It packs enough strength and stamina to easily handle common jobs around the home. It very much depends on the amp hours of the battery and how hard the drill is working. A battery can last as little as 15 minutes, though many will run between 30 minutes and 1 hour. Buying a spare battery allows you to simply swap one out and carry on working while the other charges.
Weight determines how easy a drill is to handle, while size is important when working in tight spaces. All of which means I’ll have to eventually spring for a FlexVolt charger once I expand my power tool menagerie. The one slight negative we found with the DeWalt DCD701F2 kit is that taking the battery off the tool is a little counterintuitive. On most drills, a sliding tab releases the battery, but on the DeWalt 12-volt, you need to press the tab in toward the drill.
DeWalt’s 20V MAX cordless drill/driver comes from one of the most respected names in professional power tools. It offers superb quality and excellent performance at an affordable price, so we couldn’t wait to run it through our battery of tests. For the dewalt reciprocating saw drills with less voltage such as 12V and 7.2V, we did not subject them to intensive drilling as we did the others. These smaller drills are not designed to withstand that type of activity, so we tested them in practical drilling and driving situations.
It delivers a surprising amount of practical power in a remarkably diminutive package. It weighs a little more than 2 pounds and comes with a ⅜-inch chuck. Two speed ranges provide good versatility for all kinds of drilling and driving tasks. This product is available as a “tool only,” so the kit doesn’t include a battery or a charger. We used a well-worn 5.0Ah 18V battery from another cordless tool, and we were able to get almost an hour of continuous use.
Since the battery was designed to slide into the base of the handle, DeWalt also had room to place the LED down below the grip, whereas many other 12-volt drills place their lights just above the trigger. The DeWalt LED’s lower position means it casts much better light at the nose of the tool dewalt impact drill and reduces the drill’s shadow considerably. In our tests, the light from the Bosch and Milwaukee models’ LEDs barely illuminated above the drills at all. For a general around-the-house drill, we recommend a 12-volt brushless drill kit that comes with a pair of lithium-ion batteries.