Maintaining junk cordless stuff.

[dbhost]

So dumb thought. As you may, or may not know, I own a couple of Drill Master 18V junk cordless drills. They are genuinely garbage, but DO serve the purpose of driving screws when fence pickets get blown out, or I need to run new coax for a replacement TV antenna the last hurricane took out. Yeah I do OTA TV and streaming now. DirectTV / Xfinity just got too annoying over the years. Not even a money thing, their service, both of them was horrible at best, and customer service made me long for a colonoscopy by the DMV...

Anyway I digress...

I can't keep my shop heated / cooled 24x7, mostly because it would be a SERIOUSLY expensive endeavour, so I am wondering, What can I do to maximize the battery life of these? These are the 18v NiCad Drill Master battery packs, and it appears HF is discontinuing these...

I am thinking when these die, these get chucked out.

[LCHIEN]

The problem is NiCd. They are worse than NiMh which are outclassed by LiIon. But I thought NiCd were great when I first encountered them in college in 1973. A lot better than using Alkalines.

NiCd have several annoying habits now (back then, too)

They have high internal leakage rates (self discharge) lasting only a matter of days. For tools you use once a week they would be dead when you wanted to use them.
Second they had memory and needed to be full cycled. And then tended to shorts from metal whiskers on the electrodes. And they go bad if you didn't use them and cycle them. They were a very exasperating battery by todays standards.

Unfortunately the charging scheme is slightly different for NiMH and very different from LiIon so its not that easy to convert the battery packs and be able to charge them.

Craftsman C3 19.2 tools went from NiCd to LiIon The issued multi-chemistry/multi-voltage chargers that detect the battery and use the right charge
I have thought about

• Take a dead battery C3 tool and salvage the female battery connector
• take a 18-19.2 V tool like yours and a gut the battery pack for the male connector
• Fashion a adapter with the C3 female to the male battery pack connector
• plug a C3 battery pack (Any,kind that works) charged with the C3 multi charger to power the foreign tool.

But that would probably be one ugly adapter. Very long.

The other thing is to make an AC-DC adapter. Most Laptop adapters run 19,2 volts or so, Problem is that you need way more power than the adaptors which are typically 130 watts (ones from the early 2000;s anyway; new ones are half that). while a respectable AC drill takes about 5A or 600 watts, So you are going to need a heavy duty AC/DC PS and then it needs a very, very heavy gauge cord because an allowable voltage drop for 120V AC is going to be percentage wise 6 times greater at 20 Volts. A 6-foot cord would be reasonable but require about 8 ga. The batteries are not connected by 8-ga. in the cordless driver but that's because it only goes 2-3 inches to the motor. And that's why yo don't see AC/DC adapters for cordless drills.

[Jim Frye]

Yes, the problem is the chemistry of the batteries. I have a Makita 12 volt drill that uses the old "stick" batteries. It was my first cordless tool. I also have a Hilti 9 volt driver/drill that I dug out of the trash at work, also with NiCad packs. They were good for a few years. I had a half dozen Ryobi One+ Nicad packs. Over the years, I had all of these packs rebuilt by a local battery shop at about 2/3 the cost of a new pack. The Ryobi 18 volt tools I have (about 2 dozen) all now run on the LiOn One+ packs that last a lot longer.

[leehljp]

I bought a Porter Cable 14.4v (I think) drill driver back in 2000 and it was both hefty and powerful. But the two batteries didn't last but 4 years. After I checked the replacement prices I saw that it was cheaper to buy a new impact driver. I moved on to the 18V Ryobi and bought a few of the blue tools and NiM or NiCad, before moving to the green line which I still have and use - 13-14 years later.

[capncarl]

I keep my eye open for 18v Rigid tools in flea markets and yard sales just for parts to rob and make adapters for my obsolete 14.4 Dewalt tools. 18v Rigid uses a slide on battery pack. Slice off the Rigid donors slde battery holder and graft on a 14.4 Dewalt battery top snout and a 18v powered 14.4v tool it doesn’t seem to care about the higher voltage, probably because most were about worn out anyway.

[LCHIEN]

I have a nice craftsman drill driver (13.2V) and a B&D impact driver (12V) both in good shape except for working batteries that all use NiCd packs and chargers. Hate to throw them out but they're kind of useless.
.