After doing a set-up job at the Sugar Loaf Crafts Festival a few days ago, I happily biked myself up York Road to buy a new tool. A Black & Decker tool, to be exact, an RTX 3-speed rotary tool to be exact. I was drawn to the RTX originally as a less-expensive alternative to comparable Dremel tools. Reviews on the internet were mostly very positive, and several reviewers stated that the B&D rotary tool was interchangeable with Dremel bits. People were saying they bought the RTX and then picked up one of the multi-cases of assorted Dremel bits, totalling to about the price for just the Dremel tool by itself with only a couple extra bits.
Convinced by that, I’d looked at a couple neighborhood tool stores to price them out. Nobody sold the RTX locally, so I figured I’d look out at the big chain stores while I was in the county. Target sells Black & Decker brand, but was out of the RTX. Walmart was selling it for $27.99. I bought it and a Dremel 105 Engraving bit to work with on my newest give-away for the Hampden Chess Club, an engraved piece as a gift to any passerby who ends up sitting and playing a game with me. I noticed, while I was still performing my due diligence as a consumer, that the Dremel bit I’d bought was 3/32” wide. Made a thorough scan of the RTX packaging, read the tech specs section several times, but didn’t see anything that would indicate the collet (the receiving piece the bit slides into before getting screwed down with the threaded collet nut) was any other size. Confident in my internet reviews, I assumed everything would be fine.
But, of course, it wasn’t. Things of this nature never work out quite so simply. The collet turned out to be 1/8. Not way off, but enough that the bits simply wouldn’t work. Figuring I would just get take the $4.99 hit and buy a differently-widthed Dremel bit, I hopped online to find the right model number, but couldn’t find what I was looking for. I read around a little bit about replacement collets for the RTX and found a guy saying they were extremely hard to come by.
Ended up at the ACE Hardware in Waverly on my way out to Beth’s DIY Workshop on Harford Road, and found that for $9.99 I could buy a pack of Dremel collets of different widths. Who knew if they would fit into the RTX now though, I had my doubts. Bought em anyway, took em home and they fit fine, accepting the 105 Engraving bit just right.
All told, I’m happy with the performance of the RTX as a tool. Never actually worked with a comparable Dremel before, but the RTX has a nice feel and weight to it. Engraving onto small curved pieces of plastic is a bit more difficult than I thought it would be. But I didn’t need the lettering to be perfect. Wanted it to have that hand-made look. That said though, I’m not happy that I had to spend an extra ten bucks at the hardware store to take advantage of the alleged inter-operability of the Black & Decker rotary tool with the Dremel equivalents. At the very least, I think Black & Deck could humor its customers and include at least a 3/32” collet and a 1/8” collet which seem to be the most common sizes. One more collet, how much would that cut into corporate profit, versus the customer satisfaction of knowing that you haven’t been tricked into buying something more complicated and expensive than it seemed at first.
If I had it to do over again, I would probably recommend just going for the Dremel tool in the first place if you’re looking for a small electric rotary tool option – if only for the reason that they seem to control the actual products available in the physical market-place, at least in the stores I sampled around Baltimore.
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