3 Types of Knockout Sets Electricians Use - Electrician Tool Review

what's going on everyone i am dustin stelzer with electrician you uh today we're going to talk about some different ways that electricians might have to cut into metal so if we have conduit that we're running in and we need we have a metal box and we need to get our conduit attached to this metal box how do we do that there's a couple of different ways so recently milwaukee reached out to me and they've got this program called milwaukee grid uh it's basically for apprentices it's kind of like a a pool of resources specifically for apprentices they've got a whole bunch of different like videos and stuff from different trades so if you're brand new to an apprenticeship they wanted a place to kind of like help apprentices transition into their apprenticeship so they do a lot of like giveaways promotions there's videos on how to use tools there's stuff like this where i blabber at you about uh specific topics so today's topic we're going to be talking about knockout sets and how we um how we address the issue of knocking out metal using tools out in the field all right so say that we are at some commercial building somewhere and uh we have a metal box and we've got a couple of different sizes of conduit that we have to run into this large junction box there are some junction boxes that you can buy that actually have knockouts on them and all you got to do is just hit the little circle and the disc pops out and you can just put conduit in but most of the time if you're talking about large junction boxes large conduit that's not going to be the case you're going to actually have to tap your own holes in them so how do you do that there's a couple of different ways that are very messy and really crappy but then there's just kind of like the tried and true ways that we actually use out in the field you could use a carbide hole saw bit the problem is you're probably going to burn through those break pilot bits burn through drills there's all kinds of reasons why you wouldn't use actual carbide hole saws for something like this so what we do is we have a thing called a knockout set a knockout set is essentially a cutting die and a little metal cup that fit into each other and when you either hand crank or squeeze a pump or pull a trigger the die goes into the cup and it actually cuts out a round hole and then you release it pull it out and you just keep going down the line so today we're going to talk about the three different kinds of knockout sets that there are out of the market and show how they work and what the differences are between them [Music] this is just using a hand uh knockout set so hand knockout sets going to come with a handle it's going to come with a bolt and it's going to come with a bunch of different sizes this goes from half inch up to two inch so it's kind of an electrician sized knockout set so the idea here is say we're going to do an inch and a half this knockout the cutting edge goes on one side of the metal and the cup goes on the other side and they pinch together to cut through the material so all of the knockouts that's we're talking about that's the whole idea the bolt goes in oops goes the other way sorry uh the bolt will go through this side and then this will go on the other side and by twisting this bolt we actually kind of ratchet the cutting edge inward and that's how it cuts material so the first one we're gonna do is just to show how much of a pain in the butt it is for a hand knockout set granted this is what i've done the majority of my career i haven't had any like fancy stuff but there are new things that are being developed and we will get into that here in a second all right so one thing to discuss is you have to get a hole a preliminary hole in the material first that way you can put this bolt through so we have to get a half inch hole in the material for us to do any of these so there's a couple of different ways that you can do that typically this is what a stepped bit is for we call this a unibit or a stepped bit but what this does [Applause] this will drill a hole and continue drilling a hole and get bigger and bigger and bigger now you'll notice using these i'm just going to make a hole up here it can take a while to get through [Music] so after continued use of these they actually are really terrible these are expensive but if you don't take care of the tip and if you drill at high speed like i was just doing you're gonna end up burning these things up so what a lot of people will do is they will start a pilot hole first and they'll get a pilot hole drilled through then all they have to do [Music] is push through and they this thing will just keep chewing a hole so it's got certain kind of steps on it um you know like this would be for our half-inch conduit three-inch conduit and one-inch conduit but that's the idea of the stepped bit the benefit or the crappy thing about a step bit is these little shards of metal are like molten hot so when you're doing this above your head you end up raining down shards of hot metal on yourself so it's actually a very bad solution there's another kind of unibit and unfortunately i just don't have mine um but that goes on an impact driver and it looks a little bit different but it snaps in here and due to the nature of this being an impact you don't have to go at high speeds and hold it and like send molten hot metal everywhere you can