The First behind the scenes look EVER allowed at How Milwaukee Tools builds power tools & batteries

all right today guys you're gonna see something that's never been allowed to be filmed or even photographed before every year Milwaukee tools lets this group of media come behind the scenes just to educate them on how they build their tools but they've got signs all over the place that they don't allow anybody to record any of this and today you're gonna see probably what I think is one of the most interesting things that goes behind the scenes that the big companies just don't want you to see and you guys tell me what you think of this as you watch this I absolutely personally find this stuff fascinating and I want to find out from you guys what you think of it as well so without wasting more time let's get into today's video all right guys I'm with Andrew and today we're gonna be talking about battery technology the evolution of it and how it's changing and the reason I'm with you is because you had up the battery and cell department at Milwaukee tools for the last seven to eight years it's correct yep so this is like your baby right all of this stuff right here Lee alright and I really want to point this out because you guys are gonna see batteries popping up more and more kind of like fleas on a dog's back they're everywhere when I was at the gie it seemed like every other outdoor power tool that came out had battery in it and that does not mean they're all built the same because they're not there is such a wide disparity in quality and it's so confusing because guys see these numbers and these numbers don't equate to performance yeah or durability or durability and you're gonna help clarify that so can you kind of start walking us through this thing Andrew because I really want to understand this in detail yeah we're gonna take a step further than that too and actually talk about the three fundamentals to make a world-class cordless power tool and that's the battery the motor and the electronics yeah because the motor and electronics the battery is only one part of it you've got have a really they gonna all talk to each that's correct yeah they all have to talk to each other to get the best performance durability in life okay and this is where I stop talking and you start talking all rights to the tree so let's let's start with battery packs okay so there are three fundamental elements when it comes to a battery pack okay there's the cell the physical construction and then the intelligence or the electronics okay and you really have to do all those things great together so to walk you through a quick history of how we got to where we're at today because this is important because as you mentioned it's it's you've all been very very quickly right so you have to have perspective on how we actually got here so you know back in the 80s early 90s this was the predominant player in the marketplace and for the first time someone didn't have to pull out say you know 50 feet extension cord to do a light drilling or fasting application now that being said this thing left a lot to be desired right now you're looking at it obviously you don't have to be an engineer to tell that the pack construction left a little bit to be desired right bring quality scotch tape I don't know so if people don't still use this design right correct yes so this is this is this is an older design skilled nickel metal hydride yep it's an older technology now because it left a lot to be desired there was a evolution along the way so this thing came along this is an 18 volt NiCad battery pack and from that battery was a pretty decent step-up in terms of power and runtime and because of that rather than just having say you know two or three products that work off that battery now you start to create a system right so you could get into Saul's high torque impact wrenches all that stuff now similar to the technology that was in here NiCad left a lot to be desired anyway I mean by that is you would start out really powerful at the batteries charge and then as you go down through charge would lose power right so at the end you'd be wrenching on trying to get the application done oh yeah the other thing is that there was no evolution of the technology and what I mean by that is if you wanted to improve power or run time yet dad sells and when you add sells you're making it bigger you're making it heavier right and you're changing the voltage right so if you look back in like the 90s early 2000s that's why you saw 12 volt 14 for 18 24 36 40 like crazy different voltages nothing was compatible that point in time we did have some NiCad solutions but we were still known as a courted heritage company right for bansal's and in whole hogs and salsals and we decided to abandon this NiCad technology and go all-in on this thing called with you my own so this is the first lithium-ion power to a battery ever made and what I can tell you is since we introduced it we have continued to evolve the technology both from a performance standpoint as well as a durability standpoint to where you know now we're on we're talking our 9th or 10th generation of lithium-ion where others are in there like you mentioned gie summer on their first maybe second maybe third so you learn a lot along the way now it's important our stand is just because it says lithium doesn't mean that it's gonna be created equal okay so may have the same number on the side and may say lithium-ion you will get wildly different performance durability and life out these things so to paint a picture for you going back to what makes you know these these lithium packs really impressive it starts with the cell right so there are thousands thousands of cells available in the marketplace today a lot of competitors will you know open up the spec sheet right pick out a cell and then basically place a po2 that cell company and get a battery pack we take a very very different approach so during the cell development the developmental process we actually partner with the world leaders right to the Samsung's LG's Panasonic's of the world you have it and we have we develop the cells hand-in-hand with them so you got a chance to go through our battery lab and see how we fundamentally break down the cells and test them and bear right and actually create this technology with those partners so once you get to the point where you know you're happy with the the cell performance it has to work in all types of conditions too right so extreme heat extreme cold past the last you know fifteen hundred plus cycles cuz we make sure that someone's investing in us we're protecting their investment