All right, guys. Today we’re going to be taking a look at Milwaukee’s 3” Compact
Cut Off Tool Kit. Now, I really like these kind of tools because they’re multidimensional,
meaning you can cut a variety of different things, and that’s always really helpful
when you’re on a project. So, let’s open up the box; take a look and see what’s inside.
The model number on this is 2522-21XC. So in case you’re interested, that’s the
number you need to look for at the store. Milwaukee did send us this cut off tool, but
we do not do paid reviews, and that’s important for you to know.
Let’s open up the box. While we’re doing that, I did want to mention that this is a
brushless motor. So right off the bat, you can see this kit
comes with a bag, which is always nice. As I’ve mentioned before, I love Milwaukee’s
bags; they’re nice and sturdy. You get three different types of cut off wheels; we’ll
go over these one by one. This is the M12 charger. This is kind of neat. This is a dust
extraction system. They’re becoming more popular because of OSHA regulations. But it’s
obviously a very nice safety feature as well. This is the M12 RedLink XC 4.0 Ah battery.
So this is what you need to use with this cut off tool. And then finally, this is the
tool itself. As you can see, it’s nice because you can just hold it with one hand. It’s
very petite, for lack of a better word. And I’m really excited to test this out and
show you what it can and cannot do. One of the things I’m a little bit bummed
about with this battery is there’s no power indicator on it. Typically, with Milwaukee
batteries there’s a power indicator on the front. For example, this is a 5.0 Ah battery.
And if you press the button here, you can see how much power you have left. That’s
really, really important. Unfortunately, it’s not on this XC 4.0 Ah battery. So, little
bit of like eh… wish that was there. On the cut off tool itself, it has a wheel
guard, which is great. And from what I can tell, the wheel guard is not removable. So
on a typical, for example, angle grinder, you can remove this; although, we leave ours
on. There’s a forward and reverse button here on the side. There’s also a white indicator
on the top of the tool that shows whether or not it’s in forward, neutral, or the
reverse position. I’ve never seen that before, but it’s kind of a rudimentary way of showing
that. The lock out button is in the front of the
tool. So you have to press this and then turn the spindle until it engages. That way you’ll
be able to swap out or install one of the blades.
The trigger’s on the bottom of the tool. And what I like about this is it’s very
ergonomically easy to use. Now, Milwaukee gives you three types of wheels
with this kit. You have a diamond blade for cutting tile. You also get a metal cut off
wheel—and these are all 3” by the way. And then you get an abrasive wheel that’s
meant for cutting a variety of different materials—actually, let me take a look. This is for drywall, fiber
cement board, and plastic. And we’re going to test all three of these wheels on different
types of materials. So don’t worry; we’re going to get around to that.
Now, here’s the deal. The maximum rpm for this tool is 20,000. Now that’s quite a
bit because most angle grinders in fact are only like 11 or 12 or 13 thousand; really
just depends on your angle grinder. So 20,000 rpms? That’s pretty impressive for this
little tool. The other thing to remember is this can accommodate both 3/8 of an inch and
7/16 of an inch arbor size. And they give you an adaptor here that you can put onto
the tool for a 7/16-inch arbor. So we’re going to put the first blade onto
this. And what we need to do is use the Allen wrench that they give to you. So there’s
a bolt. Actually, you want to turn this clockwise. There’s a top flange. And then there’s
a bottom flange. You can leave the bottom flange on. Now, the most important thing is
to install these blades the right way. They have arrows on them that indicate the direction
in which you need to put the blade onto the tool.
Now, because we’re only going to be using this diamond blade in the forward direction,
we’re going to be lining up the arrow on the blade with the forward direction arrow.
So it’s really as simple as installing it like that. So you want this to snap into place
over top of the spindle. And you want to put your top flange on, and then this bolt. And
to tighten this bolt, we’re going to turn it counter-clockwise. And we’re just going
to tighten it until it’s nice and snug. And by the way, it’s a best practice to
not have the battery in the tool while you’re putting the cut off wheel in place.
So, one of the biggest questions I had was, “How do you put the dust shoe assembly on
this little, tiny tool?” Well, I’m going to show you.
Inside the dust show assembly, there’s a little, red tab. This sticks out. When the
dust shoe assembly is installed correctly, that little red tab engages with the slot
in this wheel guard. So really the first step is to understand the orientation of the dust
shoe assembly, and this is how it should look. You should have the port facing the front
of the tool. And then the tool needs to slide into the dust shoe assembly. And you want
to slide the tool backwards so that that little slot in the wheel guard is engaged by that
red tab. There really isn’t much to it, and you won’t feel a lot of movement. You’ll
just feel a subtle engagement of that tab. So, that’s really all there is to it. And
now that it’s engaged, you’re good to go. Now, if you want to remove this dust shoe
assembly, you press down on the red tab here. And what that does is pulls that red tab inward,
and then you can disengage the wheel guard from the dust shoe assembly. But for now,
we’re just going to reengage that because we want to use the dust shoe assembly.
