skipclemmons said:
At the different torque settings on my drill, 1-12, what is the torque level at which the internal ratchet starts clicking? I can do the math to convert it. Just looking for 1 number per setting. I don't believe the speed or the size of the battery should be a variable. Just the torque settings.
P.S. I didn't notice your reference to torque settings of 1-12 until I was proofing this posting. Rather than delete it all, I will just add new information to the end regarding the CXS drill that you are referring to.
The original C12 (and its predecessors) had a mechanical clutch for the torque limiting function. All of the newer drills use an electronic torque limit by sensing the increase in motor current. There are electronic devices for calibrating torque settings on drivers. The manufacturing company I used to work for had these for calibrating all of the drivers on the production floor. If you had one of these, you could create a lookup table for torque values versus settings.
There is a downside of the electronic clutch when driving machine screws. If the screw is going in with little resistance until it suddenly bottoms-out, there will be an impulse spike in the torque due to the inertia of the motor and drivetrain. This means that the final torque the screw will experience when it bottoms out will be a function of the speed the drill was turning. So if you have the trigger full-on when the screw suddenly stops at the bottom, the impulse torque is going to be huge. But as long as you begin to slow the drill down before bottoming out the screw, it should give a repeatable value.
The reason why this is not as much of an issue with wood screws, is because they are undergoing a greater load as they penetrate. So they don't experience a sudden impulse spike from no load to full load in virtually zero time.
Now that I have written all of that information about the drills with EC-TEC technology, I realized that you have the CXS drill, which is different. (It only has 12 torque settings, as opposed to the 20 to 25 on all other drills.) I am less familiar with these because I have not played with one before. So some of this is speculation. The CXS uses a more traditional DC motor instead of the brushless motor in the EC-TEC drills. It appears to have a mechanical clutch instead of electronic, so there will be a little less impulse spiking than mentioned above. It also appears that the clutch is at the final drive of the drill, instead of just behind the motor for most larger drills with mechanical clutches. If this is true, then it will give you more consistent torque values regardless which speed range you are operating in.
If you can find someone with one of these torque gauges, you can correlate your torque setting to the torque output. For the CXS, you might even be able to do this with a torque wrench, but the results would not be as accurate.
