About ToolSpecs

Why this exists

This started from liking power tools and getting steadily more frustrated with one specific thing: working out which battery actually goes with which tool. Not across brands, where the answer is obviously no — within a single brand, on a single platform, where everything physically fits and the answer is still not simple.

Because “fits” and “runs it properly” are different questions, and the marketing only ever answers the first one. A pack can slide onto a tool, latch, power it up, and still be the wrong pack — it sags under sustained load, runs hot, cuts out on a demanding cut, or empties so fast it is useless for the job you bought the tool for. The physical fit told you nothing about any of that.

That gap is not a conspiracy, it is just poorly presented. Milwaukee publishes most of what you need: a power level for each pack, and for some tools an explicit batteries required count of two rather than one. What they do not publish is any single place where you can line all of it up against the tool in your hand. So the answer exists, scattered across hundreds of product pages, and almost nobody has time to assemble it while standing in an aisle.

This site is that assembly. It is why answers here have four states rather than two — works, works with conditions, does not work, and no evidence either way — and why a condition gets stated outright instead of being rounded up to “compatible”. Rounding up is the thing that cost us the afternoon in the first place.

Who compiles it

ToolSpecs is compiled by a longtime tool user and enthusiast with decades of hands-on experience. We do not claim to have used every tool listed here. Most of what you will find is manufacturer specification data, cited to its source and curated with genuine interest. Where we have first-hand experience with a tool, we say so on that tool’s page, under a visible Hands-on note heading.

We publish under an organisation byline rather than a personal one. That is a privacy choice, and we would rather disclose it than dress it up.

What we are not

We are not Milwaukee, not affiliated with Milwaukee, and not a testing lab. We do not run controlled runtime tests, and nothing here should be read as one. Milwaukee, M18, REDLITHIUM, FUEL and FORGE are their trademarks.

How this is paid for

Nothing on this site is monetised today — no adverts, no sponsored placements, no affiliate links. We expect to add retailer links that earn a commission, and the policy for that is published in advance on our affiliate disclosure page, including the part that matters: compatibility answers are decided by cited sources, never by who pays us.

Why an evidence trail

Getting a compatibility answer wrong costs somebody real money, or a damaged tool. So every published claim carries a link to the page it came from and the date we read it, and anything we cannot source is shown as unknown rather than filled in with a confident guess.