Everyone will remember a tool like below when it is mentioned “Electrical Drill”.

A Drill is a must-have tool in every toolbox. Also is an essential tool of an innovator. I’m expecting from this post to give some basic introduction on how to choose an Electric Drill based on the requirements. I also hope to explain the uses and features of the Drills. First, let’s see what types of Drills we can see in the market.

The most common type of Electronics Drills is the Corded Drill. It should be connected to an AC power source. And the other type is known as Cordless Drills, which are powered by batteries.

In general conditions, Corded Drills are cheaper and easy to maintain. The power of the drill will be decided on its wattage. We can find electrical drills in the market with 400W upward. For day-to-day works, an electric drill with around 550W is enough.

On the other way, Cordless Drills are very easy to handle and can be used from anywhere, without worry on AC power supply. Since the use of DC motor, the torque and the speed can be controlled better compared to AC motor in Corded Drills. The main parameters to measure the performance of Cordless Drills are battery voltage and maximum torque. We can find electric drills with 12V, 18V, 20V, etc. Higher the battery voltage, the drill is more powerful. Other than battery voltage, we can see Cordless Drills which are coming with different maximum torque amounts from 20Nm to around 300 Nm.

The main disadvantage of Cordless Drills is the limitations of battery capacity. Having a few inter-changeable batteries will fix the battery capacity limitation. And also Cordless Drills are expansive compared to corded equivalents. It is required to buy a few batteries as well as a Battery Charger along with a Cordless Drill. But now we can see Cordless Drills with higher battery capacity, and low cost in the local market.

Yes, the main purpose of the Drills is to drill the holes, but we can see a lot of additional features are coming with the electronics drills. Let’s discuss some of them.

If your drill has this feature, and when you are drilling a hole, you can see there is a small LED in front of the drill that will power and give you some light into the place that the hole locates. It is actually very useful when you are working in a darker or a place with low light conditions.

When you are frilling a hard surface like concrete or metal, it is better if you can catch the Drill from both your hands for proper control. In this case, you can use the Auxiliary handle. It comes as an additional attachment, you can attach or detach from the drill as your favor.

This mostly comes with the Auxiliary Handle. When you are drilling a hole, sometimes you need to stop the drilling at a certain depth. In this scenario, you can use this Depth Stop feature. It is usually a rod with the printed/embossed dimension marks like a ruler. This rod can be adjusted and set the depth limit.

In regular drills, we need to have a special key to attach and detach drill bits to the Drill Chuck. But if the drill is coming with the Keyless Chuck feature, you don’t need any additional attachments to attach and detach bits, other than your hands. (Please refer the below image)

If your drill is a multi-functional one, you will see a selector button in your drill to select the function. (Will discuss these additional functions in the latter part of this post.)

If your drill coming with the Torque Selection feature, you can select the maximum torque (actually a number from a range) that should be applied to the connected bit. This is mostly used in the Screwdriver Mode, to allow slips after the screw is completely fixed into the position. Once the screw is fixed, a clutch in the drill will temporarily disconnect the motor from the drill shaft, to avoid any damage that happens to the motor coils.

With this feature, you can select the RPM value of the drill. In most cases, there are two speeds to be selected. Speed Mode 1 is to use with Screwdriver, and Speed Mode 2 is for general purpose drilling works.

If you have this feature in your drill, you can select the direction of the rotation of your drill attachment, Clockwise or Counterclockwise. This is mostly used in Screwdriver Mode.

In general, most of the drills are powered by AC or DC Brushed Motors. But if the drill comes with a Brushless Motor, you can get more power and better control of the torque of the brill. And also there is no requirement of changing the Carbon Brushes from time to time.

The main purpose of a Drill is definitely Drilling the holes. But now Drills are not limited to it, and we can see various different drill models, specially designed for different purposes in the market. Let’s discuss a few of them.

Those Drills are specially designed to work with screws and small bolts. Mostly they are powered by an inbuilt battery and can be charged via a USB port or a small DC charger. It has a very small RPM, but higher torque.

Drill Drivers are a combination of General Purpose Drills + Screwdrivers. There is a Function Selector or a Speed Selector to select the operation mode. Most of the Cordless Drills come as Drill Drivers.

This is similar to a screwdriver, but with more power (heavy-duty screwdriver). The tool is designed using the concept of the impact in physics. Due to its Impact Mechanism, it can transfer a large torque through its chuck. Due to power is transferred to the bit using the Impact Effect, the resistance feels to the wrist is much low. This tool is used to tightening bolt heads, nuts and screws.

The working concept is similar to the Impact Driver. But Impact Wrenches are more powerful and used to remove and tight large bolts. (Ex: Nuts in-vehicle rims) Impact Wrenches are available in higher torque ranges starts from 300 Nm, and different head (square head) sizes such as 1/2”, 3/4”, 1”.

When Drilling a hard surface like concrete, this type of Drill is very useful since, with the hammer mode, drill bits are going toward and backward while rotating. With this specific motion like a hammer is used against a nail, the drilling process becomes easy because the operator doesn’t require to put a high force into the Drill.

This also similar to the Hammer Drillsh but more advance. These devices are using a special motion function known as the SDS function (Slotted Drive System), which moves the Drill bits forward and backward like tiny punches. Since this behavior, we can use only some bits, specially designed to work with this tool.

This tool is also another variation of the Drills but mostly used to break the concrete and harder materials rather than Drilling holes. Those tools are very expensive as well as very powerful.

The main objective of this post was to give a basic introduction to the Drills and Drivers, their functionalities & features, and the available variations of the Drills. I was tried my best to explain things simply, without going into deep facts. I hope to continue this post with some other tools useful for innovators and DIY hobbyists in the future.