The augers work the drill motor hard, and brushless motors won’t get damaged by overheating as easily Brushless motor: Although you can often get by with an older brushed-motor drill, you want to go brushless.Lithium batteries: These will last much longer and hold a charge better in the cold than older-style cordless tool batteries.These drills-which have pretty much become the standard-have plenty of power to get the job done, but it helps to have a few things: Most of these 6- and 8-inch augers can be used perfectly well with your average modern 18-or-20-volt cordless drill. What you already have might be perfect, but you want to make sure. Before you run out and buy a drill-auger, there’s a couple things to note about what it takes to run them. Many of us already have a cordless drill or could certainly find one useful if we don’t. The drill-powered auger is a brilliant example of ingenuity and maximized utility. I think that for most ice-anglers, this style of power auger makes everything else obsolete. Even with an 8-inch extension and drill, it’s much lighter than a gas or full-size electric auger, and easier to tote around if you’re dragging or carrying everything on your back. On one trip, I drilled 18 or 19 holes through 40 inches of ice on a single battery. There is some nuance involved in using it, but it’s an incredibly accessible and effective tool. I continued to use the Pistol Bit throughout the winter, both for fishing with my kids and exploring other waters. For depth prospecting or targeting smaller fish, the size and weight of drill-powered augers is appealing.
#Ice auger for cordless drill plus
Giddy, I quickly punched the other holes we needed, plus a couple extra for fun. I was shocked at how quickly it bored through the two feet of ice. After pulling onto the lake, I set up the popup tent, got the heater going, and slid the bit into the chuck of my 20-volt DeWalt drill. I was on my way to the local lake with my kids to fish stocked trout, and my curiosity could wait no longer. I’d finally bought a gas-powered 10-inch Eskimo auger for fishing big pike and lake trout, and it worked plenty well for stocked lakes with my kids too.Įventually, in a moment of impulsive weakness, I pulled a drill-powered auger off the stack at a local sporting goods store-an Eskimo 6-inch Pistol Bit. I was used to a gas powerhead, and seriously side-eyed the prospect of trying to use a cordless drill to power an auger. I wasn’t sure about how well these lightweight augers would really work, especially in thick ice. These augers are basically just lightweight shafts with cutting blades and nylon flights that utilize the power from a cordless drill-that you probably already have in your garage or tool kit. I’d heard about augers like the K-Drill, Nordic Legend, and others, but it sounded like a gimmick to me. The Drill-Powered Auger Isn’t a GimmickĮlectric-powered ice augers have become more prevalent in recent years, particularly the cordless-drill type. By mid-December, ice can be two or three feet thick, and four or five feet thick in the spring. In fact, I didn’t really do a whole lot of ice fishing on my own before buying one. Beyond the first week of November here in interior Alaska, the lakes already have drivable ice, and a motor-powered auger is a serious benefit. The classic hand-powered auger works, sure, but if you’re boring through more than six inches of ice, they’re awful. Expensive and useless for any purpose other than ice fishing, a motor-powered ice auger can be an investment that many would-be or casual ice-anglers just don’t want to make. It would be two decades before I saw a drill-powered auger.įor me, the limiting factor in ice fishing was always equipment-an auger in particular. I was green with envy as I watched it motor through the ice while furiously spinning the awkward hand auger I’d been handed to use. I remember pulling a few brook trout through the ice, and that our crew had a single gas-powered auger among us. We were fishing a high-mountain lake in Colorado-with a group of several other dads and their boys-and if it weren’t for being a fishing-obsessed kid, it would have been pretty lackluster. I was sitting on a five-gallon bucket, trying to tolerate the cold wind in snow pants, a Starter brand pullover coat that every kid had in the 1990s, and one of those three-hole ski masks that never seemed to fit quite right. I don’t have a lot of memories of ice fishing as a kid, but that was one of them. “Sit with your back to the wind ,” My dad would say.
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