Update on Makita drill

Thought it might be worth posting my experience with the 18V Makita 8391 combi drill currently available with two 1.3 AH NiCads and a good collection of accessories in a nice solid plastic case for ~ £120. The whole set is quite heavy, only slightly lighter than my old Ryobi drill driver plus angle drill with two batteries and fast charger.

As others have said, a nicely balanced and finished drill with a very good chuck. Enough torque for all I needed today, but the hammer drill setting gives rather less "hammer" than my somewhat larger mains drill. I'd use that if I needed to drill a lot of masonry, but it coped, if a bit slowly, for a few holes to support battens on some brickwork at the bottom of the garden. Probably would not want to use it for anything greater than 6 mm (except on light-weight blocks, which would be fine up to 10 mm).

Did two jobs this afternoon, put a dog guard in the van (using centre punch, metal drill, nut drivers) and put up some feather edge fence (masonry drills, wood drills, torx bit for masonry screws and PZ2 and PZ3 for wood screws). All of these conveniently stored in the lid, saved me having to collect them up from about three different toolboxes.

Although the batteries have limited capacity, they recharge in about 20 minutes so unless the drill was getting really intensive use you are not likely to "run out". Another nice point is that the charger will do both NiCad and NiMH, which gives you more options if you do need extra packs or need to re-cell them in a couple of years time.

Reply to
newshound
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And something else very useful, is that Makita chargers will happily charge up legacy batteries from smaller, older tools and auto-switch to type. I have a couple of 7.2V pistol drills (amazing little drills for their size) and those have a mix of NiCad and NiMh batteries - I also have a Makita 12V battery for my Bosch SDS, which fits the charger no problem. The charger is a 14.4V one and was designed to deal with anything that went before.

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

Makita ones, or any brand? Just curious since the cheapest way to get a 24V NiMH battery charger seems to be to get an old power tool charger from a car boot sale. But there's a question of how 'clever' they are - do they rely on things in the battery to detect the type, and to detect end-of-charge (eg thermistor)?

Theo

Reply to
Theo Markettos

How long is a piece of string? Some chargers were no more than a DC supply with a series resistance. Although I'd expect a decent make one - like Makita - to be fairly state of the art for when it was made. But they don't turn up at the car boot sales round here. ;-)

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

In the case of Makita (and most of the others, I've no doubt), there's a third or fourth contact which mates with the later gen charger and tells it battery type and charge state/temp. As far as mine goes, I haven't tried it with other than Makita batteries (even the Bosch one is now a Makita, so fits ok) However, with sufficient knowledge it would be a trivial matter to make an adapter on a flylead to take almost any make of battery and use the Makita charger to run it properly.

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

The temperature sensors on a cell are actually low tech these days. An intelligent charger can manage without - only two contacts.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Yup the new chargers will do all the old ni-cd and ni-mh batts IME. The old combo I found that did not work was with the old charger for a mates

9.6V Ni-Cd makita drill that would not handle later Ni-Mh packs. However since he also had a newer 14.4 V drill with a new charger that would do all of them.

Quite often you can salvage the required connector from the charger that came with the tool... should be easy enough to make up a universal charging harness - say old battery shell to pickup power from the charger, then other tools old charging base to interface to its battery, and then any standard connector between them to allow the relevant adapter to be powered from the charger.

Reply to
John Rumm

The Mak for the NiCd/NiMH will recharge Aldi's 14.4V battery - I found out by 'accident'.

Reply to
PeterC

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