we own two eyes for the long term so the nice big thing is is really that the physical construction if you will right so how do you make sure that this thing stands the test of times in all different types of environments and conditions so what I can tell you is that with our battery packs we do have the best protection against jobsite conditions and just to give you an example of what some other lithium-ion batteries look like on the marketplace so no is this a current gen like competitive product yes is this is like on the market right now right yeah oh this is a this is a competitive battery pack and see here the straps are pretty janky it's also held together by tape now we've upgraded from scotch tape to duct tape so that was an evolution technology this is not your this is not our business okay good so we went from scotch to duck yeah in the last progression now this is an example of another competitive battery pack and what you're seeing here is there's no intelligence no electronics which we'll get to in a second they're using this steel weld straps which perform very poorly a thermally right they don't get a lot of power out of it and there's not really a lot of protection going on like this versus our like to like battery this is the m18 500 battery versus a competitive five volt battery oh so these are like two like right so same same voltage call same exact voltage same amp hours wildly different looking on the inside so we actually use different materials so for example it's a it's a coated copper as copper transfers energy very efficiently and the coating protection against stuff like water right okay and then there's a lot of intelligence going on in this thing now are you picking this up Nick okay now there's some cool stuff that we do inside of this where we actually have these little rubber inserts or wedges okay fit in between there what happens is they're gonna absorb impact and vibration off of these wall points so if you drop it or you're using something that creates a lot of vibration so I can actually take the stress off and make it last a heck of a lot longer so you're talking about these points in between that is rubber yeah okay so that's rubber so when you drop it it's got a little bit of a cush yeah and you have that on the outside of the battery too right so we have a rubber on the outside the rubber bro that's kind of a dull yeah okay that makes sense yeah so the thing I point out is water so we've done a lot of work over the years to protect against water no not Saints waterproof by any means but in a situation we accidentally leave it outside which guess what it happens up right we make sure that it's not going to be damaged or destroyed so this is what the inside of a competitive battery looks and this is current gun this is current gen yeah of a competitive battery pack so it's just a different recipe of this one if you will different cells okay so how long was this left out in water great question so this is its we have a shower test that we run and then it sits for three days and then we tear it open three days underwater no no no yes so okay so waste yeah yeah so we do a shower test for 24 hours our test and then we let this pack sit for a couple days no no no no more shower just sitting right sitting sitting and then open it up and see what it looks like oh my god yeah and what you're seeing is that the whole thing is corroded okay but where's yours oh right here okay so right here so the same shower test same exact shower test so you do see a little bit of some corrosion on the terminals but this is where the tool actually meets the battery and it cleans it up as soon as you put that can we hold this under the light a little bit more Andrew I want it because this is kind of important I want to make sure we get in here and see this so it's same 24 hours in the shower in three days same exact test okay okay so what you see is this pack failed basically immediately and it corroded through once again going back to that steel steel corrodes very easily right versus our pack pretty much untouched right okay so what that means is it's going to be protected against those conditions okay got it cool so what's next so what's next so that the final thing then talk about battery packs does need electronics right are the intelligence so we do a lot within this to make sure that once again we're protecting you know your viewers investments so anyway that buys a battery if it did get expose its exposed to a harmful condition it has the intelligence to protect itself so what I mean by that is you know say someone tries to do something crazy and you know jump-started you right or they put a product on it that it's not intended for yeah they not they take the notches out of the battery and try to hook it up for something that's not supposed whatever works whatever maybe if case tell me these stuff all the time okay you just cut this snip off and you can hook it up to this and I'm like okay right right yeah so it has intelligence to be able to protect itself from an overload standpoint or you know the the tool binds up the a will say alright I'm gonna shut myself down same thing with heat so if it if you're really going to town working the pack art says you know what I've got two hot I'm gonna shut myself down wait wait a couple minutes and I'm ready to go again okay now the other cool thing we have is every battery has a unique charging profile and what I mean by that is it's dependent upon the cell type and the pack type so they all have intelligent charging and the benefit of this is that you're gonna be a faster charge but you're also going to extend the life of the pack okay now within our m18 batteries we do have three different types of packs if you will and these are all 18 volt batteries so we have this guy which is called a compact battery it has five cells it's ideal for you know drilling and fastening if you're doing overhead work that kind of stuff step up we have what's called an XC battery that has 10 cells so the interesting thing here is that you have twice the amount cells what we're going to maintain the same voltage right so when okay when you step up here even though the voltage is stay we're actually putting out more power and then finally if you step up to the HD battery it has 15 cells once again 18 volts more cells more power so to help illustrate this is good let me show you what that means so you actually if you take our m18 peel drill and put a compact battery on it you pull a trigger hear the sound you know step-ups the xt battery you get a sound difference of higher pitch so it's actually outputting more power okay now what