B&D 18 volt batteries

Keep a watch at Ace Hardware. They had the drill with battery for $30 and half off that around BF. 'tis the season for tool battery deals.

Batteries are a crap shoot. Aftermarket batteries seem to get good initial reviews, then later, lots of complaints that they don't last long. Can't trust the 'shill' reviews. I decided to stick with real vendor batteries on sale at local retailers.

I also retired all my old B&D crap and craftsman crap and skill crap and the box of dead batteries and the box of chargers and and and and switched to Ryobi lithium. They're transitioning to brushless and having some good deals on packages of brushed motor tools. And Ryobi shows up a lot at garage sales and thrift stores for dirt cheap. If you use tools for business, may want to go with a better brand, but for homeowner use, they're fine.

I really like the ability to swap batteries between generations of tools. And lithium has the great advantage that it's not dead every time you want to use it. NiCd self discharge is a bitch for tools you don't use every day.

I pulled out a lithium cordless tool the other day that hadn't been used in years. Pressed the trigger and to my surprise it ran.

NT

20 years ago, Ryobi closed all their parts warehouses in the US. Secondly, for example, if you blow the gear box in a Makita, you order a complete new gearbox. With Ryobi, you get to order each part individually and assemble it yourself.

Yeah, I did this for a living for a while.

--
Jeff-1.0 
wa6fwi 
http://www.foxsmercantile.com

Like I said, if you use 'em to make a living, you might want something better.

I've been buying tools of many brands at garage sales and thrift stores. In 40 years of household use I've never broken a cordless tool. It's always the batteries that go dead.

So, you end up with a Makita drill with a dead battery and a good battery for a B&D drill you don't have and a similar B&D drill that won't fit that battery. And a Porter Cable battery with no tool. and a big box of perfectly good tools that need batteries. And a 'toxic waste dump' of random dead batteries.

Any 18V Ryobi tool I have works on any Ryobi 18V NiCD or lithium battery I have. Yesterday, I bought a Ryobi 18V drill at a thrift store for $2.50. Works great with a lithium battery pack. I bought the $1.50 light and replaced the incandescent with LED. And the second $1.50 light is gonna get turned into a 120VAC supply. Not sure what I'm gonna do with the 3rd $1.50 light, I got carried away. I passed on the $3 circular saw because I already have more of those than I need.

Ryobi is the sweet spot for "good enough" tools cheaper than dirt, available everywhere. We don't need no stinkin' repair parts. ;-)

Take the NiCd cells out of the unuseful packs & recell the wanted ones

NT

One problem is that all the wanted ones have more cells than the not-yet-completely-dead packs.

I've tried rebuilds on multiple occasions. Problem is that if one cell is dead, the others aren't far behind. I have computer controlled power supply and loads that I've used to try to match used cells. Best you can hope for is matched crappy performance. Most often encountered symptom is at least one cell that works just fine after you charge it, but self discharge takes it to zero in a few days.

Problem with tool batteries is reverse charge. You're drilling along and the drill starts to slow down. Well, you've only got two more holes to drill, so you do it. Now, you have at least one reversed cell. And it gets worse every time you do it. When a cell is damaged it's capacity is lower, so it's the one that gets reversed again next time.

Tool batteries are overcharged, overheated, over discharged, vented, left unused for years. By the time you need em, they've self discharged and some cells are likely shorted, which means the others get overcharged and vent.

You find that a new battery cost about as much as a new tool set. Then the tool sits in the basement until you decide to clean up and sell it at a garage sale or give it to Goodwill.

I've bought a lot of used tool batteries. They are almost never good, And new cells cost about as much as a new battery.

Much of this can be avoided by paying attention and taking care of your batteries. But 99.9% of the people don't know, don't care. That's why they go bad and you find a dead cordless tool at virtually every garage sale. People who take care of their tools don't sell em for 25-cents at their garage sale.

I've always thought 12v & 14.4v ones could be run off a car battery or a small SLA sat on the floor. But really no-one is that short of dough these days.

NT

or a small SLA sat on the floor. But really no-one is that short of dough these days.

Glad to hear you're doing well... The conundrum is that the only way to have money is to not spend it. Most people don't have the discipline to plan ahead.

There's the issue of the physical interface. How many adapters do you need? How would you hook up that 12V battery...conveniently? How would you get all that up into the attic to drill a hole? Might as well take a corded drill. I'll typically use one drill as a drill and another as a screwdriver. So, I need two batteries that work. Before I went all-in on Ryobi, that meant two batteries and two chargers and advance notice to charge the inevitably dead batteries.

It didn't cost much more to switch to Ryobi than it would have taken to buy a couple of batteries for my junk pile. I'm glad I did. Now, I just grab whatever tool I need and can be sure that I have a compatible battery that is fully charged and ready to go.

Unfortunately, the pack-rat in me can't bear to let go of all the old, useless cordless tools. ;-(

I have used Craig's List CURB ALERT quite often to creatively recycle many things from (no kidding) old toilets to picked-over electronics to random j unk. I can honestly state that nothing has lasted more than four days - or the first weekend, whichever comes first. I know now to initiate such alert s on Thursdays. A careful, but accurate description with pictures often hel ps.

The stuff gets gone, and as someone went to the trouble of coming to get it - I suspect that it will actually get used. Far better than a paper sign " FREE".

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA

that's easy, just fit a cord to the drill. Forget the old battery pack case. SLA then sits on the floor near you. FWIW it would make the drill smaller & lighter - someone somewhere in the universe must have a use for that.

Is it a struggle to take a 7 or 12Ah battery with you? It would beat the heck out of a 1.3Ah NiCd for run time.

An SLA powered drill wouldn't need mains and would be much lighter.

One thing I'm not short of is drills. They're fairly versatile.

NT

It would be nice to go right down the street to the factory to get repairs. Instead of going half a world away.

It wouldn't, it would cost 5x as much

NT

Once the owner passes away, they sure do.