LawnBoy-5247
Well-known member
Here's the link
Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
AvE vs HF Hercules has arrived
- Thread starter LawnBoy-5247
- Start date
smittyjones
Well-known member
Hope he does one about the new HF cordless ratchet.
JohnDeere1
Banned
He says it junk and I believe him I tried the demo in the store and it sounded rough I wouldn't waste my dime on one. It is a cheap price tool and you get what you pay for as we all know you quality and cheap don't go together well. I have Makita and love them.
I agree it is a cheap tool but not price wise, they have the gall to charge Milwaukee/dewalt/Makita prices for that tool. So really you're not getting what you pay for lol
Sent from my SM-G930P using Tapatalk
What is interesting is that Tool Teardowns spoke highly of the Hercules corded grinder and it included some obvious higher quality components as well as longevity enhancing design decisions. The cordless tool showed none of that. The MTBF on other critical components is likely to be less than 6 months for regular use and perhaps even barely over a year for occasionally homeowner DIY use. It is also clear that the batteries are complete junk.
This would be fine if the tool were half the price of the Dewalt they compare it to. Since without a coupon, it is within 20%; it's a complete sham and certainly won't help elevate the Harbor Freight reputation.
This would be fine if the tool were half the price of the Dewalt they compare it to. Since without a coupon, it is within 20%; it's a complete sham and certainly won't help elevate the Harbor Freight reputation.
Corndoggeh
Well-known member
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2016
- Messages
- 1,198
This could be similar to the chinese craftsman crab claw situation. I'd give it about a year before you start seeing big improvements.
That's the big question...is it a copy of the AC Delco for less as some have suggested or is a complete piece of **** like this drill? I'm not going to worry about it though...when my current Milwaukee 3/8 craps out I will get the Fuel version for more torque...or whatever they have out by then that is even better.
the Hercules cordless drill = avoid
Too many failure points! I'll bet the battery spade connections crack at the PCB first, from my experience on consumer gear.
I don't mind spending 10 bucks on a crappy HF angle grinder but at >100 bucks I wont take that gamble. To replace a failed drill you will end up buying a name brand to replace it then it looks really expensive to get back on track.
Too many failure points! I'll bet the battery spade connections crack at the PCB first, from my experience on consumer gear.
I don't mind spending 10 bucks on a crappy HF angle grinder but at >100 bucks I wont take that gamble. To replace a failed drill you will end up buying a name brand to replace it then it looks really expensive to get back on track.
watch this one and the Hilti one. But especially watch the end of this one.
I think they are trying to get whatever money they can out of this price point when sales stop they will drop it or do a better coupon price.
I think they are trying to get whatever money they can out of this price point when sales stop they will drop it or do a better coupon price.
Jp267
Well-known member
Love your username! The Vader LB, was favorite, until the blade hit a piece of shelf and bent the crankshaft.[emoji23] Worst day ever!
Anyway, can't wait to watch the video and didn't mean to hijack. Game on!
Sent from my XT1635-02 using Tapatalk
jdlong
Well-known member
I think HF is relying on the reputation of their Earthquake air impacts and US general tool chests to sell this junk for the prices they are asking.
dkroth
Well-known member
I couldn't stand him at the beginning.
Now I can't get enough of him.
I recently even caught myself saying thing like: "son of a diddly" or "skookum as frig"
I couldn't stand him at the beginning.
Now I can't get enough of him.
I recently even caught myself saying thing like: "son of a diddly" or "skookum as frig"
Yeah he grows on you. What impresses me about him is that he has a sense of ethics. It really, really pissed him off that HF's making BS claims that their Hercules drill is better than a DeWalt when it's clearly not by any stretch of the imagination. He was pointing out the BS marketing lies on the box of the tool.
For the same price or just a little bit more, a person could buy a superior DeWalt, Makita, or Milwaukee drill, but yet they may lay their hard earned dollars down for a POS Hercules thinking it's of comparable quality.
jdlong
Well-known member
I just got back from Lowes and noticed a 20V Dewalt kit for $199 that includes a drill, impact driver, charger and TWO batteries. Seems like a way better deal.
