I normally don’t post reviews, but this tool has really impressed me in the last couple of days so I thought I’d share.
I have owned mine for over a year now. I generally don’t do much work in masonry or concrete, I picked this drill up for drilling holes for anchor bolts while doing some renovations in my workshop. thus far I’ve just used it for small holes and as expected it worked great. But yesterday came a real test. I helped out a relative with some issues with a home they moved into. Whomever had owned the property beforehand had hired an extremely shady plumber. This plumber had installed a water heater over the top of a floor drain, using some 2x4 offcuts to support the heater. The condensate from the AC unit was plumbed to discharge into this floor drain, with the pipe running under the water heater. It was impossible to see or access the drain to clean it, and of course there was the mindbogglingly idiotic decision of using wood of all things to support the water heater in very close proximity to a drain. The moisture had already started to attack the wood and I was very concerned about its ability to hold up a full water heater tank. So, I pulled out the heater and decided to relocate the drain to a different place in the utility room so that the condensate drain, etc, could be properly plumbed in and the drain was easily accessible for maintenance and inspection. This required cutting out a roughly 1 foot by 5 foot long section of the concrete slab.
I do own a concrete saw, but I didn’t want to deal with the mess it makes in this particular room so I chose to do the job with the DCD273. I started drilling 3/4" holes through the slab at the major corners, and then 3/8" holes every two inches around the perimeter of my cutout. The drill had no trouble with the 3/4" holes and it downright whizzed through the 3/8". My first plan of attack to break up the area to be removed was a 12 pound sledgehammer…I gave it some good hard swings…nothing. I was about to go rent a good size demo hammer but I figured I’d give the 273 a shot. I had a brand new Bosch Bulldog pointed hammer steel in the 273, and it was a bit slow at first. This was very hard 50 year old concrete. But once I got a hole started through the slab, which turned out to be 5 inches thick, the game changed in my favor. That little rotary hammer made short work of the concrete. I was shocked at how well it worked for being an 18v class cordless tool, and I was running it on old 5ah batts I bought in 2013. That was a job that would certainly have called for a heavier class hammer but I was seriously impressed with how well the DCD273 worked.
I must admit that if I were doing a lot of this sort of work I’d want to supplement it with a heavier class machine, but for my needs this rotary hammer downright rocks. I never expected it to handle that kind of a job as easily as it did, and it didn’t just handle it, it did so flawlessly. No overheating, no overloading, no strain in my wrists, it just worked.
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