction site.

Until Makita fixes this, I would not advise buying these tools.First off, I did not buy this on Amazon. .I bought the set at HD in NH and paid $299.00 for the LXT211 I saw the white BFD set for $279.00 at the same place and figured, $20.00 extra and get three amp batteries?!? Anyways, I looked on-line at Amazon.com (have used this ste before and am very happy with my purchases) and saw it advertised for $264.00 Wow, I havent seen it that cheap since. I printed the sheet went to HD and they price matched Amazon and gave me the difference back! Now onto the set: I have built a couple of heavy duty work shop tables using both the Hammer and the Impact drivers. I have also built some small decorative shelving units and wow... I bought the set and charged the batteries once. ONCE. I have not charged them since. I dont need to, how cool is that? I bought this set to replace a Ridgid 18v lithium drill set and there is seriously no competition. I am not a contractor but felt that buying contractor grade tools would be a good bet for the money I set aside and I am not sorry. Trigger control on botht he drill and driver excellent you really dont need to practice too much. The LED light is incredibly bright and stays over for 12 seconds after you stop pressing the trigger. One other thing, I spoke with Makita directly as the HD did not know, and I was told that I should only use the 3.0a batteries, not the smaller ones with this set. So I will be ordering those batteries here as you cant beat the price. The only gripe that I have with both tools is the lack of on-board storage for drill bits but thats not a gripe about the quality, power or durability that I have experienced. One other note, I purchased the Milwaukee 18v M18 compact drill and impact driver set. Those tools feel heavy duty and the impact driver is a great solid powerful tool. I had two problems with the drill which caused me to immediately spend the extra money for the LXT211. 1- the speed selector on the top of the drill became stuck between speeds. I was able to play with the torque settings and it immediately switched back. 2- the chuck made a buzzing sound (something was rubbing in there) when I held it in place to tighten a bit, that happened after about ten minutes of playing with it. I did not feel that those are good signs for a ten minute old drill. I am not a fan of dewalt and I had never used a Bosch drill but I have read reviews on all of these and the Makita was the way to go for me. I hope this helps in your decision making!

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