Cordless Drill Battery Issues....

My Dad just bought a new Craftsman EX 18V drill. He did so because both batteries in his perhaps 2 year old 14.4V are dead.

I am going to attempt to rescue this drill. I have a WAY off brand 14.4V in my truck that is NEVER ready when I am. Which is another question after this one!

Anyhow, the 14.4 batts come apart easily with 4 screws. 12 Panasonic Sub C ceels are in there. I have no idea of mAh capacity.

Can I send these packs off somewhere to get new cells? Can it use NimH or must it be NiCad?

And as to being ready for use in my truck... do any of you know any way to have a trickle charger in the cab for this type of battery??? I figure keeping a batt on trickle is the ONLY way I'm EVER going to have a Cordless drill I can count on.

Last thing. The new 18V drill has a charger that is supposedly smart. It says it goes into trickle mode when the green led lights. The only info I can find says it puts out 1.6A in fast mode. But gives NO INFO on trickle mode. The batteries in the 14.4V drill got dead from being on the charger too long, too many times! If this charger is smart, life will be MUCH better for THIS drill!!!

Use nicads, not nimh. They have less capacity, but higher current capability and less self discharge. You don't need to keep it on trickle. My Bosch cordless drill works fine up to a year after charging it. Probably a lot of the charge has drained off by then, but it's fine for zapping in a few wood screws or holes or whatever, my normal usage. A carpenter of course would use the drill all day and need to charge it.

Yes there are places that rebuild battery packs. You can also contact the manufacturer and ask if a new pack is available. You can buy cells from powerstream.com or digi-key.com, etc.

I am nowhere NEAR able to remake this (these) packs on my own.

The cheapy drill in my truck self discharges in WAY WAY less than a year!!!

However I think I have the answer, whether I stick with my crappy no name or use this Craftsman. Both use a base that takes a plug in transformer that plugs into the wall socket.

So I am thinking one of the multi-adjustable cigarette lighter plug in chargers with maybe 400ma would do what I'm looking for???

And probably stay with my no name, because I have at least one decent batt pack for it.

Joe, you may have a "Batteries Plus" store in Houston. The local store was happy to build some battery packs for me (no charge) (other than the batteries of course).

I would recommend a high capacity nicad such as a Sanyo CP2400 or something like that. They are not too bad to rebuild. A bit time consuming.

At 14.4v your alternator may have about the right output voltage. Most are regulated to 14.8-15.0v. All of those cigarette lighter plugs reduce the voltage (or do nothing). So you need to direct charge from the alternator (use a current regulator maybe?) or go thru a small inverter to run a wall wart. I've rebuilt the battery packs but it is usually cheaper to buy the entire replacement battery pack. I made 3 packs out of 4, then 2 packs out of 3, then 1 from 2. Finally I bought another one. You will need the inverter setup to recharge the 18v. Do beware, a lot of the older power tool battery chargers (DeWalt, especially) will not work on inverters (non sine wave).

Try digi-key or mouser, they can build battery packs out if the individual cells by spot welding them together. See if the sears drill has mAH specs listed on the pack, my bet is there are 12 cells in series to get the 14.4v, therefore since current is the same for cells in series the current of the pack will be equal to the current of the individual cell. If there are cells in parallal then just figure it out from the total.
I was going to do my 9.6v makita battery, it had two rows of three all in series. Problem is the cost to buy the new cells was $22, the cost of a new battery pack from HD was $25.

My Dad checked at Sears. Packs for his 14.4 (which is just enough different than the current model - PLBBBBB!!!!) are $45 each. If I was going to pay that much (or even a litle more) to get better cells I would.

But what the heck, I could get a new EX 14.4V for quite a bit less than the cost of two batteries... and so far the 18V is looking like a decent purchase (and will be a home tool only).

I have also had Batteries Plus rebuild some older packs. If I remember right the 18v ones I had redone were about $25 each. I know at the time they could have done them with a slightly higher cap battery, but then it was about $40. It was like 1800mA vs 2000mA. I went the cheaper route, actually the originals were something like 1200mA anyway.

There is a place in Conroe called 'Zekes Batteries Plus'.

I am going to call there after while.

Post some links or email addys if you would as a backup...

Please?

Batteries Plus is a national chain, so the Zekes store might be one of the chain ones. In any case the main link is here

http://www.batteriesplus.com/

THANK YOU BROCK!!!!

I TRIED to websearch for Batteries Plus and came up lame.

I called Zekes. It sounded like I was talking to a 'knuckle dragger'. He said theydo reconditioned car batts only.

I have talked to the BP store here IN Houston (of course way over across town!) and I can get the packs rebuilt with 1800 Sub Cs (they said stock is likely 1200) for 10 bucks less a pack over buying new stock packs.

Just gotta get over to the hoity toity part of town...

In case anyone is interested, they are at 2662 S. Gessner (just N of Westheimer) and phone is 713-785-7587.

THANKS AGAIN!

web page
web page
web page

And you can keep looking for more at:
web page

look for interstate battery outlet near you... not a dealer but the actuall interstate battery shop the one here will rebuild your packs for a FRACTION of the cost of a new one...

Thanks for all the info guys!

I will probably go with ONE rebuilt pack for the 'old' 14.4v Craftsman. I'll probably get it done at Batteries Plus here in town.

Most likely a new 14.4V or possibly even 18V EX Craftsman will be my new truck drill.

The (ugh, do I even have to say it?) Wagner 14.4V in my truck wouldn't even drill two holes today (with two packs freshly charged). They show good voltage unloaded, but have no runtime to speak of. I have (had) a total of 4 packs for it, and a second drill was my around the house drill (lotsa fence repair and such). One of the packs wouldn't charge so I pulled it all apart. Out of 12 cells, each inserted into my C Crane Quick Charger, one started charging. After 'tickling' each cell with a 12V 2A maintaner battery charger for about 20 seconds each, I got 3 more cells to act sort of right. So I shall have 4 SUB C to play with.

Also. The charger that came with the 18V EX is indeed a smart charger, or at least internally timed. It goes from sounding like it's gettin' with it on the Red LED, to utterly silent on the Green LED. Cool!

Using my C Crane Quick Charger the 4 batts I rescued have now been charged once, discharged once, charged again, discharged again, and charged.

I'm thinking of using them in a 2D with a 3 cell bulb. Although I don't THINK 4 of them are enough shorter than 4 regular C to make it possible. Might have to use a 3D...

What about just cut off the battery part and epoxy a 12V SLA battery to the plug? You may need to tweak the charger a little bit, but most likely it will work directly. If your car battery is also 12V (most likely yes), then you may simply leave the battery pack connected to the cigrette lighter socket for trickle charging.

Led mods... I'm not quite clear on what you are saying.

I found that 4 Sub C will not fit into a 2D. So I put them in my Pelican M-10 with the spring from a C M*g.

In about 30 minutes the light dimmed drastically. The cells at this point don't have much duration. I'm hoping several more cycles on the quick charger will help with that!

Well, in my travels out and about on a NASTY rainy Saturday I left one Craftsman Pack at Batteries Plus. A VERY nice lady helped me.

She was building some kind of huge pack of D ALKALINES?!?!? for some underwater duty of some sort. HOLY MOLEY what a bunch of batteries! It was to end up at 48volts or so...

[ QUOTE ]
PlayboyJoeShmoe said:
Led mods... I'm not quite clear on what you are saying.


[/ QUOTE ]

What I meant was to use one 12V sealed lead-acid battery instead of 12 NiCd as the power source of your drill. That should hold the charge better and be a lot less bulkier than 10 D cells /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif