this is a hammer drill and this is an impact driver when these two have a baby
their baby looks like this this is makita's 18 volt lxt brushless cordless
four function hybrid Hammer impact driver drill yes that's a mouthful and
as far as I can tell is the only tool available like this in the world today
so in this video we're going to try to answer the question should you get one
to answer this we're going to talk about this product's features specs usability
pros and cons all that good stuff we'll also compare it to its parents here and
then lastly we'll talk about whether or not this tool is actually a good value
I've actually been looking for this Holy Grail of drills and drivers for a long
time now and I've never found anything like it now this tool has actually been
out for over four years but if you search the internet you're going to have
a hard time finding it unless you know exactly what to search for
let's take a look at some of the specs starting with the hammer mode here the
hybrid actually has a higher Max RPM than the hammer drill and it can
actually deliver more blows per minute or BPM than the hammer drill as well
when it comes to torque in the impact mode the hybrid here delivers 1330 inch
pounds and that's compared to 1500 inch pounds on the dedicated impact driver
when it comes to the speed again the hybrid lacks a little bit behind the
dedicated impact driver this one Peaks at 2700 RPM compared to 3400 RPM for the
dedicated same thing with the impacts per minute we have 3200 for the hybrid
and 3600 for the driver so those are pretty respectable numbers it's not
quite as strong as the dedicated machine here but it gets pretty close and it
does that while giving you all the features of the drill really not too
shabby in my mind at least one of the more important features of a drill is
how heavy is it this is one of the reasons I love going to my impact driver
because this small head and compact body makes it quite light so it's a lot less
fatigue when you're using it all day this is a great little tool and they're
almost always lighter so let's take a look I'm going to use the same 4 amp
hour battery with all of these on the impact driver we've got three pounds 7.7
ounces if we switch this off to the drill this is the full size hammer drill
here then we've got four pounds 2.5 ounces
and then finally on our hybrid tool move that over a bit
this one comes in at four pounds 1.3 ounces so it's definitely lighter than
the drill but not by a ton and it's a fair amount heavier than the impact
driver so that's one of the things that's a little bit of a trade-off
between having the functionality of the drill and the driver in one versus a
dedicated tool length is something else worth considering because again getting
into tight spaces is easier if the tool isn't quite so long so we've got a
measly less than five inches right about five inches on the impact driver not bad
at all here on the drill we're at seven and a quarter
and then on the hybrid we're at six and three quarters so about a half inch
shorter than the drill and a good deal longer than the impact driver now this
is probably a good time to bring up the elephant in the room and that is the
recessive gene Factor apparently the quarter inch hex Chuck is the dominant
gene here because there is no keyless Chuck on this thing and that obviously
affects the length and the weight of it so without that that means there's a lot
of things that are off limits you cannot just grab any Chuck or any bit sorry
that you want to use with that and sometimes that's a real downside the
fact is quarter inch hex bits almost always cost more than their non-hex
counterparts one of my favorite tool sets to use is this set of bits this is
the Harbor Freight Cheapo drill bits and it has every size drill bit from 1 64th
to a half inch in 1 64 increments and I use these all the time I have two sets
of them I have other drills because there's no warranty on any drill bits
they're going to break and they're going to go away and they're going to get dull
yes you can make them last but the cheaper you can get your drill bits
especially decent quality ones the better and using quarter inch hex is
going to add some cost to your consumables unfortunately not much you
can do about that now there is one thing you can do about that and that is you
can use a Makita adapter like this this is a 3 8 inch keyless Chuck and it fits
into a quarter inch hex so I can now place this right in here like that and
it's not the same half inch capacity that we get on the dedicated drill but
it's 3 8 of an inch and it works just great it's going to lock in every time
and do a really nice job it's all metal it's well built and it is again an
additional cost but I think worth having if you're going to go with a hybrid like
this now besides the cost of it there's some other issues that you're going to
have to look at let's take a look at the length now so if I grab my tape here if
you remember before we were at about six and three quarters and now we're nearly
10 inches about nine and three quarters this is a really long tool here that's