M-technik-3
Well-known member
I'll stick with my company issued Hilti.
apollo11
Banned
theoldwizard1
Well-known member
Great summary ...
Todd.Brock
Well-known member
Technically you're not watching him. Just his hands...
.
I’m sure he knows his ****, but his sayings and what not drive me crazy
Zeke
Well-known member
OP
LawnBoy-5247
Well-known member
He can be obnoxious at times but as others have said his ethics are where its at. I feel that what he says in his reviews is generally a straight answer with little bias and for me that counts. He also looks at the tool and finds the modes of potential failure instead of just drilling a few holes with it and calling it good.
Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
Corndoggeh
Well-known member
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2016
- Messages
- 1,198
Amen, my SIW-18T is the king of my shop and is the sole reason why I never got into air tools except for sand blasting and air hammering.
visionguru
Well-known member
Me either. I can't stand that guy. He is a total pretender, pretends to know something. Plenty of idiots watch his idiotic rants.
stonesg
Well-known member
That's interesting....
How about you do the community a service here and review one of his videos with a few examples of where he's, "Pretend"?
You may not like his presentation style but he almost always backs up his opinions with facts and actual testing.
I couldn't stand him at the beginning.
Now I can't get enough of him.
I recently even caught myself saying thing like: "son of a diddly" or "skookum as frig"
He's a bad influence.
I was just in Canada for a week on business with a coworker who isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. We went to a few places that wouldn't accept American dollars. So he decided he would attempt to exchange USD for Canadian money at the hotel front desk. It went something like this:
Him: "What does Canada call their money?"
Me: "Kopecks."
Him: "Really?"
Me: "Yep."
He goes to front desk with a $20 US bill in his hand
Him: "I'd like to trade this for Kopecks please."
Employee: blank stare
Me: Laughing hysterically and heading for the elevator.
I'm a bad person I guess.
I did visit the Cambodian Tire and Princess Auto Power Fister while I was there. Didn't buy anything, but was amused nonetheless.
Loscaldazar
Well-known member
- Joined
- Feb 23, 2013
- Messages
- 2,385
He's ripping apart that battery, but like a member here showed, it uses samsung cells (the same ones used in some Milwaukee and Bosch batteries too). He called them off brand cells and said maybe he would check later when he has another battery. Talking before he really knows all the details. I would bet if the Hercules battery performed well below the amp/hour it is rated at, then the milwaukee and bosch batteries that use the same cells should also perform well below their advertising. He's never tested the name brand batteries as far as I can remember, which leads me to another point about him.
He's always way more critical of cheaper tools. The same design elements in a cheap tool get harped on way more than when he is taking apart a more expensive one. In a cheap tool, it's a sign that they cheaped out. In an expensive tool, it's not the best, but it must be adequate if they did it. He loves Makitas (which are great tools, I'm not denying that), but they often get a few passes on things that he normally doesn't like about other tools. Hence why he tested the hercules battery and declared it to be overrated and has never tested a name brand battery to verify those too. We all know that HP ratings on tools are overrated across the board, so it would not be surprising to find that all companies overrate their batteries too, but he's given every name brand tool a pass on that.
I believe it was the Milwaukee 9 Amp/hour battery he was saying wasn't balanced at all. There are 3 sets of cells that are in parallel. They're self balancing when in parallel (http://liionbms.com/php/wp_parallel_balance.php).
AvE also deleted his comments on that video where he was caught not knowing that Li-Po are a different type of Li-Ion battery than what people think of as the traditional Li-Ion battery.
In the cubio video he was talking about how the video must of been faked/manipulated when they were using the external battery pack to power it because those only put out 500 mA. That was true about 10 years ago. Most are 2-4 amps now, making him off by a factor of 4x-8x. Not a big deal if he was just talking about it with friends, but when you're publicly calling someone out for being a liar or faking things, you better have your facts straight.
