Milwaukee® M18 FUEL™ Free Standing Drain Cleaner

Welcome Everyone, my name Is Henk Loggen and
I’m Product manager at Milwaukee tool. Today I am going to take you through the M18
Fuel Free Standing Drain Cleaner, also known as the Switch pack sectional drum machine. The M18 Fuel Free Standing Drain cleaner is
the worlds first drum machine that is powered by an 18-volt battery. It is also is the first hybrid system between
a sectional sewer machine and a drum machine. This allows the user to transport their drive
unit separate from their cable drums making it the easiest machine to swap between cable sizes for different size drains and different types of clogs.

Now let’s walk through this tool and its
features step by step. First, The Hybrid system. Here we have here 3 components, to show you
exactly how this hybrid system works. First, we start with the Drive Unit. Now the drive unit, this is where the Fuel
system is built in to, with the battery pack here on the side. On the top we have 3 modes that indicate which
direction the cable spins. Left, neutral or right. This is also the part where the foot pedal
is attached to. As standard with drum machines, we have a
foot pedal, what is unique about this foot pedal is that it is an electronic foot pedal
and not an air pedal. The benefit of having an electronic foot pedal
is that the drum reacts quicker to stop within 2 seconds. This gives you as the user more control when
you want that drum to stop as quickly as possible.

Now why is it that we have an electronic foot
pedal where most of the other drum machines you find out there have air pedals? This is simply due to our FUEL system. Our batteries and tools are fully protected,
this eliminates the danger of electrocution, which you could have with a corded Drum Machine. Then we have here 2 separate drums. Within these drums we have 15m of 10, 13 or
16mm spirals. How this works is very simple. On the drums we have slide connection points,
which fit perfectly in the drive unit. We simply lift the drum up, place the slide
connection points directly above where they fit in the drive unit, push the drum down,
connect the clips on the side and we are ready to go.

Now your next question might be, why do I
have 2 drums? This is where the hybrid system goes a little
bit further. As said before, within every drum there is
15m of cable. When these 15m of cable are fed into a drain,
a coupling will come out of the drum. We can then simply take our pin key, which
we also use to swap out our attachment heads, disconnect the empty drum. Remove the empty drum from our drive unit,
replace this with a drum that has again 15m of cable in it, connect the 15m of cable that
is already in the drain to the 15m in the new drum and we can go up to 30m down the
line.

This means that we could connect our cables
as far as we want, however, Milwaukee tool recommends users not to go further than 30m
with this tool. As we can see, a very simple way of using
1 drive unit, with multiple drums filled with different cables. Now, we go a little bit further into some
of the features of this system. The Drums: as we can see, we have fully enclosed,
“double” drums. Every single drum that contains cable is fully
covered by an outer drum. We have done this to eliminate free spinning
parts and to contain mess better then ever before with these small drum machines. When you want to clean out your drum, you
can simply open up the top of the drum and simply take a hose and hose it out.

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When you put it on its side, the water nicely
gets directed out of the drum and we are ready to go to the next job. The next feature is the Automatic Feeding
and Retract. This is a feature that we are launching additionally
to this tool in 2020. That means that if you have purchased your
M18 Free Standing Drain Cleaner already or going to, you can easily transform your tool
into one that has an automatic feed and retract possibility. How this works, I’m going to show you now. At the front of the tool the have a black
cap that we can remove. We take a TX 25 screwdriver or drill driver
with a screw bit and unscrew the front cap. We remove this and replace this with the Auto
Feed base plate that is standard delivered with every single Auto Feed mechanism. We screw the base plate on and now we are
ready to lock on the Auto Feed Mechanism. Very simple as you can see, we tilt the auto
feed mechanism until the reception patterns matches, we push, and turn clockwise and the
mechanism clicks on to the tool. Now we can see how easily the mechanism goes
on, this also means we can very easily take it off and we make it very easy for users
to swap the autofeed system between different drums with different cable sizes.

The Auto Feed can be used on all available
cables for this tool, which are 8mm, 10mm, 13mm, these are all inner core tight wind
spirals for tough clogs and also it works with the 16mm spiral which is an open wind
and more flexible for those softer clogs. We go into a bit more into detail on the Auto
Feed mechanism. To engage the Auto Feed, we simply push down
on the ratcheting lever. Automatically adjusting to different cable
sizes, we push down on the lever until it is tightened well enough. We have the handle on the side to choose if
we want to feed or retract. We simply move the handle to the left to feed
the cable and we push it to the right to retract. In neutral the cable is not feed and it will
only to spin to work the clog. The Auto Feed mechanism is very speed sensitive,
so the more we push the lever to the left, the faster the feed of the cable will be,
the same goes to the right for retracting the cable. To release the bearings that are engaged for
feeding the cable, we simply press down on the red button on the front, immediately releasing
the bearings and stopping the feeding and retracting of the cable, while maintaining
the spinning of the drum.

This is especially helpful when we reach a
clog and the cable start to bind up. Additionally to the Auto Feed Mechanism, we
have a front guide hose, sold separately from the Auto Feed Mechanism. The front guide hose can be connected to the
front of the Auto feed to protect your surroundings from that dirty spinning cable and for better
mess containment. We take the hose, place it over the reception
point of the Auto feed, fasten it and we are ready to go. Once we have fed the cable through the guide
hose, we can select our Attachment head, connect to our cable and start unclogging those drains
from 32mm up to 110mm. Within our accessory line up we have 8 different
attachment heads. First are the small and medium augers. Second are the small and medium drop heads. Third the small and medium spade bits and
fourth small and medium C-Cutters. They all have the same reception, they fit
on all sizes of our coupling end cables. This tool is available in 4 versions. First version is the base unit, 1 drum with
10mm x 15m cable, 1 attachment head kit, with all medium size heads, with batteries and
charges sold separately.

The second version we have is 1x drive unit,
2x drum with 13mm x 15m cable, 1x attachment head kit with all medium size heads, batteries
and chargers sold separately. The third version is a drive unit, 2 drums,
16mm x 15m cable, 1 attachment head kit with all medium size heads, batteries and chargers
sold separately. The forth is 1 drive unit, 2 drums with 16mm
x 15m cable, 1x attachment head kit with all medium size heads, 2x 18V, 5.0Ah with fast
charger included. Additionally all cables and attachment heads
and spare drums are sold separately. When it comes to The Auto feed Mechanism this
is sold in 1 model, this includes the Auto Feed mechanism and 1 base plate. The base plate and front guide hose are sold
separately. The Milwaukee M18 Free Standing Drain Cleaner,
is the perfect tool to service domestic drains from 32mm up to 110mm. For more information go to our website. Thank you for watching and enjoy using your
M18 Free Standing Drain Cleaner..

As found on YouTube

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