Watch out Harbor Freight, a new cordless 18V drill in the $20 price range is on the horizon. This new drill sold at Walmart is the Hyper Tough 18V ni-cad cordless drill and it’s actually cheaper than $20. It was being sold for $18.73 and now at a price drop of $17.29 for a whopping $1.44 in savings!! Sarcasm aside, this puts this drill directly against the Harbor Freight DrillMaster 18V cordless drill regularly sold at around $20 or less with coupon.
Now before I go on, I will admit that even though I mention this as being new, I don’t know exactly how long it’s been on the market. Frankly, it’s been a while since I’ve roamed the single tool isle at my local Walmart store so this might not be late breaking news to some Walmart diehards. The last time I checked the Walmart tool isle, the only power tools I remember seeing were a few Black + Decker, Skil, Hitachi, and Bostitch power tools. I definitely didn’t see any Hyper Tough power tools at all a few months ago.
Anyways, back to the drill itself, it’s very similar in many ways to the Harbor Freight budget 18V drill as it comes with a 3/8″ plastic chuck that requires 2 hands to tighten, variable speed brushed motor with electric brake, a built in LED light although it’s placement is on the base of the tool, it comes with a 21 settings clutch, comes with an old-school nicad battery and budget charger. The stats though are a bit confusing on the website, there’s a short spec list on the top right of the Walmart website saying it has a single no load speed of 0-550 RPM while the description paragraph lists the product as having “2 speed settings” and this is repeated again just under the description in the specs/features bullet list mentioning “2 speed settings (no load speed: 0-350RPM and 0-1150RPM )”. Because the single speed stat is listed once while the 2 speed stat is listed twice, one would lean towards believing it is a 2 speed drill, although a close inspection of the stock photo close up, shows no 2 speed switch on top leading me to believe that it is most likely that this is a single speed drill with 0-550 RPM’s. If true, this makes it considerably slower than the Drillmaster from Harbor Freight which tops out at 900 RPM and is a single speed drill. So based on the price point and the stock photo, I seriously doubt this is a 2 speed drill. Sure, it would be nice to have a $20 2 speed drill that tops out at 1,150 RPM on speed 2, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you. But I do plan on going to my local Walmart soon to take a look at the actual drill if it is available at my local store. If they do have it in stock, I’ll make sure to post an update as to whether it’s a single speed or 2 speed drill.
So what can we expect from this drill? Because performance stats such as torque is not listed, I would expect similar torque performance as the HF model. You can check out my YouTube review for the Drillmaster 18V drill by clicking here. Don’t expect this to blow you away or make you want to get rid of your Dewalt 18V drill. After all, this is a $20 drill and a drill such as this one is aimed towards light duty use. Think hanging picture frames on drywall, light duty arts and crafts projects.
Looking at the user reviews most are positive with 4-5 stars out of 5, although some of the reviews are pretty hilarious. Here’s a few quotes from the reviews…
- “A man came in & said “this is a nice drill”, Man approved, but I love it!”
- “The drill goes clockwise & counterclockwise.”
- “Gobahead and throw away big bucks for a “name” brand, it may be as rough and tough, but at the end of the day you’ll have mucho denero in your pocket and a beautiful little beast of a drill, in my book, that’s common sense not uncommon cents! LOL”
- “Not extremely powerful but definitely faster than doing by hand”
- “buy the way I gave it 4 stars only cause I didn’t use it yet buy I’m sure it will be a 5 star drill”
- “the keyless chuck was monstrous”
What is the point if you can’t replace the battery. I bought an 18 volt cordless at Big Lots, the battery lasted about a month,. went to the store and was told, no we don’t have replacement batteries for it.Now that sucks, right along with the Ryobi band saw I bought with a “plastic’ drive gear that split in half, they had every part for it but the cog gear. Saw is like new and useless. Be careful what you buy and where.
As cheap as it is, though, just buy another drill for the battery itself. Not to mention, you can find these batteries on eBay for $10.
This is typical of low quality generic NiCds, but the biggest problem with this drill and the others like it including some of the Harbor Freights, is the dumb semi-trickle charger that cooks the batteries instead of terminating at end of charge.
Big Lots though, don’t count on them having accessories for anything. That’s just the nature of their business that while they do carry some staples, anything else is just hit or miss, whatever they could buy surplus of at a given moment in time.
Buy a 2nd drill. That way, you’ll have back-up battery and drill. $18
I bought a drill and when the battery went dead I tried to charge it and the charger wasn’t any good, by the time I had used the battery until it was dead I could not take it back to Walmart, I would not recommend this drill to anyone as the charger isn’t any good, a person should get more than one time of a battery out of it no matter the cost!!!!
Thchere’s no replacement battery on eBay nor the Walmart shelves. I wouldn’t recommend this drill .ols
It is variable speed, not single speed.
I don’t doubt that it’s a variable speed drill otherwise it would be a pretty crappy drill, but what single speed and or 2 speed means on a drill is referring to it’s mechanical transmission. A 2 speed drill has a mechanical switch usually on top to select high speed or high torque. A single speed drill would lack the multi speed transmission.
But my point is that you can still have a single speed drill that is also variable speed at the same time.
The harbor freight $20 drill master 18v drill is also single speed and with a variable speed trigger.
As far as actual “single speed” drills, even without a variable speed trigger, it’s probably been decades since a drill was offered like that. The newest one I have seen as such was from the 1960s, and it was rather basic even by 60s standards. (It had no reverse even!) I think it was a MasterCraft. Dunno what I did with that one!
What is the point if you can’t replace the battery. Useless without it
I respectfully disagree. I actually lost the charger itself! I called the customer service on the drill itself(1-800-840-7856) and ordered a new charger and she has batteries in stock for $10.00 each she says.
I dunno if the Walmart drill has replacement batteries available, but I know the Hf drillmaster does, all the HF brands have extra batteries available. If you plan on buying a
Walmart drill, there is a 20v lithium-ion drill for $24.