His entire impact torque testing rig was junk, had a bunch of sketchy math behind it, and he based some pretty serious accusations off his results from it.
His whole calling out RTR for being a shill/liar. AvE has offered zero real proof on that, and his fans were swarming RTR's channel in droves with rude comments. If you're going to make heavy accusations against someone who is using the industry standard testing machines, you might want to have some good evidence. AvE is correct that the numbers off the skidmore wilhems may not be 100% applicable to every real world situation, but he has offered no concrete and verifiable proof that the two impacts couldn't perform the same on that test, other than he thinks the Snap On should be more powerful. It's been almost 2 months now and AvE's given us nothing.
Which leads me to how toxic most of his fan base is, and how upset and argumentative they get if you question anything AvE says or point out anything he did wrong and why his conclusions drawn from that could be wrong. You get downvoted into oblivion, called names, and get a bunch of idiots arguing with you that have zero clue about what they are saying (like those arguing that you do indeed need to balance cells in parallel because AvE said so and Milwaukee was being cheap by not balancing cells that are already in parallel).
His belief and insinuation that Intertec is somehow a cheap/inferior testing lab. I've written on this before. Ever since AvE has come around, people now have the idea stuck in their head that Intertec is a ****** lab (https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showpost.php?p=6659627&postcount=17). Another casualty of AvE being careless with his words I guess.
There's more, but I don't have time or a want to write them all out. AvE started out really good by just trying to take things apart and look at how they were built, but he's gotten a little big for himself and is putting out a lot lower quality of information than he used to. He's obviously intelligent and knows a lot of manufacturing, but he makes some stupid mistakes occasionally (as we all do). He almost never corrects himself and just lets some of the misleading/wrong things he says stay out there.
He's mostly right, but has his fair shares of wrong info that he never owns up to. The stuff he is saying is dangerous in some respects because he has both good and bad info in his videos, but it often is at a level above what most people can effectively evaluate, and thus he starts numerous trends or people repeating stuff he has said that is wrong. I still watch his videos, but am definitely more critical of what he is saying after I started catching on to his inconsistencies (which have become more apparent as he makes more videos).
I'm also unsure if AvE actually knows the difference between the "CE" mark and "C E"." He's mistakenly called the Conformité Européene ("C E") mark a Chinese export mark ("CE") multiple times, and now I've seen other people repeating it without also understanding that the two marks are similar, but not the same thing at all. Some people take the stuff he says and start repeating it as fact because it came from such an authority....
Keep watching him by all means (I will too), but as with all information you come across, carefully evaluate it for truth. AvE isn't right about everything, and sometime he can be very off, as can all of us be at times. My biggest issue with him is not that he gets things wrong occasionally, but that everyone takes what he says to 100% truth and refuses to accept any criticism or debate about what he says.
Last edited:
stonesg
Well-known member
Thanks for the info.... that's actually a big help... I do like having more info to put things in perspective.
I too thought that the C E thing didn't make any sense but I just hadn't got around to checking on it.
The battery balancing thing also seemed a bit off as what I saw (if we are talking about the same one) might have been a balance across "cells" of multiple batteries vs. single cells which would not be "none"... just different.
He seems to be almost stream of conciseness and misses stuff that would be caught and edited if he actually slowed down a bit.
I'm not one of the fan boys but do enjoy the videos and hadn't yet noticed that there's a bias as against some tools or for others as you've seen so I'll keep an eye out for that.
I too thought that the C E thing didn't make any sense but I just hadn't got around to checking on it.
The battery balancing thing also seemed a bit off as what I saw (if we are talking about the same one) might have been a balance across "cells" of multiple batteries vs. single cells which would not be "none"... just different.
He seems to be almost stream of conciseness and misses stuff that would be caught and edited if he actually slowed down a bit.
I'm not one of the fan boys but do enjoy the videos and hadn't yet noticed that there's a bias as against some tools or for others as you've seen so I'll keep an eye out for that.
