There are so many cordless (battery-powered) rotary polishers on the market today versus 10, even 5 years ago. With all these new options comes analysis paralysis, and I’m here to help YOU make an informed decision before investing in a new tool. It’s all here in this clip from one of my recent LIVE monthly detailing classes I host right here on YouTube.
— Mike Phillips Chief Education Officer, Dr. Beasley’s
(760) 515-0444 | mike@drbeasleys.com
The following is an unedited transcript of the above video.
So one of the things about rotary polishers is, you know, traditionally, everything that you ever bought had a cord, you know, so you had to plug it in and use an extension cord. And then the whole time you’re buffing, you’ve got to manage that cord.
So now I think Flex may have been the first company to introduce the cordless, you know, professional grade rotary polisher. This one right here, this is actually the prototype for the model that you can buy today. This was given to me years ago. It’s still going strong. This is from 2017. I can’t even count how many cars and boats I’ve buffed out this thing.
But then after that, you know, like everything else, everybody kind of jumps on the bandwagon, copies the design, or comes up with their own unique design, but the same kind of idea. A rotary polisher that’s cordless. I have here three of them. I’ve got the Flex PE150, I’ve got the Harbor Freight Hercules, and I’ve got the Milwaukee Fuel.
so besides just buying the polisher, you have to take into consideration the battery cost, the battery charger cost, and also how well the batteries perform. And you measure battery performance by three primary categories. So one is how long will the battery power the tool? What is the run time? What is the recycle or recharge time? How long does it take to recharge the battery?
And then how many charges can you get out of the battery before it is so used up that you got to replace it or replace cells? Lifespan of the battery. Lifespan, cycle life. So I did some testing, we did a promo video and what I did is I wanted to make 100% sure each one of these batteries was completely dead.
So I set these tools in the lock position running and I ran until they all died and then I placed them on their perspective chargers and then I timed how long it took to recharge a completely dead battery. So let’s start with the Milwaukee. And this is an early Milwaukee. So this is a 18-volt 5-amp.
I think the ones they sell now are 6-amp or 8-amp. This is when it was first introduced. In fact, Milwaukee sent me this tool to test. And I tested it on a truck just like this. I can get some good shots. Sure, yeah. And go ahead and continue talking. Okay, so this is probably, you know, I know the battery technology is a little, I’m sure the tool is probably the same. But here’s how long it took to recharge the battery. It went from a completely dead battery to fully charged in 32 minutes, okay?
That’s pretty quick. The Flex, I ran this until it was completely down. Let me just show you this tool. There’s the Flex PE14. And out of the three, I’d say this is the most compact once you get the battery on it. This battery took, they say a max of 48 minutes, but it took actually, I could be off by a minute or two, but it took about 50 minutes to recharge from completely dead to when I saw the light go green on the charger.
So we’re talking 50 minutes. And then after I ran the… Harbor Freight battery down, and this is the bigger boy. This is the 20 volt 8 amp battery. You don’t have to hold it so high. Where are you going with the battery, man? This one took an hour and 15 minutes to recharge from totally dead to totally fully charged.
So 32 minutes, 50 minutes, and an hour and 15 minutes. And it’s important to know how long the battery is going to what your runtime or your recharge is gonna be because this is gonna determine how many spare batteries you purchase so you can operate that tool continuously. The other thing you gotta look out for is the chargers. Some chargers are fast chargers, some are slow chargers.
They call them a rapid charger. Oh, here, let me, while you’re talking. Sure, so all- Here’s the chargers. All three of the chargers I have here are the rapid chargers. So they’re charging the battery as fast as technology for each one of these brands will allow. I will tell you, if you go to Harbor Freight, don’t be fooled, they make a two-pack charger but it’s a four amp charger. It’s charges very slowly.
So you might be thinking, Hey, you know, I can charge two batteries and get them done really quickly, but it’ll actually charge faster in the single. And at this time they don’t make a rapid charger dual battery system. So you have to do some, uh, some research into the batteries, the chargers and the tool itself. So let me just run through the prices. Um, the flex comes in at the most expensive.
Okay. Okay. And Flex is, you know, this is a German-made tool. I know, I’ve been to the factory where they make these. These are precision machine ground stainless steel gears. It has a seven-function microprocessor in here that keeps it from overheating. It does a bunch of things, but one of the things it does is just keeps it from overheating. It’ll shut the tool off so you don’t burn it up if you’re using this thing really hard. As far as I know, these other tools do not have the microprocessor.
So the more money you spend, the better the tool you get. But when you price out a cordless rotary, at a minimum, you have to price in at least two batteries. So when one battery dies, you can put it in the charger, put another battery in, and get back to work. So here’s the cost of the flex tool.
