Cordless drill - best for occasional use

Hi,

NiCd should hold charge fine, one thing that can really stuff battery packs is using them until exhaustion as one or more cells may get reverse charged.

So best go for something with 2 or more packs, use in rotation and charge AS SOON as they start to fade.

That way you already have a fully charged pack standing by, so even if the one in the drill hasn't much charge it doesn't matter.

Two gears are well worth having too, giving better torque or speed which can help battery life.

Find the best deal you can on something like a Makita, then the same for a cheap make, and then decide if the extra money is worth it or not.

cheers, Pete.

Wickes have an 18v hammer drill driver with a 2 speed gearbox and a one hour charger for £26.49 and you get a 2 year warranty. The Wickes stuff is pretty good for the money IMO.

Voltage depression if you really want to be accurate. It is caused by overcharging - nothing whatsoever to do with the mythical "memory effect".

Which of course affects NiMH far more severely than NiCd.

NiCd is always more durable than NiMH with an equivalent quality (or lack of) charger. The ones to avoid are the "5 hr" chargers. NiCd can be happily charged at a 10 hour rate with almost anything, and will tolerate 36 hours at this rate quite happily. NiMH won't. Either, with an appropriately designed charger, can charge in anything from 30 mins to an hour - but it reduces cell life, more so for NiMH than NiCd. In any situation NiMH is good for about half the number of recharge cycles of a similar NiCd battery.

The problem with the 5hr (or thereabouts) chargers is that they are essentially uncontrolled and a 5 hour rate cannot be sustained for any length of time without damaging the battery. Used with a time switch they are adequate but no more. The safest way of charging batteries, and the one which gives best battery life, is to charge at one tenth of the cell capacity for about 11 hours.

On Sun, 28 May 2006 21:09:15 +0100, T i m wrote (in article ):

For products sold on price, certainly. The retailers demand quite substantial margin so it's not hard to work backwards.

Who knows? A couple of years ago when the industry norm was 12 and 14.4v tools and was just starting to add 18v ones, Panasonic came out with a 15.6v product. It outperformed and outlasted 14.4v products from other vendors , which is not surprising. What was surprising was that it outperformed almost all 18v products apart from the very high end ones. The reason was the battery technology.

It depends on your criteria. The OP's were battery longevity in the face of little care and occasional use. Other issues such as precision, control, ease of use, ergonomics, service and spares were not mentioned, but reasonably would not be expected in an entry level product.

If one spends £200, all of those things can be expected and obtained as well. For £60-80 one can get something with reasonably good batteries that will last well.

TTI are masters of that.

The copper is a substantial fraction of the cost of the flex though.

Grey or Black plastic?

(The grey stuff is often a decent brand with a wickes badge on it, the black tends to be run of the mill Chinese stuff)

I have to agree. *Any* fast charger - don't care how clever - shortens the service life of Ni-Cads. Of course a nasty fast charger even more.

Does it come with two batteries? Having two is really useful.

I had this exact discussion with Ansmann Chargers and a couple of battery suppliers.

Terms like 'Fast Charge' or 'Ultrafast Charge' seemed to go against the recommendations on the cells themselves?

The bottom line from them all ... "Yes, fast charging will generally sod up yer cells but that's what folk want (fast charge cycles) and they don't mind buying new ones .." ;-(

eg, I have an Ansmann PowerLine5 and that 'according to Ansmann' is such a charger .. cells coming off the charger pretty hot (not a good way to treat cells).The Energy16 however seems to be geared to treating them more gently (test, test discharge, *moderate rate* bulk charge, deltaV, trickle etc).

Most of my RC cells (TX, RX, power) were charged at the C/10 rate and I even built am 8 way constant current charger to do so ;-)

All the best ..

T i m

There is another angle as well... I was speaking to a bunch of fast electric boat nuts once[1]. They were all of the opinion that you should never slow charge a racing pack, since all they care about is getting the ultimate current delivery from the cells and are not to fussed over their longevity. They believed that always fast charging resulted in better high current delivery.

This is the black one. Chinese probably but 18v with a one hour charger it could well meet the OP's needs.

I bought the 14.4v grey combi drill driver recently. 2 x 2 a/h batteries,

For £26 you are lucky to get one battery :-)

I was eyeing up a grey router that was obviously a badged Freud FT2000E once... only problem was the price - they wanted more for it than Screwfix did for the Freud!

I got a cordless drill from Aldi, 2 batteries + "one hour" charger, for £22ish ISTR, but the batteries are 18v, 1.2AH so don't last as long. It hasn't had the "hammering" that a similarly-sourced SDS drill has had, but it's not too bad for the price. ISTR "Johnson motor" was mentioned as a selling point. No idea what make the keyless chuck is.

And I agree there is some mileage to that one John (but choose a compromise myself even on racing packs). It's all well going off like a rocket as long as you are still there at the end of the race ;-)

Ok, nothing wrong so far ... ;-)

Or drenched from the 'rooster tail' off the back of my Webra 61R / Agnew 'Z' drive powered catamaran! ;-)

Yup, have done similar myself .. not these days though ..

Mine is a suitably sized ww shunt restistor in a little ally box with basic voltmeter calibrated in amps (10A FSD) fitted on the top. I touch / hold that across each cell till I see it start to drop from

Doh! ;-(

I only lost the lid off the cat when it back flipped at speed (Donald Campell stylee). *Luckily* there were some lads swimming nearby who fancied a challenge and recovered it for me! ;-)

All the best ..

T i m

Thanks for all the feedback, looks like there's not much chance of getting a decent unit in my pricerange. However, I was inspired to open up the power pack and can see that at least one of the old cells has 'burst', which is presumably why there is practically no power left in it.

Given that most units have the same general shape I wonder if I could get a stand alone 18V replacement unit from another brand and swap the cells so I can use them in my existing machine. Anyone tried this?

There is a very similar looking unit at

For the price, I'd be inclined to look around for another cheap one, with two batteries and fast charger. They do exist. If you can wait a month or two, keep an eye on some well-known discount supermarkets.

You could even look at:

Can I suggest you forget the chuckless idea, they all come with a chuck, if you wish you can always remove it yourself. :-)

Not used my boat for years alas, but one day when there is time (or an offspring of suitable age and interest to prompt having another go) I quite fancy having a go at a surface piercing prop setup.

My most memorable mishap happened on bank holiday Monday. The park was full of people, loads of other boats there. Anyway, set the boat in the water, started it, tuned it up, set it off, and then worked out that in spite of it *appearing* to have responded to throttle control when I tuned it, the receiver was in fact turned off! There was a feeling of impending doom as it sped off at three quarter throttle toward the far bank (a vertical concrete wall) and there was nothing I could do to change its speed or direction. So I put the transmitter down and started legging it round the lake. The bang when it hit the far wall was enough to gain the attention of everyone there. As I got within 20m of it, I was able to deduce several things: one it had bounced some 3m from the bank and I could not reach it, second its engine was still running, but it was not moving so the prop coupling must have broken, three that meant no water cooling for the engine, and a good likelihood of it ending up knackered if something was not done about it PDQ. So I carried on running, jumped into the lake, and stuck my finger over the air intake to stop the engine. All to a loud cheer and round of applause from the assembled crowd!