So it looks like Harbor Freight has launched some DeWalt clones,
20V Lithium Cordless 1/2 in. Compact Drill/Driver Kit
Hercules 63380 20V Lithium Cordless 1/4 in. Hex Compact Impact Driver Kit
Hercules 63378 20V 5.0 Ah Hercules XP Battery
https://www.harborfreight.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?dir=asc&order=EAScore%2Cf%2CEAFeatured+Weight%2Cf%2CSale+Rank%2Cf&q=Hercules
There are some minor differences from the originals, mostly cosmetic but the drills seem to have metal chucks and the impact has a single LED.
I’m very curious if the batteries are actually cross compatible, from the images they look spot on.
Hercules looks like it might be new trademark/brand-name too for Harbor Freight (Central Purchasing LLC.)
Considering their propensity for branding their “made-in-China” stuff with USA-sounding names - like Chicago Electric (not ?? to be confused with Chicago Pneumatic LOL) - I would have thought they might have picked “Houston” instead of Hercules if they wanted a brand starting with an H.
The color scheme looks more like Makita’s teal than Dewalt’s yellow and black - but I think that Dewalt may have some trademark protection on their color scheme.
Your speculation about battery cross compatibility is interesting
I know that there are lots of genuine but old-stock, aftermarket, refurbished, and clones of Dewalt’s and other’s batteries sold on Amazon and eBay. Sometimes such batteries are sold with ambiguous advertising copy that seems like it might be meant to deceive the buyer into thinking they were getting the Real McCoy. But I wonder if SBD would or could have anything to say about HF selling a compatible battery ($40 after a 20% off coupon for a 5Ah battery.)
Harbor Freight will have serious issues if they really copy the most part of these tools.
most of harbor freight’s stuff is a copy of someone elses design. Or more specifically they are made in the same chinese shop that makes __________. The difference often is they change the casings and motors that don’t make the spec for name brand whomever will go into the harbor freight tool.
On the battery thing - does it have the full 5 fin connections - or just 4
From the photos there are 5 on the top row, I cannot see the rest to know if the other 3 slits are there but going based solely on what can be seen from the picture, I’d say it’s spot on Dewalt, again I cannot confirm and base this only on observation.
I was going to buy the Hercules 4-1/4" angle grinder for $ 40 less thge 25% off coupon on July 4th. However both the 25% & 20% off coupons exclude all Hercules items as well as the most popular items.
Yup it’s in the fine print…
I came here to find some discussion on these very tools. It seems HF is trying to get into a more premium market but the problem I have seen so far is that the price of the tools are not much lower than the sale prices (which are about every other weekend it seems) of the name brand tools they are trying to copy.
For the price, one would be much better off getting DeWalt, better long term support, larger family of tools, greater availability, and on and on…
I was most intrigued by the batteries and possible cross compatibility. I did find on garage journal that it is possible but must be modded with a 10k ohm resistor to trick the DeWalt tool into “seeing” the temp sensor. While it is possible it was also suggested that for the same cost/effort you could just buy a real DeWalt battery from Ebay.
How the hell are they going to run a lithium battery set without a temp sensor? that’s very dangerous. I mean I don’t put it past HF to cut corners etc but nothing that far out of bound.