CoffeeBear.net

A Bit of Home Improvement with Ryobi Tools

Posted by Mark | Filed under DIY

Back around Thanks­giv­ing, I hit up a sale at Home Depot and bought myself a 4 piece Ryobi One+ combo kit¹. After Christ­mas I went back to Home Depot and picked up the Ryobi Tool Bag. The tool bag came loaded with a nice assort­ment of drill bits and a rachet­ing screw­driver with a vast col­lec­tion of inter­changable bits (phillips, flat-head, sqare and torx). The bag was just the right size to hold my drill, flash­light and radio. Since then the tools have sat around mostly gath­er­ing dust.

Today while out doing some shop­ping, we found a nice set of bath­room hang­ers (e.g. for tow­els & toi­let­pa­per) on clear­ance for less than $20. The set has a brushed nickel fin­ish which we really like and installing it helped me avoid clean­ing out our guest room². The set installed very eas­ily and I really got to try out my tools.

Things I liked:

• The mag­netic strip on the base of the drill is fan­tas­tic for hold­ing dif­fer­ent drill bits, screws, what­ever I need.
• The ratch­et­ing screw­driver makes it quick and easy to install/remove screws.
• That tool bag really holds every­thing I need for most home improve­ment projects. The way it’s designed feels like some­body at Ryobi was sit­ting around their house wish­ing they had a bag to hold all the bits they’d ever be likely to need for a screw­driver and a drill.

Things I didn’t like:

• The key­less chuck on the drill poorly grips the bits.
• After 10+ years of apart­ment liv­ing, I’m out of pract­ing with using a drill. Espe­cially using a drill as an elec­tric screw­driver and so I kind of stripped a cou­ple screw­heads. Ooops.
• The metal splin­ter I got in my thumb after strip­ping a cou­ple of screwheads.
• The drill is heav­ier than I really like.³

¹ Mine was a slightly dif­fer­ent kit as it came with a radio rather than the Cor­ner Cat Fin­ish Sander.
² I’m sooo going to be in trou­ble when my wife reads this.
³ My ver­sion of the kit uses the NiCd bat­ter­ies which con­tributes the vast major­ity of the weight of the tool. At some point I’ll buy the 18v Lithium Upgrade Kit which should solve this complaint.

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