actually go really slow and it does the same the same kind of thing so the other option that i think is a very good option is getting a set of carbide knockouts so these this is carbide meaning it's really really stout but it already has a pilot bit on it that helps start drill the hole and then it cuts out a disc rather than trying to clear material out and shooting all that material outward to get rid of it it just cuts a disc so watch this so it keeps most of the material right here now you did see around the edges it does shoot out i'm not gonna lie to you either one of these you're still gonna be shooting out really hot shards of metal so it's a good idea to not be doing this like with short sleeves on especially when you're working above when you're working when you're above the material it's not as bad but when you're below the material and it's falling on top of you you're going to have little burn marks all over your skin so be really careful about that but i just like using these carbide things because it's just less there's a lot less metal that comes off on you plus it just cuts really quickly because it's carbide so let's start cutting one of these the first thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to do an inch and a half so i know let me grab my my stuff here [Music] so i know i've got to get an inch and a half male adapter through here so what i need to do is find the exact center of that and normally you kind of just have to eyeball it a lot of people will do this you know if you don't have a whole bunch of these to line up and you're trying to make them really pretty and all in a line you don't really have to worry about measuring them but a lot of times what i'll do is i'll at least just get that drawn out and then i'll figure out where the halfway point is so i know that from there to there is two inches it's an inch and a half hole but it's a two inch hole that it's going to dig for this inch and a half male adapter to go in that'll make sense here in a minute but if you go right here that's the center then do the same thing a lot of people might ask like why are you not going from the end of the tape measure it's because the tape measure actually moves so i always start at a line that's how i take measurements anyway so now i have the dead exact center of this hole which will become important and the other thing that i do too is since this bolt is um really small i mean it's about a half inch maybe a little bit more than a half inch this is a 7 8 bit so i wanted i don't want to drill like a huge hole you know so like i don't want to have a huge huge hole where this thing starts moving around a lot otherwise i'll lose accuracy on my hole so what i'm going to do is just pop this out and then we've got our inch and a half it says inch and a half conduit it's not inch and a half on your hole it's just this is for inch and a half conduit on the other side oops dummy the other side make sure that there's no slack now take this thing and it ratchets notice there's an on direction and an off just like any other socket set there's one direction where it releases and clicks and one where it actually draws and drives while you're pulling leverage on it so i'm gonna go with the on facing me and when i do that it's going to start cutting through the surface so once you try to hold this box it's going to start sliding around on you if you're pulling on a lateral plank you don't want that you want to put it on a longitudinal point and usually i will kneel down on it and i'll start cranking like this but by putting all of your weight on it you're controlling this thing from sliding around and it helps give you a little bit more leverage when you're pushing downward some people like to try to pull that's okay too but it ends up just straining your wrist you don't have as much strength so i find that pushing going all the way back [Music] it starts to get hard after a while especially especially if your dies are not sharp um you'll know all right now just put that in there so that is the manual method with the hand knockout set [Music] next thing we're going to talk about is the hydraulic knockout set now hydraulic knockout set has been the big savior for many years for not having to do hand knockouts especially if you're doing like two and a half three inch four inch stuff like that having a hydraulic set is great you can see that it's just the same thing essentially you still have to knock out a hole in the center you still have to line everything up you put a die in you put the cup in but you're hand pumping this hydraulic pump these things are great they're super durable i mean they last many many many years as long as you keep up with the hydraulic fluid in them the way that the tool releases and catches is by this little knob on the side and once you tighten this knob or loosen this knob it releases the dye from the cup or it allows the dye and the cup to be tightened together but the whole thing works off hydraulic pressure so these things are really great they're very expensive but they're strong tools and they'll last you a really long time [Music] the last method that we're going to talk about is using this force logic m18 knockout set it's battery operated it's on the m18 system this is a smaller battery than i normally use usually i would use like a 5.0 or something like that but this is really neat because you don't have to do any of the work everything is