Battery Drills: I now have 4 bad ones.

re: This morning I discovered I now have 4 non-functional cordless drills and

re: The last cordless drill set, from HF, lasted less than 3 years

I guess that implies that the other's lasted at least that long, which means you've held onto 1 dead drill for 12 years, another for 9 and a third for 6, assuming sequential purchases.

Seems like a waste of space.

That's called designed and planned obsolescence. They force you to throw the whole thing away and buy another one. We need more s*it in our garbage dumps.

for $30, you can buy a cheap 110vac drill.

Look around on the internet. I found aftermarket batteries for my Makitas for about $30 with higher AH ratings than the original.

Are they plugged into the wall recptacle?

Get the packs rebuilt, or get a new drill, Ridgid has lifetime warranty on even batteries. But you could be over discharging, overcharging and knowing HF they were not Sanyo or panasonic cells which are used in good equipment. If used 3 years alot you may just have gotten their expected life out of them. Think of these new LiIon drills that dont last as many years as Nicad and will cost 80-120 for a new pack, yes they make their most money on new packs.

I have a cordless drill that batteries kept dieing on so I converted it to plug into a car cigarette lighter. I went down to the local battery place that sells 12 volt DC batteries for computer backup power supplies and bought one for $22.00 and use a car battery trickle charger to charge it. It holds a charge for a long time.

When the drill needs extra power for a job I use a power converter to convert 120 volt AC to 18 volt DC and attach it to the battery I bought and together they give me all the sustained power needed for almost any job.

I also converted a video camera to use a standard 12 volt car adapter to convert to 9 volts and using that battery I never have to worry about not having enough power.

Rigging this up isn't as much trouble as it might sound.

Murdock

Rig the battery with a plugin like a car cigarette lighter.

PRIMECELL rebuilds your packs with better than original batteries, excellent service, reasonable price

I have a B&D 12 volt cordless that I obtained back in 1993, I just replaced the battery packs last month. The old packs will still hold a bit of a charge.

TDD

I personally never run into this kinda stuff in my "fantasy wishful thinking land", but...

Stop dreaming and get out the old soldering iron and just rebuild the packs with some new nicads like these:

actually soldering to a ni cad is a bad idea, the heat can damage the cells long term life.

primecell spot welds the cells together, heat is so fast it cant damage cells.

cheap cordless tools cheap out on batteries, with low capacity cells.

Phil Again wrote in news:u5CdnRSHqrVSOrzUnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

Which implies it lasted at least 2 years...from HF. Was this a comment of dissatisfaction? What did you pay for it if I might ask and you recall?

I have my 18v Ridgid for "real" cordless drilling.

I have a cheapo B&D I use daily for all the misc light/med stuff. When it dies I'll toss it and get another, just like I tossed the prior cheapo Ryobi. That's what and all I expect of them. Maybe I'll try one of those econo HF's that are dirt cheap and can probably use an additional 15% off

Early in your post you said: "I can always run a cord to use a 120V plug in drill"

And then you followed up with "Since I could not drag a cord and 120v drill out in that rain..."

I guess "always" was a bit overstated, wasn't it?

Same with ICs - that's why there are heat sinks.

Just a suggestion re a GFI equipped extension cord. We had one older style GFI duplex outlet that is capable only of protecting anything plugged into it. It is not, like more modern ones, capable of protecting other 'downstream' outlets. Fixing up an extension cable of reasonably heavy gauge, we placed that GFI on the end of it. So we now have a GFI equipped extension cord/cable which can be plugged into any outlet; inside the house for example and run out through a window etc. for safe use outside.

We have several (of different brands) cordless drills etc. with dud batteries and are considering some sort of approx. 12 volt power supplies. Each probably capable of supplying say 5 to 10 amps. (120 watts?) into which we could plug these presently useless tools.

Such a PS would also provide isolation from AC mains for safety. Since they would be less portable than our working cordless drills would mainly be used at work benches. So we could have drills plugged in 'ready to go' at each location.

One possible source of transformers for suitable power supplies could be transformers from scrapped microwave ovens, of which we have several, providing pre-wound 115 volt primaries and metal transformer cores. Read an article not to long ago describing removing the fine gauge several thousand volt microwave secondaries and winding on heavier gauge low voltage ones.

Another possibility is to use m.wave oven the transformers backwards; however this may be impossible because in some cases one end of the higher voltage winding is grounded to the transformer frame.

I buy individual batteries and replace the bad ones in the power pack. Been doing that for about 10 years.

Each of the batteries are 1.2 volts and the replacements are about twice as powerful as the originals (in the cheap drills), so your charge lasts a long time and your drills are more powerful than when new.

One time, I turned a cordless screw driver into a corded model. For a guy who does factory work. The power supply plug came from

It sure is a good idea. I bought 12 volt drills from HF so I could power them off a car battery after the nicads went dead.