The one battery or two batteries and one charger comes at $890 and that was off the autoality. So do your shopping around, see if you can find a better deal. The Milwaukee to buy the tool by itself, two of their batteries and the charger came in at $760. And then the Harbor Freight for the tool, two batteries and the fast charger came in at, what did I have up there? 380 bucks. So by far the cheapest tool.
I flipped them all over so that way people can have a comparison about size-wise. Yeah, let me flip these this way so you can come by and just take a look at the tool body length. So again, out of all three, the Flex is the smaller, most compact tool in its size, followed by the Fuel and the Harbor Freight is the longest tool. So that just gives you a size. And I don’t use the stick handle on any of these.
They come with rubber over molds on the heads of the tools nowadays so they’re easy to grip. And it looks like I think the flux actually is the closest, shortest from pad to back of tool. Yeah, yeah. So it’s also closest to the surface you’re buffing on. Now they all have recessed gear locks on them.
So the gear lock is something like this. You would push this in. That way it locks up the gear so you can do things like pull the vacuum plate and the pads off. It’s nice to have a recessed one because if not, sometimes your hand can actually hit that and you’ll hear a grinding sound. That’s not a good sound to hear.
So you want that recessed. They all come with variable speed dials located in different places. Looks like this one here, I’ll just rattle off, goes from a low of 800 RPM to I think 2200 RPM. The Flex goes from 600 RPM to 1450 RPM and the Hercules starts out at 800 RPM on the dial and goes to 2400 RPM. So they’re all pretty close, about the same RPM. You’ve got a low range, you’ve got a high range.
And then a couple other things, they’ve all got a trigger lock. You can take and depress the speed lock trigger, push on the button and lock them. That way you don’t get to sit there and hold it the whole time you’re buffing. They all have rubber tool rests. Now this is nice. So the flex one is integrated into the overmold. And then I guess it rests on the battery. Back here, we’ve got a rubber tool rest here and here. And let’s see. And it looks like the battery’s still gonna be hitting.
And then on this one here, you’ve got a rubber tool rest here, down here. The battery definitely hits. And the battery is going to hit. So it looks like all three polisher companies kind of got it right on making a rubber tool rest. And a rubber tool rest is so if you want to set it down, it doesn’t scratch the paint.
I know most people don’t do this. I do sometimes as I’m buffing out a car. But you definitely don’t want something with steel tool guards or the hard plastic because it’s going to slide off. So anyway, that’s neither here nor there, but I just wanted to point that out. Besides that, then they all have – these are all – Brushless. They’re all brushless. There’s no brushes to retain. They’ve got a stainless steel cleaning port on the Hercules. You’ve got a stainless steel cleaning air filtration on the Flex.
And I have not looked at this one, but it does the same thing. Stainless steel little vent grille to keep dust bunnies from getting inside your tool. Doesn’t the Flex one, though, it actually sucks in air to help cool down the battery? The way this one is designed is it pulls in air actually through the battery. Now that’s a good design. I don’t know that that’s not true with these, but let me just look.
I can tell by looking at it. I do not see any air vents on the inside of the battery or on the back, okay? I’m going to guess it’s going to be the same way here. Oh yeah, they’re fully charged, by the way. Yeah, they’re fully charged. Come off. Okay, same thing. There’s no air vents inside the chamber or on the outside back, but if you look at the flex, Right here, you see this little grill here?
There’s a stainless steel mesh wire screen in there. And then right, where does it pull the air in at? Is it at the bottom? pulls the air in. I don’t see now, but it has to pull it in somewhere cause it flushes it through the battery. So it pulls the air through the battery to the body of the tool to keep the battery cool because I’ve been told the biggest enemy to lithium ion batteries is heat. True statement.
So yeah, but you can see where the vent is on everything on here. Okay. So now the next thing I just want to show is how loud they are. Um, Let’s start with the Milwaukee since it’s in my hand. I’m gonna run it down to the 800 RPM and I’m gonna bring it up to full speed and you can hear the sound it makes. So pretty quiet on the 800.
I’m gonna guess this is the noisiest one. Okay, here’s the speed setting one, two, three, four, five, there’s the six. This has got a whine to it. And let’s try out the Harbor Freight here. Okay, here’s 800. It’s quiet. That’s very quiet. You can hear it over. Flex is still the quietest at full speed. So, but you know, the difference between them is pretty nominal. I’d say these two were the quietest.
This is probably the noisiest. I think the Hercules is the quietest at low speed, but at high speed, the Flux is the quietest. And for me personally, like I usually, when I’m buffing clear coats out, I rarely go over like 1200, maybe 15 at the most. With boats, usually I want to be up around 2000 RPM for buffing on gel coats.
