Adapter to fit LiIon batteries to Makita 18V NiCd power tools?

Aliexpress is the place:

Although you'd probably find modern tools are night and day better than old ones. So I wouldn't invest too much going down this route.

Theo

I use Wickes 18V 2.0Ah battery Li-ion 1ForAll® Battery in old Makita cordless tools with an adapter sold on ebay the low battery cutoff is in the battery cost £24

Yup.

I have a 18V combi and impact driver that were originally supplied with MiMh batteries (same form factor as their older NiCd ones). I was nearing the end of life on the second set of NiMh batts I had bought, and decided it was time to migrate to LXT for new tools.

I thought it worth trying the old tools on the adaptors. I got a couple of different ones. It seems that one is a very much better design than the other. That is very similar to:

Generally they have worked well. They add a little bit of height to the tool, but don't really change the balance.

Makita LXT batteries do have a battery management facility built into the battery, but also can take advantage of smarts in the tools. Hence it would be wise to not run them completely flat in the tool. (LXT batteries have charge indicators on the them anyway, so you can check)

(and don't plug a LXT battery with an adaptor on it into the old NiCd/NiMh charger!)

I rebuilt one of my three Makita Nicad batteries, with Ni-Mh ones - several years ago. The drop in charger, claimed to be able to charge either type, reading the label on the charger. It was a success, so I intended to do the remaining two, but never got around to it, I just bought a new Parkside kit. The Ni-Mh still works just fine.

Those Makita NiCd/Mh chargers are quite versatile - will cope with either chemistry and anything from 7 to 18V.

I found some of my very old battery tools had a connector that "borrowed" that used by Makita in the Nickel era, and hence could be charged on the Mak charger. Much faster and easier on the supplied slow charger.

I wasn't aware of that.

This thread has prompted me to look at rebuilding another of my two near dead, Makita battery packs. I compared the cost of buyig the Ni-Mh cells, to rebuilt one - versus just buying a ready-made, compatible 4aH pack. Rebuilding one, is just not worthwhile.

Although that is possibly not comparing like for like. Chances are if you rebuilt it yourself, you would use decent branded cells, compared to the "no name" cells of dubious quality that you will find in many "compatible" packs.

Having said that, a battery adaptor and a LXT pack might be a better way forward if you were planning to add any modern Mak 18V tools.

It will also be interesting to see what happens with new startup Ceenr / PD Nation - they have produced a fully interchangeable battery platform when you buy the pack and whatever adaptors you need to connect it to your tool. Hence making it easy to share batts between tool platforms. The batts recharge from a USB C (with PD) charger.

Interesting:

The one downside seems to be charging speed for using power hungry tools for long periods. It would be interesting to see if the USB-C charging speed can be increased by cooling the battery, or whether it's an electrical limit.

Theo

The latest iteration of USB-C PD allows for up to 240W of power delivery

- so the power supply does not need to be the limitation. However, as you say, cooling will become the limiting factor.

The other downside I can see is that with modern air cooled charging platforms, you can put a hot pack on "charge" - which is contrary to convention wisdom about not fast charging a hot pack. In these cases the charger will sense the battery temperature, and just run cooling on its own until it is cool enough to actually start the charge. There is no obvious way to replicate this capability on these universal ones that I can see at the moment.

It need not, but it can be a limit of the design of the power conversion circuit inside the battery. Unlike conventional platforms you pay for one conversion circuit per battery, so they are strongly incentivised to cut corners on that circuit. It also means you can't upgrade the charging speed by using a different charger.

If the battery regulates its charging speed based on temperature (as maybe it does), you could imagine a charging dock with fans in it. The battery charges very slowly or not at all while hot, but the fans run and cool the battery and once cool it starts charging faster. The dock would only passthrough the USB-C, and perhaps have its own temperature sensor to control the fans.

Theo

Interesting, but s*it was what I thought he said?

Not quite as good as OEM, but looked pretty good for anything but the highest loads, which you won't be doing much of the time anyway. If you used a passive aftermarket adapter you might also find a performance dropoff as some of those don't seem very well engineered.

There's something to be said for maintaining a heavy duty battery platform (eg tools on a 40V system) and then using this for the lighter duty 18V tools (the majority). Where you do need the power, buy a 40V tool.

Theo

Ah, I thought you'd linked to Tools & Stuff, not Torque Test Channel

Hmm, a bit overblown there. The market for these isn't builders who are breaking concrete all day and need 4 batteries an hour so they're constantly on fast charge, it's DIYers who don't want to be chained to a battery platform. A lot of the durability objections go away in a DIY context (although the rubber flap isn't great - if phones can have waterproof ports then they should too)

The more batteries you're going to use, the less the cost in having several battery platforms on the go. It's when you don't have any investment in platform then this makes most sense.

If you do use a few batteries, there might be some sense in having one or few of these in your arsenal: you can always charge from USB-C to get you out of a pickle. For example, car USB-C -> battery is easy here, while you'd be left trying to find the rare/expensive Makita/Dewalt/... car charger. They can also cover the cases where you have a long tail of other-brand tools and don't want to invest in their platform, and the battery protection might be better than Makita/Dewalt/etc (remains to be seen).

I agree there's some build quality issues and there really should be a stalling reset feature on the battery. It wasn't fair to just show that and not demonstrate the battery working on non-stalling loads, which it seems to mostly handle according to other reviews.

The review wasn't helped by him charging from a USB-A which is only going to be max 10W, and not USB-PD 45W. He also didn't test the power output feature.

Theo