Gold clap to you, sir. He is non stop saying stuff that makes 0 sense to someone knowledgeable on the subject. But as soon as you stick your neck out and say "excuse me, wtf are you talking about" people who have even less than 0 understanding on the subject get their jimmies rustled.
What you mentioned above is pretty much 5% of the WTF that comes out of this guys mouth.
stonesg
Well-known member
Heck... just seeing the insides of the tools is valuable.
I have to agree with him that the Hercules at it's price point is not a good buy.
Conversely, he took apart one of the angle grinders and found it wasn't horrible so for as little as I'd use one (but do have a use for one) it'd be a good deal.
TG
I have to agree with him that the Hercules at it's price point is not a good buy.
Conversely, he took apart one of the angle grinders and found it wasn't horrible so for as little as I'd use one (but do have a use for one) it'd be a good deal.
TG
American Locomotive
Well-known member
The most telling thing for me was when AvE turned the public display of his monthly Patreon amount off. At 7,000 patrons, AvE is one one of the highest earners on Patreon. He's pulling anywhere between $15,000-$30,000/month in Patreon revenue.
Guess it doesn't look good bashing cheaper tools when you're making anywhere between $200-400k/year.
Guess it doesn't look good bashing cheaper tools when you're making anywhere between $200-400k/year.
visionguru
Well-known member
Yeah, it's the way he conducted himself in the videos. I have no time to parse through his rumbling videos. He is at best an amateur with 1/2 baked knowledge about the design/engineering, but he sounded like an expert, better than those designer/manufacturer combined. May sound good for people with 0 knowledge, but not with 0.02 knowledge.
I'd compare his videos to Kardashians.
dkroth
Well-known member
He's not plowing it back into the channel, is he?
Same crappy Bridgeport and and the BOLTRs only seem to come out over other month or so. In between it's a lot of random stuff where he'd just dicking around in the shop.
That's the dream. I can't knock the guy, and I actually really find him entertaining.
It's the calling out objective testing with real equipment based on anecdotal dicking around with tools, and just flat out spending 30 seconds to a min talking about something without real knowledge on it then other people quoting it that gets me.
I thought it was pretty ****** when he railed on every other tool manufacturer for using a powdered metal gear in their drills, then when he opened the Hilti and saw it also had one and went "Oh I guess it's fine."
He seems to have exposure to product design and development, but his views on engineering design can be toxic and just unrealistic (in my opinion). You have to realize that every design decision has tradeoffs. You can't always make the perfect tool you want for every application. You'd go out of business and everyone would lose their jobs. A lot of the cases where manufacturers "cheap out" is making a decision based on MANY engineering, business and logistical factors.
You want the best possible gear train ever? Who can manufacture it? What kind of volume can they support? How good is their logistics network? How long can they guarantee the manufacturing contract? There's more than just saving a penny and screwing the consumer in every decision (which is what he and most other teardown reviewers seem to think).
The last thing you want to do is launch into a major advertising campaign or get priority placement in a major retailer only to have your fancy new drill geartrain manufacturer tell you that they aren't renewing your manufacturing contract and that you have to make a lifetime buy in the next month or two and then you're cut off. Then you have to find someone else who can pick it up, get integrated into your supply chain hopefully with no hiccups (not going to happen) and you'd better hope that you own the design of that geartrain and it wasn't shared IP or you're screwed. Now let's say that you went for a very difficult to manufacture part in the first place and that's why you went to that one supplier. After they ditch you, you go to the market and try to find someone else who can match the tolerance and durability specs that the other supplier was providing and surprise, no one can. So you have to redesign parts of the gear train as a running change right as your volume is exploding. That new supplier who just jumped in to manufacture the redesign right as you started moving a million units? Well the initial sample run they provided to your engineering team for testing was hand picked and finished and their production parts are junk. Your million unit expansion is now a million unit RMA, and you have no good parts to even repair the units flooding back in with. It's a nightmare.