Overall, it’s a pretty slick assembly. And once you do it a few times, it becomes pretty
easy to take the dust shoe on and off. One of the things that I forgot to just mention
though is you want to have the depth of cut at its maximum distance to install the dust
shoe assembly onto the tool. So really, there’s just a wingnut back here. You loosen it, and
you can move this depth of cut up and down. The other great thing is there are increments
on the back of this depth of cut, and those align with the arrow on the side here. So
you can easily adjust your depth of cut depending on the type of material that you’re using.
So for example, if you’re cutting ¼-inch thick tile, you can just simply loosen this
nut and adjust the depth of cut to just a little bit more than a quarter of an inch.
But the nice thing is that this is easily adjustable, and you can put it anywhere you
want, up to looks to be like about ¾ of an inch. So there you go. That’s how you adjust
the depth of cut. And that’s really nice to have when you’re cutting tile.
We’re going to start making cuts on the porcelain and ceramic tile. But before we
do that, always make sure you have your safety gear. So hearing protection, safety glasses,
gloves, and if you’re not going to be using the dust shoe, then get yourself a silica
dust respirator. We really like these ones by Sundstrom. They’re awesome. They don’t
do so well for those of us with facial hair, but definitely worth the $50.
The first test that we’re going to do with the cut off tool and that diamond blade is
on a 12x12 inch piece of 3/8-inch porcelain tile. This is a very, very hard tile. We’re
just going to make a straight cut through it and see how it does.
And by the way, we are going to have this hooked up to a Shop-Vac while we’re doing
the cutting. The battery installation is very easy. Just
simply push it in until you hear the click, and you’re good to go.
So this is a ¼-inch Shop-Vac hose that we connected to the port here. So it’s in there
pretty snug. If I had my druthers, I’d put some type of Fernco system on this to keep
it nice and secure. But it is pretty tight, and it is on a swivel. So we’ll see how
it performs as is. I’m personally obsessed with electronic
brakes. Check out this one. Not too shabby, right? So that’s a really nice safety feature.
We’re just going to be using a very affordable Shop-Vac on this. Obviously, you can get an
expensive HEPA Vac, too, which we love. But we’re going to use this 3.0 horsepower Shop-Vac.
So this first cut is just a straight cut through the 3/8-inch porcelain. And as you can see
here, there’s still a lot of dust shooting out from the cut off tool. That’s mostly
a function of the Shop-Vac. It was a little bit of a struggle to cut through this porcelain,
and one of the things I’d like to highlight is the fact that the blade may need to be
worn in. But in this particular case, it was a little bit more difficult to cut through
than it would be with a traditional angle grinder. As you can see here, we struggled
until the end to make that cut. So it just took a little bit longer than I anticipated.
Here’s my first impression cutting through this porcelain: the tool seems like it has
a lot of power, but the electronics shut it down whenever it starts to overheat or whenever
it starts to really become pressured by the load that it needs to cut through the tile.
So in terms of long cuts, I’m not so sure about that. But now, here’s the deal: this
is just a 3-inch blade too. Typically, when we cut through tiles, those blades are a minimum
of 4 ½ inches. So where a 3-inch blade comes in handy though is cutting through tile for
electrical outlets. So let’s see how this cut off tool works for that.
The other thing I wanted to mention, as you probably saw, this Shop-Vac didn’t do the
best at extracting all that dust. Definitely try to use a HEPA Vac for that.
With a traditional angle grinder, it’s a little bit difficult to cut out a typical
electrical box just because of the size of a 4 ½-inch angle grinder blade. The 3-inch
blade for this cut off tool is perfect for this type of project. And as you can see here,
we’re working our way through the cut of this porcelain tile. It’s pretty easy to
cut through it. And definitely, I highly recommend the cut off tool for this type of project.
The blade could handle the porcelain in short cuts and short bursts. It’s just that whenever
it’s a straight, long cut, I feel like the cut off tool and the blade struggle a little
bit. But in this particular case, I love the 3-inch blade and the fact that you can complete
the cut on the back side of the tile. As you saw, it was pretty easy to cut out
the dimension for the electrical box. There are a few different problems here. The blade
is not that great that Milwaukee supplies. As you can see, there’s chipping in this
porcelain along the edge here. Not too much of an issue with an electrical outlet because
the cover will hide that. But the other issue with this cut off tool is the small wheel
guard here. On a traditional 4 ½-inch angle grinder, the wheel guard is much more substantial
because it’s 4 ½-inch blade. This is very tiny, and I highly recommend that you wear
at least some type of eye protection, if not full face protection, because I was getting
shot at by a bunch of different pieces of porcelain, slivers of porcelain. So be very,
very careful if you’re cutting porcelain or ceramic with this. It will cut through
it. Does it make a perfect cut with the blade Milwaukee provides? Absolutely not. I think
that one of the biggest recommendations I have for Milwaukee is to come out with different
types of blades that work a lot better with porcelain and ceramic.
