I rebuilt my old Milwaukee a couple years ago. I bought generic ones on Ebay, they've worked fine. May not be much use, because I can't tell you a particular vendor and it's only a sample size of one.
First, don't even think about soldering wires DIRECTLY onto cells. Don't even think about getting cells that aren't rated for high current. Make sure you're sitting down when you price high current cells. Maybe even put a towel in your mouth so you won't bite your tongue during the seizure.
Go to Lowes. (check stock online as they are getting scarce) They sell a battery pack for the Kobalt tools for $10
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Contains six 18650 name brand high current tool cells. That's as cheap as it gets for HIGH CURRENT cells.
If you cut the tabs apart with a Dremel cutting wheel, there's enough tab left so you can safely solder them together IF YOU PUT A WET CLOTH ON THE CELL END AND DO IT VERY QUICKLY SO YOU DON'T TRANSFER HEAT TO THE CELL.
A battery tab spot welder is a much better choice.
There's some protection circuitry in the battery pack. You may or may not be able to rebuild them. When you disconnect the cells, the chip might forget its settings and refuse to restart, for your protection. I don't have any Kobalt tools to test it, but I disconnected the cells inside the Kobalt battery and reconnected. The battery test lights no longer worked. Don't know if they would run a drill.
I took a quick look at rebuilding a dead Ryobi pack. Didn't look like it was gonna restart...but I didn't try very hard.
I've had that problem with laptop battery packs. I only had one restart because it had a PIC processor and I could figger out how to reset it. All the rest just stayed dead. Some people claimed that, if the battery was only weak, but still functional, you could wire up a power supply to each cell connection to keep it alive while you changed the cells.
YMMV It would be really disappointing to buy a bunch of expensive cells and not be able to use them.
I'd add that my comments about successfully rebuilding that old Milwaukee was with an old battery pack that had no electronics in it, it was just a dumb battery pack. I managed to solder to the tabs on the new batteries with no problems.
It might help if you give us the sites you've searched so no one is suckered into doing searching and researching for you. After all, isn't that the reason for your post in the first place? You can't be bothered or don't have a clue what you should be looking for.
That's ok, you'll convince others here to spoon-feed you.
Joan, I suspect you are suffering with a reading comprehension problem. I specifically asked for "first hand experience". I am quite capable of using search engines and do not need anyone to search on my behalf.
No sure why you are behaving so aggressively towards me, but, you can take your attitude and shove it up your ass.
It is interesting to note that you contributed absolutely nothing to the subject matter of the thread.
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