He seems to have exposure to product design and development, but his views on engineering design can be toxic and just unrealistic (in my opinion). You have to realize that every design decision has tradeoffs. You can't always make the perfect tool you want for every application. You'd go out of business and everyone would lose their jobs. A lot of the cases where manufacturers "cheap out" is making a decision based on MANY engineering, business and logistical factors.
You want the best possible gear train ever? Who can manufacture it? What kind of volume can they support? How good is their logistics network? How long can they guarantee the manufacturing contract? There's more than just saving a penny and screwing the consumer in every decision (which is what he and most other teardown reviewers seem to think).
The last thing you want to do is launch into a major advertising campaign or get priority placement in a major retailer only to have your fancy new drill geartrain manufacturer tell you that they aren't renewing your manufacturing contract and that you have to make a lifetime buy in the next month or two and then you're cut off. Then you have to find someone else who can pick it up, get integrated into your supply chain hopefully with no hiccups (not going to happen) and you'd better hope that you own the design of that geartrain and it wasn't shared IP or you're screwed. Now let's say that you went for a very difficult to manufacture part in the first place and that's why you went to that one supplier. After they ditch you, you go to the market and try to find someone else who can match the tolerance and durability specs that the other supplier was providing and surprise, no one can. So you have to redesign parts of the gear train as a running change right as your volume is exploding. That new supplier who just jumped in to manufacture the redesign right as you started moving a million units? Well the initial sample run they provided to your engineering team for testing was hand picked and finished and their production parts are junk. Your million unit expansion is now a million unit RMA, and you have no good parts to even repair the units flooding back in with. It's a nightmare.
Last edited:
dkmc
Well-known member
Yeah, it's the way he conducted himself in the videos. I have no time to parse through his rumbling videos. He is at best an amateur with 1/2 baked knowledge about the design/engineering, but he sounded like an expert, better than those designer/manufacturer combined. May sound good for people with 0 knowledge, but not with 0.02 knowledge.
I'd compare his videos to Kardashians.
Agreed.
He has some sort of engineering background, but there's a lot of bumbling and blurring of facts and physics mixed in. What he doesn't know, he fakes, and mumbles on.....to the delight of most of his clueless fan base.
Getting to see the insides of tools is mildly interesting......at best.
The rest is mostly annoying.
BUT it's apparently got what it takes to get views, and Patreon contributions, so why should he care?
Last edited:
Are you BCC'd on my inbox or something?
American Locomotive
Well-known member
That's what gets me. He's making enough money to buy proper metrology grade equipment to do this testing. But then he messes around with crazy cobbled together contraptions and claims X tool manufacturer is obviously lying.
I get the desire to tinker and play around with DIY torque-testers, etc... But I have problems with it when you start to make strong statements about products with your cobbled together junk.
Pantsfall_McFixit
Well-known member
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2012
- Messages
- 167
I would like it if the Patron money was reinvested into the channel more as well. For curiosity's sake, if the accusations of him being wrong a lot are true, then where can we get factual information? Are there other Youtube channels I can watch? It's not helpful to say he's wrong without a resource where we can find the truth. This is deep industry-specific knowledge that requires more than a simple Google search.
Yeah, it's the way he conducted himself in the videos. I have no time to parse through his rumbling videos. He is at best an amateur with 1/2 baked knowledge about the design/engineering, but he sounded like an expert, better than those designer/manufacturer combined. May sound good for people with 0 knowledge, but not with 0.02 knowledge.
I'd compare his videos to Kardashians.
The Kardashians like to tear tools apart on YouTube to see how beefy they are? I didn't know that.
I don't see anyone else doing what he does. If someone has a materials science/mechanical engineering background, then why don't they start a channel and go into more detail about the tools?
The proof is in the pudding, so to speak, a lot of the basic aspects of what makes a tool likely to last a long time (or likely to break) can be easily seen once you take the tool apart. Beats the heck out of the 99.9% of the other reviewers who use the tool for 2 minutes and then review it.