A carmine demon creeps and crawls over the face of the Earth, observing no border or boundaries (or maybe just hangs around some aisles in various flavors of cheap tool depots), waiting for it's chance to seduce your mind with tantalizing offers of power and success.
The lies it offers are bold and powerful, unbelievable to the rational mind, and so alluring that sense and experience are crippled against rebuffing the calls that assure you of "up to 10X faster material removal when compared to standard grinding wheels."
I spent easily 3 goddamned hours longer removing weld garbage using one of those friggin' flap discs yesterday than it would've taken me if I had thought to use a grinding wheel. Total waste of time. Sure, I'm partly to blame for giving marketing garbage a chance, but I think all regular users of power tools are constantly looking for that next little trick to give them an edge. You know -- like performance tuners, or drug-addicted athletes.
Today's first round of grinding saw me removing material in about 1/3 the time as yesterday by using a grinder wheel to hog and a flap disc to finish, as usual. The downside, however, is I totally drained both available battery packs in that span of time, just grinding, whereas I only did one recharge cycle all day yesterday and made heavy use of the angle and die grinders, as well as the bandsaw.
This doesn't come as a surprise, since the mass of a flap disc is considerably less than a grinding wheel, meaning more work has to be done by the grinder's motor to get that sucker spinning. Working harder means the motor draws a greater amount of current. It also gets hotter. Getting hotter means the motor's internal resistance gets higher, which means, yep -- it needs more electrons to do the same amount of work and eats the battery as quickly as the power supply circuit will allow.
Now here's the part where things get tricky: if you're using air or (corded) power tools, it's kind of a no-brainer situation. You don't need to even bother with any tonic to boost your grind time performance. Use a grinding wheel and be on your way.
It may not be that simple when using battery power, though. Consider a scenario where a job getting done faster doesn't outweigh needing to recharge your battery. It might be beneficial to spend extra minutes/hours on grinding something if it means you can still use your impact when you're done. Something worth considering at the yard, roadside, or asbestos caverns.
I'm curious as to which has the greater impact on battery consumption with my tools. I assumed it would be the act of spinning up the wheel to operating speed, since it takes more energy to get something moving than to keep it going. Battery use seemed to be the same, even when making it a point to minimize spin-up cycles. Either way, I don't really care enough to actually get scientific on this and doing boring stuff like "measuring" and "maintaining consistency".
I'm just going to chalk it up to electricity being weird today. Even the welder's hotter than it was yesterday. I keep burning the shit out of myself and catching things on fire. Yeah, that's gotta be it. Something funky in the electricity coming from the zap factory today.
(I'll have some exhaust update pics up later tonight.)
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