Things that make you go... WHAT!!!

I bought (2) Dewlat DC730KA  14V compact drills today for a work thing.  The interesting thing is as I opened the two boxes I realized I had two different series of chargers and batteries.

If you look at the chargers below, you will see one of them is a up ro 18V charger (DW9116) and one only does up to 14V (DW9118).  Not a big deal as these are 14V batteries, but I did notice the 18V charger charged (3) batteries in the time it took the 14V unit to charge one battery.  Also the 18V unit has the "tune-up" mode and the other unit does not.

Then I noticed the batteries are not the same.  If you will look in the below picture you will see one battery has a third connection in the plug for a TCO and the other one does not.

Then I went back and noticed the 18V charger has a TCO connection and the 14V charger does not.

Now of course your saying, well the kits must not be the same.  Well the only thing I can find on the outside of the case, packing, etc that shows a difference is the serial number and date.  Other than that they are exactly the same.  So what happened?  Where did we decide we would change things, and why is it that the poor un-suspecting consumer has to deal with it?

I will be using them pretty heavily on a job next week.  After that I will post a review of what I think of the drill.  I'll tell you now the reason I bought this one was because I needed a fairly light drill / screwdriver and it had to run off nicad batteries because my gig is out of town and I have to ship them.  Dont get me started on the rules about shipping Lithium Ion batteries.

DD