not going to fit in many areas that you need to work in the other issue of
course is weight so if I bring my my scale back out here
oh no you can see behind my secret wall all right let's see what this is with
the four amp hour battery now we're at four pounds 11.1 ounces so
that added over a half a pound of weight just by having this guy on here so it's
a little unwieldy that's for sure but it does get the job done if you're in a
pinch and most of the time hopefully you won't need to use the Chuck and can just
use the quarter inch hex if you or a loved one are as dorky as me and enjoy
the DIY dorky t-shirts like this one feel free to check those out in the
links in the description below you can also check out that little shopping bag
in the corner and pick one of those up directly right there now whether you're
a fan of having the quarter inch hex Chuck over the keyless Chuck or not
maybe that's a pro or con to you but there are some other pros and cons about
this the biggest one I think is one tool right you don't have to carry around
these two different tools going right along with that is having one tool means
less weight in your bag makes you a little bit more portable and it's just
more convenient other Pros that are worth mentioning on this one are the
fact that despite being four years old at that time not a lot of the impact
drivers have the features that this one does as an impact driver for one you've
got your different different levels so if I go to my impact driver mode here
you've got my one two and three levels so I can adjust the torque and speed
which can be pretty convenient at certain times and then also I can go in
my drill mode into the P mode right there so I go to 89p and then that is
basically a self-tapping screw mode that means I can take a self tapping screw it
will give it all at Scott once it gets through and once it's sunk that screw it
kind of clutches out basically and as you're squeezing that trigger nothing's
happening which is exactly what you want to see happen so you're not going to
overdo it and strip those self-tapping screws for cons I've kind of already
covered this I think it's a con to not have the keyless Chuck on here and only
have the quarter inch hex option I consider that a con maybe you disagree
another con is that there are fewer clutch graduations or increments on here
so as I'm going I've got one two three four five six seven eight nine and then
that self drilling or self-tapping screw version or mode and that's nine mode I
took the average of all of the different brands of drills I have and I've got
quite a few I think there were 14 of them that I've got and the average is
about 19. it's like 18.79 so typically most are going to have 19 different
graduations this one has nine and that makes it I believe the smallest number
of increments that any of these drills have speaking of the settings on the
clutch it's maybe a little inconvenient that I can't use the clutch settings
here on the barrel that I have to use this button down here because it's
unidirectional I have to go one two three four five six seven eight nine P
one two three four five so if I want to go backwards I went too far I've got to
go cycle through the whole thing again not a huge deal but it would be nice if
it was just up here in fact I would love it if they just said you know driver
here is the last one and then you go through your different settings even if
there were still just nine that'd still be an improvement after over having to
go through the menu here and yes I have one more con that has to do with the
clutch itself and that is the fact this is kind of the biggest one to me is that
the clutch not only a adjust the torque but also adjusts the speed so if I'm in
level one here so right here
I've got the trigger pulled all the way down and that's as fast as it will go
if I go to five and finally up to let's go to nine
it'll give me full torque
and that's actually P so nine doesn't give you quite full torque the
self-drilling version does until you reach that sufficient resistance so I
don't like that it kind of controls how much actual speed you get in addition to
the resistance that it's going to stop at in most drills like for example on
this one here if I go to all the way down to one and put it in my driver mode
I got full speed right there now if I go to 13 or 15
same thing I can drive as fast as I want to and it will stop whenever it needs to
whereas on this one I can only drive as fast as that torque setting allows me to
and then it's going to stop wherever it needs to not a huge deal but I can see
if you're using this day in and day out that that would get pretty old now there
is one more con and it might be the biggest one it's the bombshell Con in my
opinion but before we get to that let's put these head to head so let's get to
testing I've got some six inch power lags here these are quarter inch thick
I'm going to run two in each end through this four by four one two three
[Music]
okay that seemed too easy let's up the ante I've got some five and a half inch
massive lag bolts here and I'm not pre-drilled or anything I'm just going
to drive each of them in see how it does