i will tell you is that it's tool dependent right so it depends on the electronic and motor set in the tool of what's that power difference going to be for every product but the benefit of having the intelligence in there is that we can communicate with a tool to say I can put out more conversation yes your tool syncs to the batteries of the battery and the tool talk to each other so you not burning there too a lot is my blame and understanding of innovate you're absolutely right am i right all right hey talk to each other to make sure that they don't destroy each other right and then they also optimize performance okay so but we can we go all the way up and down we can use any one of these batteries in this tool and it will communicate even with the HD 12x or batteries for the biggest to the littlest without burning that to it all right that's great and that's something that we take for granted but a lot of companies that actually have different battery platforms that you can't cross mingle because they don't is it because they don't have the technology because they did yeah they don't have technology and invest in the electronics on it so a great example is you know the this competitive hack no electronics right so if you try to run the more powerful tool and your continue to push motor electronic performance okay you run into a lot of issues does it can't protect it so so no are we you know you've got these chargers here and then we're also gonna look at the motors yep Andrew am i right correct okay so what I want you guys to know is we're gonna actually break this into two videos so I want to make sure that we this end of it and then in the next video we're gonna actually start to look at these motors and then bring this tie this whole thing together but before we let you guys go tell me about these Chargers and what these batteries means so that these guys can go what the heck does an ex e CP hdh a what did all of those monikers stand for great yeah it's a great great question so with the batteries you know we have the compact CP stands for compact so it's just the little guy X C stands for extended capacity so it's like the middle the road and then HD stands for high demand so it's like there's really power-hungry stuff right hey and then within that we have this new introduction of batteries called high output right so high output is utilizing a new cell technology what's called 21700 cell okay and then we've also advanced the electronics and the the pack design to take full advantage of that so the benefit is when you step up from our red lithium to read lithium high output you instantly see a 50 percent jump in power and then it runs significant link or two so the benefit there is that we're able to maintain compatibility like you mentioned and keep pushing performance to get past levels of 15 and quarter or to cycle gas right but I want to also talk about because a tool that is waiting for a battery to charge is not money yep so have you taken into consideration I want these guys to have a good wrap their head around what is the difference between these charters and what does it mean to the batteries are we gonna be burning out of battery if we get a super charger and put on a regular or a great question yeah so so we similar batteries we have three different types of chargers right and what we have is a standard what we call rapid and super the difference between these chargers is charge time so as you step up you're cutting your charge time in half so to paint a picture for you let's use the 12:04 as an example as you take the 12'o you put it on our standard charger it's gonna take about four hours to charge this thing now if you step up to the rapid charger same exact battery right same exact 1200 battery you step up to the rapid charger put in there now your charge times down to two hours so you went from four to two hours by just changing the charger okay and then really what's impressive is the latest technology which is called a super charge is that out it is not out yet it's getting ready to launch in July okay yeah and now what's happen is you take that same battery same 12'o put on here it'll charge in under one hour so you want from four hours to two hours to one hour that's up that's your biggest beefiest battery that's correct now the great thing is it doesn't matter what battery used they're all fully compatible with it with every charger so I'm gonna jump in here because he forgot to say something that I think is not only pretty important but also pretty impressive my understanding is that that rapid charger allows you to now hyper charge your battery so if you're getting to the end of the day and your battery goes dead you can put that battery on the charger for five minutes and it'll allow you to get enough juice rammed into that battery to make an additional like 65 cuts through two by four I don't know or something like that enough enough power to get you through the end of the day without waiting for that thing to charge up for an hour that's a pretty cool technology advancement so you know if you're if you're already invest in the system you can buy any of these and get the benefits as you step up now what I will tell you is with new supercharger it is optimized for these high output batters okay so what I mean by that is if say say someone has a bunch of nine O's right yeah they actually won't see a benefit going from the rapid to the super it's those people that actually step up into the high output batteries they'll see a significant benefit and per how this actually works is it goes back to that cell technology in electronics that it can handle really fast charge current without that it's backwards compatible fully you can stick your oldest m18 battery on the will not burn it up because the technology that's in it is still communicating so ma teens been around for how long Andrew now 2007 okay so so there's some guys that still have them yeah they can stick it on the supercharger and that technology from 2007 will still communicate and Wednesday right that battery is right and when it comes back to is the electronics about making that initial investment electronics allowed us to have that compatibility reports you're absolutely right okay okay good that's good stuff to know all right guys I think we've covered the batteries and the next video we're actually going to talk about how the motors communicate with the batteries tell me what we're going to be talking about next we've got a complete layout here I kind of want to wet the whistle for these guys to find out you know to let them know what to look for yeah so what we're going to talk…