Re-celling a NiCd drill battery

[Lobster]

Hi all To those that recognise me - long time no see, it's been a while!!

I'm wanting to re-cell my old cordless Makita 8390D drill - at least one of the three power packs, maybe more.... I'm aware that finding decent quality cells to replace the originals is a complete jungle, so I'm wondering if anyone who's done this before can recommend a good supplier of decent kit please?

Part 2 of the question is that the original power packs are NiCd. The OEM charger (a DC1804T) states that it's good for both NiMH and NiCd: so does that mean I can buy NiMH cells and simply swap those out for the existing duff NiCd items? Or will there be electronickery inside the power packs that I would need to contend with, and should therefore stick with NiCd?

Thanks a lot for any pointers

[newshound]

Is it worth it? Third party NiMH packs are available for my old Maks at half the price of OEM. Ebay, in spite of the dodgy name "Floureon" have been fine for me.

[T i m]

<snip>

If that is the case then potentially 'yes'.

Not that should care AFAIK as with NiCd / NiMh most of the 'intelligence is in the charger. I don't think they have any voltage protection / cutoff in the battery as shown by the fact they (or all the ones I have ever played with) do get slower and slower, rather than just cut off, as per most lithium powered things.

You are probably looking for 'tagged' sub C cells but it's best to check what's in there first.

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

Welcome back :-)

Not bought any NiMh cells in ages so hard to recommend. CPC will probably do you "real" ones - but may be far from the cheapest.

It should be fine with NiMh - the tools were the same, and the chargers will do either. There are no particular smarts in the battery itself except for perhaps a temperature sensor.

You can still buy the NiMh cells new (OEM and "compatible").

You can also get adaptors that will let you fit the modern LiIon packs onto the old drills although you need to be careful to not run the packs too low since the old drills don't have any smarts to communicate with the battery management system in the new batts - so you run a higher risk of bricking a battery.

[The Natural Philosopher]

IF the charger can cope with either, then yes you can swap one for the other.

But consider the cost. Re celling may be as expensive as a new drill and battery with LI ION ...

In general a sub C Nixx is between £2 and £5. 8 of then is already £16-£40....

[John Bryan]

I have recently re-celled an ancient B & D electric screwdriver using cells from batteriesplus and everything seems ok so far..

[Lobster]

Thanks all very much for all the pointers - definitely very enlightening. I've just been researching cells at CPC/batteriesplus and agree - that would be an expensive route... I've also just opened up my bricked power pack and it looks like it would be a right ball-ache to replace the daisy chain of 13 cells in there too, so I'm binning that idea! Especially as I didn't actually realise you could buy aftermarket power packs....

Two of my power packs are still just about serviceable, and especially so if I replace my third one with a new item, so I reckon that's the way forward for now at least. Ebay throws up loads of them starting at 17 GBP delivered:

's no way of ascertaining quality so I guess I'll just take a chance? Have to say I've had bad experiences in the past buying mobile phone and laptop batteries that way. Can't see any evidence of 'Floureon' unfortunately!! ;)

[newshound]

The old Makita stuff is just so well built, there's no excuse to replace them. With the NiMH replacements they just go on and on.

[Dave Plowman (News]

On my Lidl stuff, I'm fairly certain that protection is in the battery, not drill?

[Dave Plowman (News]

IMHO, though, Li-Ion batteries have a vastly longer service life as well as better performance. I've yet to have one fail. Unlike Ni-Cad or NiMh.

[PeterC]

I bought a Floureon 3Ah 18V NiMH battery via Amazon in 2016. It's still going, not an enormous amount of use, and recently it was used for what seemed to be for ever. I've just spent some time searching and it looks as if Floureon s pretty well out of the tools market and replacements for the old NiCads are rare. My Mak did 4.5 years then the NiCads both failed on consecutive charges! I suppose that timing chips are as cheap as chips.

[newshound]

I had a Li-Ion "jump-starter" battery fail (after not very much work). Just refusing to charge any more, not an exciting failure.

[Mark]

You could buy a Li-ion Battery Adapter, and then a charger and genuine Makita 18volt battery

[John Rumm]

There will usually be a BMS in the pack on any respectable battery, however some also communicate with the device - perhaps allowing the BMS to instruct the tool to shut off or passing thermal data from the tool to the batt (this is conjecture - I have not studied what passes on the additional pinouts on the batteries)

[Theo]

That's pretty much how it works in this Aldi pack/drill:

The BMS handles the battery monitoring (a bit sad he didn't take that apart), but the drill has its own cutoff circuit if the battery is over temperature.

Theo

[T i m]

<snip>

I believe that to be the case on at least some of the Makita batteries in that there is an external connection to the thermistor in the battery that *could* be read by both the charger and / or tool.

Cheers, T i m

[Mark]

The Lidl battery I bought had the BMS board in the battery housing which was good, but the size of it meant I could not get it in the old NiCd battery housing so had to make an adaptor

-

[T i m]

<snip>

That is fairly typical for a Lithium.

Sorry, what are we looking at there Mark? Is that the Lidl Lithium battery with the top cover off?

Cheers, T i m