okay all right not burning but
not able to do the job so I mean this thing didn't even come very close we've
still got two or three inches hanging out there
that didn't get to yeah a couple inches uh more that it could have gone and
obviously didn't come out the bottom or anything so
kind of showing its weakness there when you're trying to drive something big
like that this guy felt like it could have just kept going for a while and
this one just seemed to be struggling I'm curious though I'll bet that the
impact driver could finish this thing off let's give it a shot
interesting okay so this guy is not really able to finish
it off either next up we're going to use this one and a quarter inch Diablo Speed
Demon bit this has the self-feeding tip on it and this should pull itself right
on through here let's see how it does we're going to use the standard drill
versus the hybrid and the hybrid has better specs in general than the drill
when it comes to regular drilling so let's see how it goes
something just made a popping sound okay it's not the drill bit that's good
I don't think I think that was just the sound of it cracking through the bottom
oh we got a stop already ah it's not liking this
oh man it's just bogging
Okay Go baby go nope
I don't know if it's going to make it and
I am definitely smelling burning going on in there
yeah that's
that's all I'm gonna get out of that I think so it made it about halfway
through maybe a little bit more than halfway
no one likes to smell that when they're using their power tools you don't want
to smell the smell of your your tools dying on you next up let's test out the
hammer drill function on both the dedicated drill and the hybrid
wait
all right looks like the dedicated drill did a faster job in that case I tried to
put a pretty even amount of pressure on both the drills and this one just came
out a little bit ahead there's no doubt that in this case the drill has more
torque and is more powerful than this as a drill and that the driver definitely
has more torque and is more powerful as a impact driver than the hybrid is there
are definitely more tests that I could put this through I could try drilling
through metal I could try decking screws and in fact I've got a bunch of that
stuff that we can try here but I think we saw the limitations of the hybrid
versus the impact driver or the drill so there's definitely a lot of strength to
it it does a pretty good job I would consider this something that actually
works pretty well for Di wires or for contractors who are doing some general
work maybe handyman and things like that but if you have some pretty grueling and
aggressive jobs that you need to do then the individual drill and impact driver
are going to give you more power and more torque to do what you need to do
and more speed as well so this is really nice to have have as just a standalone
tool so you don't have to buy both and that brings us to our last thing and
that is cost so the cost for this guy right here is 295 dollars for the bear
tool almost 300 bucks for the bear tool that's quite a bit of money especially
when you consider that I bought both of these for 279 dollars and they came with
two four amp hour batteries and a bag and a charger so I got all of that for
279 and as you saw these two guys both outperform the hybrid in each of the
tests that we've done so far and I think if I just did more and more tests we'd
see more and more of the same results so you really got to want just one tool to
get a hybrid like this that said I am super excited and hoping that by having
a tool out here like this that the other brands will take note and we'll try to
make something like this that comes in at a more affordable price point so I
would say if you already have a Makita lineup you've got batteries you've got
everything like that and you're the type of person who's looking to do one tool
for your different jobs then this could be a nice investment there if you're
buying it by itself without having had batteries and that kind of thing this is
a lot of money to get into something like this so it's fun to test fun to see
but I'll be using this one because I have it but I wouldn't necessarily run
out and buy it unless I already had a Makita lineup and had those specific
circumstances that I needed what do you think is this something that you'd buy
or put in your tool kit is it worth it to you are you the type of person who
might actually really benefit from that despite the cost I'd love to hear about
it in the comments below be sure to check back in next week I've got a
really fun video I've been working on I'm actually comparing all of the 18 to
24 volt cordless drills against each other in a whole slew of tests to see
which one performs best and honestly I'm hoping for an underdog win here I'm
hoping that a little Harbor Freight guy like this or one of the other underdogs
will actually perform quite well especially given the price so I'll be
doing a value comparison on these as well based on how well each performed
compared to its price so check that out if you haven't already subscribed be
sure to do so I'm Nils with learn to DIY thanks for watching