Expert Power Tool Reviews & Buying Guides for the UK
An 18V circular saw for joiners is a battery-powered handheld saw, typically fitted with a 165mm blade, designed to make fast, accurate crosscuts and rip cuts in timber and sheet material without a trailing cable. It’s the tool that decides whether your morning starts with cutting or with untangling extension leads. If you’ve ever watched … Read more
Somewhere in most UK sheds there’s a corded circular saw tangled round a strimmer, an extension lead nobody trusts, and a vague memory of the last time it actually got used. That’s usually the moment people start looking at a cordless circular saw instead — no lead to trip a ladder, no hunting for a … Read more
A cordless SDS drill is a battery-powered rotary hammer that uses the SDS (Slotted Drive Shaft) chuck system to punch, rather than simply spin, its way through masonry, brick and concrete — trading a mains lead for a slide-in battery pack while keeping the hammering action that ordinary drills can’t manage. If you’ve ever tried … Read more
Right, let’s get one thing out of the way first: if you’ve ever tried to break a slab with a bog-standard combi drill, you’ll know the feeling of watching a £60 tool wave the white flag against thirty-year-old concrete. That’s the gap an SDS max drill exists to fill. It’s the tool site foremen reach … Read more
A SDS plus drill is the tool that turns “I’ll get round to it” into “done before lunch.” If you’ve ever wrestled a cheap combi drill into a brick wall and watched the bit smoke, spin uselessly, then die, you already know why this category exists. An SDS plus drill uses a spring-loaded, tool-free chuck … Read more
Stand in the power tools aisle for five minutes and you’ll hear it: someone asking a very patient member of staff whether they need “the small one or the big one.” That, in essence, is the sds plus vs sds max question, and it’s one of the most misunderstood decisions in the whole DIY and … Read more
Nobody ever plans their weekend around a joist cavity. And yet here you are, torch clamped between your teeth, wrist bent at an angle your physiotherapist would not approve of, trying to get a standard drill into a gap that was clearly designed by someone who has never held a power tool. This is exactly … Read more
Somewhere in every toolbox in Britain sits a battered flathead that’s opened a thousand paint tins and stripped at least a dozen screw heads out of pure stubbornness. That’s the manual screwdriver most of us grew up with. But the debate over electric screwdriver vs manual screwdriver has genuinely shifted in the last few years, … Read more
There’s a particular kind of Sunday-afternoon despair that comes from wrestling a flat-pack wardrobe into submission with a manual screwdriver, wrist aching, knuckles skinned, and half the cam-lock fittings still refusing to bite. If that sounds familiar, you’re exactly who this guide is for. The best electric screwdriver isn’t about brute force — it’s about … Read more
Somewhere between “this drill is too much tool” and “my wrist is done for the day” sits the compact impact driver — the bit of kit that’s quietly become the most-reached-for item in a lot of UK toolbags. A compact impact driver is a cordless, brushless screwdriving tool that combines high rotational torque with a … Read more