DIY – Or Wood Working And The Cordless Drill

Go to your local DIY store and selected the carcasses, doors and drawers and load up the car with your new soon to be cabinets for the kitchen. Make sure you include everything from the cabinet feet to the counter top. This sort of shopping saves you a huge amount of money and only requires a minimum of hand skills and a small but select tool kit to complete.

An important item of your select tool kit is a cordless drill, and when selecting one of these if you don’t already own one just remember – battery size – this equals not only torque (or power available out of the motor) but also endurance of the tool. My first cordless drill was a 9.6volt one and it was brilliant, except if I was drilling then it lasted about 45 minutes, if I was using it as an electric screwdriver then I got about 1 hour 30 from the battery. I have progressed over the years and now my cordless drills all have at least 18volt batteries. This gives me power and endurance and in most cases the drill will last me nearly all day, well at least for most of the wood working project of assembling my new kitchen. A tip when using your cordless drill is to plug it in between uses; this will definitely extend the operational life and see you through the day.

The cordless drill is a wonderful tool. Its first use is obvious by its name – drill – it can make holes with the right bits; wood or steel it depends on what you want to drill?. But it can also be used as a screwdriver.

Anyone who has assemble any flat pack by hand will know how tedious and blister creating this is. With a cordless drill as your driver of screws – no flat pack will be long staying in bits and no watery blister will form before you have the all-important last screw or panel fixing in place.

If you need to move a hinge on a door – take out your cordless drill, zap out the old screws, realign your hinge, and with a few presses of the trigger the screws and hinge are in their new homes. If it is a cabinet door hinge and you have to drill a new hole, no need for power cables or pedals drills, just carefully mark up where the hinge has to be, and insert the hinge bits and press the trigger. Apply a gentle pressure and the hole is drilled to perfection. Now reverse the chuck and insert your screw tip bit and the screws to hold the hinge in place are driven home quickly and effortlessly.

I recently drew up some sketches for a friend of mine on that very job and he was able to replace and renew his whole kitchen by changing just the doors and drawer fronts. On some of the doors he had to install new hinges to fit into the old locations on the cabinet carcass but using his newly bought cordless drill he flew through the job following my simple but detailed plans.

Saved him a fortune and that little project encouraged him to tackle bigger wood working projects. He now is a regular visitor to the hardware store to add to his woodworkers tools. I also advise him to check out used tools, a lot of these may be second hand but are still as serviceable and practical as the day they were made.

Check out the blog on how to change your kitchen doors and make sure you get those new hinges aligned and drilled just right in a few easy steps.

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