done for you i also like just they've got extra grip on all of the uh the edges of their dies and the cups have lines on them and that helps out tremendously if you've got a line that you know on here that you've measured out these lines on the side they're really easy to to see the little red line so you just line up the red line on that side line it up on that side and you know that you're in the center so that's just really like a really cool idea or you can mark off to the side you know if you're trying to find center you need to get a straight edge and figure out where center is just having the lines there is like super super helpful so i'm gonna do the same thing just cut the middle out and this we're going to be doing a two inch again this is two inch conduit that's not saying that this is two inches so we just pop this on there make sure that all of our lines are lined up this is really handy if you over drill your holes a lot of people will drill you know too big of a hole and then this thing moves around a lot so you can't really tell if you're on the line but the fact that these actually have these red lines on it means that you're guaranteed to hit every time so we just pull the trigger um you got to make sure that it's down this is what releases it so i'm just going to hit the trigger watch this nothing [Music] done then you hit this little button releases it and you're ready for the next one [Music] now the other cool thing about this tool is that there's a different way that you can set it up so instead of having this thing on there you can have this on here and it allows for a little ball to go in there which is what this is so if i wanted to do that same cut instead of having to have the tool on there i can just handle this independently um and then it comes with this special little uh adapter this locks in place and it lets you slide over that ball and pull the trigger same thing boom so just a different different method but then that allows you to slide this ball out and just keep going down the line if you prefer to be able to do that rather than having it attached to the tool this whole time with this pin on it it's just different methods of doing it different ways that you can use the tool so now that we just got our two inch holes knocked out put our connector in and voila so um sometimes you'll see people do multiple rows and what you want to try to do is get everything in a straight line and make it really pretty obviously i'm just using this as a as a fun thing the other really cool thing that i think is worth talking about is that there are bigger dies this is a two and a half three inch three and a half and a four inch so four inch trying to hand crank one of these four inches is really really really extremely difficult damn near impossible sometimes all right so you notice there's a bigger hole on these two than there is on these uh these other ones so we have to get this in the tool and then just like we did before it's gonna go on like that so let's get a hole set up this one you got to drill a little bit bigger hole so i can't just use this regular half inch i got to step up a size all right so that's my three-quarter so anytime you're using a carbid bit you don't want to heat the bit up too much i'm drilling a little faster than i normally would just because it's hot and i'm trying you want to take care of your carbide bits and drill slow or use some kind of cutting oil or something to decrease the temperature all right so this is a four inch hole that is a beast let's see how he works look at that cutting through like nothing no resistance whatsoever done this thing is my favorite tool like bar none this is my favorite all right thank you guys so much for uh watching i hope that that helped a few of you guys out if you're interested at all in learning more about the milwaukee grid program there's a link in the description below um again it's just like a whole bunch of different resources like when i was an apprentice just anything that i could do to find extra videos about stuff about how to use tools and how electricity works and all of that stuff i found it really useful so click the link in the description below go visit the milwaukee grid program and uh that's pretty much it join the channel uh we get all kinds of like membership benefits if you join if you're a thousand vote member you actually get to text with me if you have any questions about how electricity works uh 480 volt membership you get your name up on the screen like all of these cool guys and gals um sorry but make sure that you uh hit the uh the little bell lets you know every time i've got a video coming out like this video please subscribe if you love the channel and i will see you in the next one [Music] this can't music and video [Music]

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 154,962

Keywords: electrician, electrical, dustin stelzer, electrician vlog, construction, commercial, residential, electrical vlog, electrical courses, electrician courses, electrical class, electrician class, electrician school, milwaukee, electrician tools, electrician tools 2020, electrician tools review, electrical tools, tools for electricians, power tools, electrician show, journeyman, tool review, new tools, electric tools, best tools, electricians, milwaukee tools 2021, milwaukee tools

Id: xwNvNLiJPLc

Length: 21min 53sec (1313 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021