Black & Decker LDX120c Review - 20 Volt Lithium-ion Cordless Drill/driver

Black & Decker LDX120C 20-Volt MAX Lithium-Ion Cordless Drill/Driver Review
Black and Decker LDX120c: http://amzn.to/1Xogdx8
Dewalt DCD771C2: http://amzn.to/2236QDM
Drill Bits for the LDX120c: http://amzn.to/1NsDDPW
Extended Battery for LDX120c: http://amzn.to/1NsE3py

Today we’re reviewing the Black and Decker LDX120C 20Volt Cordless Drill. This is probably the most popular cordless drill on the market and is built to use around the house.
The first thing that struck me was how compact this drill is. Its barrel measures about 7.5” and its about 8” tall. That’s pretty compact for a drill with a 20V battery. It weighs about 2.5lbs and what I absolutely love, is how well balanced it feels. They designed the drill such that most of its mass is centered around where you grip the drill and this gives you a very balanced grip. And this is important because having an unbalanced tool will put a lot of undue stress on your hand and you’ll tire out pretty fast. The grip on this one though, is almost perfect. The base kit comes with the drill itself, one battery and an ac charger. The 20V lithium ion battery slides and locks into place. Pushing the orange button on the front pops the battery out, so you can plug into the charger. The charger flashes a green led when the battery is charging and a solid green when its fully charged. It’ll flash a rapid red, if the battery has a serious issue and a slower red if the battery is overheating.
The drill has a ⅜” chuck. So if you want to drill holes larger than ⅜”, you’ll need to either use a reduced shank drill bit, step drill or a hole saw. I’ll leave links to a few that’ll work with this drill in the description below. The speed can be controlled reasonably precisely using the squeeze trigger, and the drill’s direction can be reversed using the reversing switch. The switch isn’t as heavy duty as something you’d find on a dewalt, but it should work just fine for household use. The ldx120 also has 11 settings on its torque clutch. It has 10 torque settings for driving torque and one for drilling. For household use, I’d recommend just leaving it in the drill setting, even if you’re just driving screws. It has an extremely handy led light which turns on when you gently squeeze the trigger and this is very helpful for when you’re working in poorly lit places. It comes with one driver bit which stores in the base of the drill. And in case you need other driver sizes, it’ll work with any standard set of driver bits.
To test the drill, I charged the drill up to a 100% and started off by drilling holes in a pine 2x4 using a ⅜” drill bit. With this bit though, it struggled a bit to break through towards the end. So I changed the bit out to a 5/16” dewalt drill bit and this time, it was able to drill through, without any issue at all. So with thicker materials like a 2x4, I wouldn’t recommend drilling through with a drill bit larger than 5/16”. Next, I wanted to see how well it would drive 2” drywall screws and as you can see, it did this without any serious hesitation. It also unscrewed those drywall screws very easily, using the provided driver bit. And lastly, I tested it with a step drill, to see how large a hole it would cut. It went pretty smoothly till about ¾” but hit a bit of resistance after that. So I wouldn’t recommend drilling holes using hole saws or spade bits, in thicker materials, that are any larger than ¾”. Now you can obviously cut larger holes in thinner materials like plexiglass or mild steel.
The battery life is pretty decent and if you’re using it around the house occasionally, you might not even need a spare battery. However, if you plan to use it for longer periods of time, black and decker sells the extended battery which will almost double your run time. I’ll leave a link to that below.