Today was a chance to see whether the Ryobi cordless drill is actually good for "semi-serious" home use of more than a single hole at a time: I hung up some shelves in my place, to make use of a large bare wall that was created after my last furniture re-arrangement last year. Took me a while to actually come up with what I want to do there, but at some point 4 corner shelves came up unused at my mom's place, and I finally had an idea. Here's what it ended up like:
All in all, 16 holes needed to be drilled into a concrete wall, 8mm across and ~5cm deep each. Then some dowels were put in, and large screws driven into those to hold some metal brackets, and the shelves slide onto those. Usually I'd use a two-handed corded hammer drill to make the holes, and then spend a while swearing trying to drive the screws in with the tiny old 3.6V driver (in practice, mostly by hand).
And I must say, the 18V Ryobi compeletely succeeded here. More than enough power in hammer drilling mode to get those holes in with my decade old concrete drilling bits. Started with 6mm opening up to 8mm in a second pass, but after doing 4 holes with much more ease than I'm used to with the "big" drill, switched to just drilling out 8mm straight away. And then just swapped the drill bit for an extension with a PZ3 bit on the end (extension being necessary to clear the bracket protrusion with the drill body and not have the bit at an angle to the screw), and easily drove the screws in, with only an occasional slippage of the slightly-chinesium bit on slightly-chinesium screws.
Very happy with the end result, and the performance of the drill, both as a hammer drill and as a driver. 1.5Ah battery is also easily enough for this amount of work, I assume it's more than half full still - annoyingly these small batteries don't have a charge indicator on them, only bigger Ryobi ones do -.- Still, expectations definitely exceeded.
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What sadly didn't exceed expectations was the vacuum cleaner, which also saw some use during all this. I usually have a second person (in this case my brother) hold a vacuum next to the drill hole, to avoid or at least reduce the inevitable mess of drill dust all over the room. Usually this means getting the old 2kW "big" vacuum out, which is a hassle - so I tried using the shiny new R18SV7, with an extra attachment I printed from Thingiverse:
This thingie is supposed to suck itself to the wall around the drill hole, and suck away the dust as it's produced. It worked well enough for the first 2-3 holes or so, and then the amount of dust dropping away past the inlet has increased substantially. The cause was quickly found: fine drill dust gets straight through the "outer" filter layer in the vacuum dust collection bin, and clogs the "secondary" paper filter, reducing the amount of air the vacuum can suck and thus making it rather ineffective. Had to swap back to the old corded vacuum for the remainder of the work.
Annoyingly the printed attachment doesn't fit the old vacuum - for some reason the attachment on the Ryobi is the wrong way around: male end of the connector on the attachment, and female end on the vacuum or the extension; whereas on the corded vacuum (apparently on most/all of them) it's female on the attachment, male on the vac or tube/extension. Why would they make it incompatible, no idea. Seems like the Dreame is the same as the Ryobi is this regard - actually, Dreame and Ryobi attachments are probably cross-compatible (apart from electrical connections for the powered brushes), the tube diameter seems to be the same.