This is a little thicker, a little harder. Usually doing a lot of grunt work on the boats I bring in at least to work on. uh besides that then the next thing i just want to talk about do they got the power of a corded polisher yeah what would be the difference a lot of people i know are running the groups and stuff on facebook people are like yeah but cordage you always have more power so how true is that it is true and it’s true with orbital polishers and truth rotaries but let me just share a little bit about the two different types of power for the different types of tools.
When it comes to rotary, when that motor, and thus the battery, only has to spin and pad in a circle, it’s a huge, it’s much less drain on the battery than a tool that has to oscillate and rotate a pad. Oh, at least for a gear-driven tool, it’s two actions. So the battery, a corded orbital will tend to always have more power than a cordless. Same thing for the rotary, it’s gonna have more power. But the thing is, is the freedom of not having to mess with a cord when buffing out a car or a boat, it just can’t be understated.
Now, I have people that talk to me all the time that say, well, Mike, I detail boats, you know, and I buy a DeWalt or I buy a Makita. Bigger, better, heavier, better. Big, full size, you know, because they’ll take it. And that’s probably true, but it depends on the type of boat detailing you’re doing.
I mean, this is like center console boat capital of the world, Florida, and boats become really bad shape. And what I’ve always been teaching since 2013 and documented in my boat how-to detailing book was instead of taking a rotary and pushing on the side of a boat for hours, You know, just for hours buffing on that boat, machine sand it first with like the Mirka Abralon system. That way you can hold a lightweight sander like this Bauer or there’s a number of sanders. It’s lightweight.
You can hold this against the side of a boat. and let it do all the grunt work and you’re just holding it lightly instead of pushing a rotary for hours so the the system i always try to teach in my boat classes is is that cliche that everybody throws around but no one ever shows you how to execute it and it’s called working smarter instead of working harder so instead of taking a traditional corded or corded rotary to a boat embracing yourself and pushing for hours to peel off or do a braid off deep oxidation sand it off with the tool that’s easy to hold lightweight against the hole, and then you can come back with the cordless rotary and pull out your sanding marks instead of trying to pull out 10 years worth of deep oxidation.
See the difference? No, especially if it goes away from you, then you’re not taxing yourself. Boats aren’t like this. They’re like this. So again, running a rotary in a way that it’s going away from you really taxes a lot of your muscles. So my point is, is when people say, you know, can you get away with the cordless versus the cord?
It kind of depends on your buffing style. You know, so in the sanding world, whether you’re sanding gel coat to remove deep oxidation or clear coats to remove orange peel, the same thing applies the higher the grits you stand out to the easier the buffing will be so some guys finish out at 1500 hey if it’s a soft paint probably buff that easy if it’s hard paint probably take a lot of buff it out gel coats tend to be very hard so you know most guys are finishing out at 2000 some go to 25 some go to 3000 but the higher you finish out the easier it will be to buff and the higher you finish out the easier or the more effective it’s going to be to use cordless tools versus corded.
Makes sense. It just goes to your style of detailing. I do. I don’t ever use a corded rotary anymore at all. No, I haven’t seen you pick one of those up in a long time except for your classes. Yeah. And for cars that are really in bad shape, like I had a 1981 Camaro Z28 original black single stage paint. Looked like it had been used for a hockey puck. My first process was wool pad, flex cordless, and NSP150.
Car came out beautiful. I had to really lean into it and push on it. And the harder you lean and push on these cordless, it’s going to tax the battery and run it down. Luckily for me, I got about 100 batteries. So it’s easy to slap another battery in and go. But I didn’t have to mess with the cord the whole time. Let me share a tip real quick. So we have a thing called… You want to maybe stand on this side, and I’ll throw splatter into your camera lens. Oh, gee, you’re so kind. Okay, so we have this thing called picking up a strip or a bead of product using the 10 at 10 technique. Now… In my classes, what I do is I actually take and I mark a backing plate so it’s analogous to a clock.
So here’s 12 o’clock, 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock, and so on. And what you’re going to do is when you want to pick up a strip of product is you lay your pad flat, you’ll tilt it up 10 degrees, 10 degrees this way, and you run that strip in at the 10 o’clock. And what that does is it tends to pull the product in itself instead of throwing it everywhere, and that’s called how to pick up your bead using the 10 at 10 technique. Now, that’s really easy to do on horizontal surfaces. It’s a little trickier on verticals. So let me pick this up and buff this, and I’ll show you the easy way to do verticals without doing the 10 at 10.
