A few years back Bosch announced a newly designed Brute Hammer Drill with 4 Pole Brushed Motor and it really was, in our opinion the best brushed heavy duty cordless drill on the market, a title we think they retain until today. The problem is however since that time brushless has become the technology everyone else has begun to adopt for several advantages in runtime, tool life and power. Bosch has also announced their own brushless drills however they are in the compact category along with Makita, Dewalt, Hitachi and others. For the heavy duty brushless category Milwaukee remains pretty much unchallenged for a few years now which is truly shocking.
At the World of Concrete when we saw a new Bosch Brute Tough Drills DDH182X and HDH182X we thought for sure we were looking at new brushless heavy duty drills. These drills will get improvements in safety first with brushless versions coming later, our guess would be 2015. At first we felt a little disappointment however when we actually saw what this new feature did we realized how many injuries the technology will prevent and understood the priority of getting this into the tools as quickly as possible.
The technology is a simple accelerometer chip which will be added to the tool and when the handle begins to spin a high rate of speed the tool cuts power preventing common injuries to hands, wrists, jaws, etc. We were told this added safety feature will not increase the price of the tool or kits like the CLPK221-181, Bosch’s top seller for professional trades. The very short video below demonstrates how this feature works and if you’ve ever had this happen to you then you’ll understand right away.
We expect the rolling change on the current Bosch 18V Cordless Tools will happen in May June time frame so you will need to be somewhat diligent to make sure you get the tools with the added feature and not the dealers old inventory. Certainly the Pros at Ohio Power Tool will work to make the change over as soon as these tool do become available just give them a call 800-242-4424 and they will be happy to answer any Bosch Tool questions for you.