Hilti NPR19-A or Milwaukee Force Logic Today I wanted to look at the new Hilti press gun. What I want to do is, I’ve just got this new Hilti press gun today, and I wanted to compare it with the Milwaukee press gun, which we’ve had now for a year or so, two years maybe. I just wanted to run through both of them for you, and then just give you my opinion of them both. Just one thing to point out. I’m just a gas engineer, and it’s just my opinion. I’m not a tool expert. Let’s have a look at them.
When we compare both press guns, we can see that the Hilti one is quite a bit bigger than the Milwaukee one. The Hilti one has got, the Hilti one is 22 volts, and the Milwaukee one is 12 volts. The Hilti, you can get a slimmer battery, which would make it a little bit shorter. But even so it’s still quite a bit longer than the Milwaukee one.
You can use the same jaws for both these press guns. We’ve got the Nova Press jaws. These are the M pattern. That’s one thing just to check, that your fittings that you use, you need to ask the manufacturer of the fittings or check which jaws are for the fittings. We use Express fittings, or we use Geberit fittings. Or Geberit. However you pronounce it. They use the M jaw. When the rep from Hilti came, he had some V jaws. Now they are not compatible with these fittings, so that’s just something you just need to double check. Make sure you’ve got the right jaws for the right fittings, and also the right jaws for the guns. These jaws fit in both these guns.
If we just have a look at 50 mil jaws, so to put in there, that just has a lever. Just go like that. That pulls out. Just put your jaws in there, and down. Then you can just use the press gun. It’s just got a button on there. On the Milwaukee one, if you press and hold the button, if you just hold it for a few seconds, three seconds, four seconds, it will continue to do the press for you. You don’t need to keep hold of the button. Now that’s okay in use normally. If you did jam the fitting, it has a button there that you can press, and that will release the jaw.
On the Hilti one, so with the Hilti one you just twist that there. Your sort of push it in and twist it, and then that’ll open it so you can put the jaw in. Then you just put your jaw in, and then just push it in. Now with this gun, this is a little bit different. If you, when you press in with this one you press and hold it until you finish the press. If it jammed and you had to reset it, it has a little lever on the side here where you can just go like that, push it down, and you can reset it.
Personally I like that one because you just press it, and it does the press. But I can see the advantage of this one, because if you start to press it and you think, “It’s not quite on”, or you wanted to double check it, you could stop it, you could release it, and you could take it back off and just check your fitting. You know, whichever you prefer really.
Some people say that this looks like DIY, but it’s far from DIY. The guns are around 2000 pound or so. You wouldn’t be getting a DIY person doing this. Now the fittings, I’ll just show you the fittings. The fittings, they have an O ring in there. Don’t know if you can see it easily. What you do it, you put your pipe in and follow the instructions for the manufacturers. Most manufacturers will tell you, they’ll have a gauge that you put on there, and you mark it with a pen so that you know the fitting is in correctly. We’ve got a fitting in, and then we get this press gun. Then with that we just press and hold. That’s it. That’s pressed.
You can see on there how it’s pressed, with the lines in it. Then if you look there we can see that it’s got a black O ring. If you were going to use these for gas, then you’d make sure that had a yellow O ring in there.
Now for me, the benefits of press, one is the risk of fire in a property. But the main reason for me is, when we do a fitting like that, if we soldered that we would have loads of flux in there, or we would have some flux in there. We’d get that into the water. If we’re doing a central heating system, we’d end up with all that flux in the heating system, and then we’ve got to spend quite a lot of time flushing that flux out of the system. Now with these fittings, there’s no flux, so it’s much easier.
If you have a look at the fitting there, we can see it’s put lines in it. You can see it’s all pressed on. I think pressing’s really good. The downsides, what I would say is the cost of it. The fittings are quite expensive, and obviously the guns are expensive. That’s the main downside. The other downside is, sometimes you’ll struggle to get in with the guns. As you can see, that’s quite big. In some areas you can struggle to get in with your press gun, so you might decide that you’d like to solder. But all in all, in my opinion, the press guns are much better than the soldering.
First look of the Hilti. It’s called the Hilti NPR19-A.