Whoops. I just wanted to show the clock face, Yancey. Wrong polisher. I wanted to use the cordless. Okay, so there’s a strip of product. Okay, we got it locked. I’ve run it down to the 800, locked in place. I prefer to lock my tools. Picking up my D, spreading it out. Okay, I’m going to bring this up to 1200.
I’m just going to start pushing on this. And I’m pulling the sanding marks out. And one of the things you can notice is I’m actually booking on edge. It’s really easy to control on edge. As soon as you lay this thing flat, it tends to grab and yank you around. But that’s kind of what the Milwaukee looks like. Notice there’s no blue base coat, so I haven’t gone through the clear. And I easily pulled out, you know, 3,000 grit in this little area just right here. No problem. Then again, this, what do you call it, demo is more about the tools, not about the process. Yeah, and I just didn’t want to buff on shiny paint.
So let me go ahead and try this little spot right here. Same thing. Oh, now let me show you how to get your product on a vertical panel without using the 10 to 10 technique. For that, you just want to take and put a circle product around the center of the pad. And the reason you put on the center is because if you put it out here and turn on, it’s just going to fly out. So here’s how I would tackle a vertical panel.
Just do this, turn it on, spread it around. I didn’t throw any product anywhere. Once I got it spread out, I’m going to crank this down to the 3. Now I can start pulling up my sanding marks. And them stainless steel gears on here, and I don’t remember that with the last one or the next one, but notice how we’re able to hold a conversation. So a lot of times when I’m out here, I’ll either wear ear protection and turn the radio on, or if it’s a short buff, I won’t put the ear protection on.
But I will turn the radio on because I can hear it or the polisher. Okay, so that easily pulled out the 3000 right there. And last but least. I think it’s a long tool. It’s a long tool. I’m just like, man. Let’s run down here. Okay. I’m going to come around the other side. Okay, I’ll use the 10 at 10 technique again to just pick this up. I’ve been doing this for like 40 years. Pick it up, spread it out.
Once you’ve got it spread out, bring the speed up. There’s 1200. Grab this. I always hold the batteries on the bottom too, just to support them. And then just start pulling out your setting marks for swirls and scratches, water spots, oxidation on the gel coat mode, oxidation on the single stage paint job.
Now, once you start pushing on it, out of all these tools, which one feels the most comfortable in your hand? For me, I’m going to go with the Flex. I think the price point of this for what you’re going to do is an easier tool to get into. If I had to come out here and I got a 1968 Camaro coming up, I got to do a complete dry sand cut and buff on it. And I will use the PE150 all day long.
Light, compact size, quiet, all the power I need, plus I got a lot of batteries. But if I was a weekend warrior, I would give the Harbor Freight a good look. It came in at $380 for two batteries, a charger, and the tool.
You got to buy pads anyway. This is $890. know just under 900 bucks and this was just under 800 bucks so these were over five and under five and they all kind of do the same thing all right any other things that you know that’s kind of it you know um i just packed for our big class up in chicago it’s a five-day class and one of the things i did was there’s not a lot of tools in here so i packed a lot of tools a lot of sanders a lot of hand sanding blocks we’re going to cover wet sanding by machine what’s ending by hand me and rod craft we’re going to be covering dry sanding my hand dry sanding my machine We have a 1967 AC Cobra and a 1960 Impala two-door bubble top that the class gets to sand down. They both have custom paint and orange peel.
But the point is, is I just packed a ton of tools. I packed everything up, including all my spurs. So I actually just wrote an article and made a video on how to clean a wool pad. And in that I say, don’t use screwdrivers. to clean your pads. But I also say in the article and the video, if this is all you got, it’s better than nothing. But spend the $10, buy a spur to keep your wool pads clean. OK.
Make sure tip’s all shiny. Tip’s all shiny. All right. Anything else that you got? I think that’s about it. Like I said, for me personally, I can’t even remember the last time I grabbed a corded pulser. I do want to share this. Remember back in the day when we both worked at the Geek? That’s been a couple of years.
Remember all those big classes I used to teach there and remember all the tools. There are more tools set out for the class to use than any other place. And here’s what I always observed. Whenever we were gonna go to a rotary polisher class session, I had corded tools.
I had the 3M. I had the DeWalt. I had the Makita and the Milwaukee corded rotaries. And I had a slew of flex cordless and I had this one at that time. And the first tools to get picked up are always the cordless. Now, these people a lot of times are newbies, they don’t know what they’re doing, so of course you grab a cordless.
But all the people that didn’t get a cordless, they’re all like, do I gotta use this tool with the cord? And they’re like, yeah, let’s see, I got 20 cordless out there and there’s 22 people in this class, so two of you gotta use a rotary with the cord, sorry. But those days are way in the past. Wonder what happened to all those tools. I don’t know. All right, you done? I’m done. Over there? All right.
