Shop Garden Tools & Accessories >

FREE Delivery Over £99

Next Day Delivery

Finance Available

FREE Delivery Over £49

Next Day Delivery

Finance From £150

Bosch GSB 18V-EC Combi Drill – The Safest on the Market?

Posted by Toolstop Colin on 4th Jan 2017

Bosch’s DynamicSeries of combi-drills boast the type of features and benefits that you’d expect to find in a drill capable of punching 13mm holes into masonry, while maintaining a compact, ergonomic footprint. A headlength of just 184mm and a weight of 1.8kg including the battery, marks the GSB 18 VEC as combi drill to have on your wish list.

Keep reading to learn more, plus see our exclusive video demo.

Powerful and Smart – Here’s How

We know what having a brushless motor in our cordless tool offers:

  • longer service life (no moving parts in the motor)
  • longer runtime (motor is smarter at drawing energy from the battery and none is wasting creating heat)
  • more power to the motor(brushless is more efficient in how it runs)
  • a smaller and lighter tool (motors are less bulky)

So it makes sense that you’ll want your cordless combi-drill to have a brushless motor, and we find one in the form of Bosch’s EC motor in the GSB 18V EC. Which is great.

The motor itself is electronically protected by the Bosch EMP chip which prevents it from being burnt out or overloading. Again, great.

Factor in that it runs off Bosch’s CoolPack batteries (or you can grab one body-only here). These have been proven to delivery better performance due to how they manage to keep cooler which being drained, and also benefit from another smart feature from Bosch, Electronic Cell Protection.

ECP protects the battery from deep discharge, overheating (heat is the enemy of lithium-ion) and helps to make sure the battery will last many, many discharge/recharge cycles.

These features are all fantastic, and offer us peace of mind when really putting our tools through their paces, but we also sort of expect them in top-end cordless tools these days. What else does the GSB 18V EC offer?

Kick-Back Control and Precision Clutch

We never want our drill to snag when we’re pushing them through their paces, and as we’ve seen on previous drills from Bosch, this one has the brilliant Kick-Back Control safety feature. Thanks to an accelerometer within the tool, should it grab or snag while we drill, the motor cuts immediately, and we need to release the trigger for the tool to work again.

The GSB18 VEC has 20 torque positions, offering you up to 60Nm of hard torque. Obviously we rely on choosing the right torque setting for our screwdriving applications, but on all combi or drill drivers, we often find that the gear box will continue to ratchet even after the screw has been successful sunk into the material.

That can cause problems such as overwhelming the thread when you’re working in softer woods.

So to prevent this, Bosch has added an optical sensor inside the gear box which senses when the required torque has been reached and cuts the power to the trigger once it has. This absolutely stops you from over tightening screws!

They’re in as tight as you need them to be, the motor isn’t overworked and the gearbox is prevented from over ratcheting.

Watch our video demo of this on Toolstop TV.

What are the Other Specs of the GSB 18V-EC?

  • Torque, max. (hard/soft): 60 / 31 Nm
  • No-load speed (1st gear / 2nd gear): 0 – 600 / 0 – 1,900 rpm
  • Max. impact rate: 28,500 bpm
  • Chuck jaw width: 13mm
  • Chuck capacity, min./max: 1.5 / 13mm
  • Drill spindle thread: 1/2″
  • Torque settings: 20+1
  • Length: 184mm
  • Height: 248mm
  • Max. drilling diameter in wood: 38mm
  • Max. drilling diameter in steel: 13mm
  • Max. drilling diameter in masonry: 13mm
  • Max. screw diameter: 10mm

See it on our site, available with THREE 5Ah 18v CoolPack batteries, the new GAL 1860 quick charger (watch our video on this here) packaged up in an L-BOXX case. Grab yours here.