The next test is going to be with a carbide abrasive wheel. This is a little, tiny beast,
and it’s used for cutting through drywall, fiber cement board, and plastic—so things
like ABS and PVC. So remember how at the beginning of the video
I said I was upset about the battery indicator? Well, it’s actually on the tool. So you
got to press the trigger, and that lights up the battery indicator right here. So kudos
to Milwaukee for putting the battery indicator on the tool even though it’s not on the
battery. So this is a test that we’re going to be
doing to just cut out a little electrical outlet spot in a piece of cement board. In
this case, this is Durock. And it has a waterproofing liquid membrane over top of it. So that’s
just to add a little bit more complexity to the test. So let’s cut this out.
So we started the cut on the top surface with the liquid waterproofing membrane. By the
way, this is Ardex 8+9, so it’s a pretty heavy duty liquid membrane. But as you can
see here, the cut off tool and the cut off wheel do a really great job of cutting right
through the surface of this. It does create dust, no doubt. So if you can put the dust
shroud onto the tool, that’s best. And I would highly recommend that you do that if
you have to make a lot of cuts through cement board. But obviously you don’t necessarily
need this tool to cut through cement board; it’s just something that’s going to speed
up that process. Nonetheless, it really did very, very well with this CBU.
I got to say I’m impressed with the cut off wheel and the tool cutting through this
cement board. No problem whatsoever. So, what’s going to be our next test? Let’s cut through
a piece of PVC because oftentimes when you’re demoing things, you just want to be able to
cut through the PVC or if you just need a short piece of pipe. So, we’re going to
grab PVC and do that test. By the way, that was a ½-inch piece of cement
board, and this is a 2-inch piece of PVC. So we’re going to cut through this.
As you could see here, we’re cutting right through the 2-inch piece of PVC. No problem
whatsoever. This is a no-brainer, but make sure you hold onto the pipe nice and tight
if you’re in a situation like this one here. If you’re just going to be demoing, then
obviously you got to make sure that the pipe is secured and you can make a nice, clean
cut, and you can bond another piece of PVC. I felt that this cut off tool did a really
nice job of cutting through. And you can actually clean off the cut, too, fairly easily. So
if you need to square that off, not a problem whatsoever.
This is another angle of a cut. So this one’s sped up, obviously. But as you can see here,
the tool doesn’t have any issues cutting through PVC, and I really liked how it performed.
So no problem cutting through the plastic. The only issue is, unlike with Sawzalls, you
can’t go right though the entire thing. You have to rotate the pipe. But nonetheless,
it’s a great cut off tool for that. So the next test is going to be on a variety of different
types of non-ferrous metals. So we’re going to be cutting through copper, some conduit,
and a U-channel that we used for putting in glass doors and glass panels. We’re going
to put the metal cut off blade onto the cut off tool for these tests.
Metal test number one: 1-inch type L copper. Overall, it did cut very well through the
copper. I’d love to know what your thoughts are, though, so let us know in the comments.
Oh, and before I forget, the unfortunate thing about the kit is it only comes with one battery.
So I’d love to see Milwaukee come out with a kit that has two batteries, and maybe there
is one, I just don’t know about it. But only having one battery with the tool is really,
really tough, especially because I have a bunch of different Milwaukee tools, but I
don’t have that 4.0 Ah XC battery that is needed for the cut off tool. So, got to wait
for it to charge. So this is conduit. And as you can see here,
it doesn’t take long for the cut off tool to go right through it. And I think this is
a testament not only to the power of the tool but also the blade that comes along with it.
Okay, that was pretty fast. It’s definitely no problem cutting through the conduit. Now,
the last test that I want to do is on a piece of U-channel. This is the U-channel that we
used to put in glass doors and glass panels for showers. So let’s see how the cut off
tool does for that. I would highly recommend using this cut off
tool for a U-channel because it made a clean cut. All you have to do is make it look a
little bit nicer using a file. But you’d have to do that anyway if you cut this on
a miter saw. Okay, so what are the final thoughts for this
tool? Where do you get it? And what is the price?
The final thought is this. If you’re just doing electrical outlet cuts and porcelain
or ceramic tile, this is a great tool for that. If you need to make longer cuts, I would
say it’s not really quote where I would want it to be. And I highly recommend Milwaukee
come out with different blades for this because trying to find a 3-inch blade for a cut off
tool is really, really difficult. What about cutting through things like metal
and conduit and plastic? Well, this cut off tool excels at that. So if you’re going
to be using it for those purposes, I highly recommend it.
Now, what is the cost, and where do you find it? It’s about $130 for the tool only. About
$199 for the kit that we just reviewed in this video. So it’s definitely not a cheap
tool, but it’s very solid. Twenty thousand rpms. Plenty of power. You just need to know
that it does have limitations with the 3-inch blade. And definitely wear your safety gear
when you’re using it, especially with tile. Let us know what your thoughts are on this
down in the comments. We’re always open to different tips and tricks on how to use
these tools. So if you have one and you’ve used it, let us know what your thoughts are
down in the comments section. Thanks for watching this video, and we’ll
see you in the next one.