What do you do, when your trusty cordless drill starts to lose battery capacity? You bought it a decade ago and parts are a distant memory, so there’s no chance of buying a new pack. If you are [Danilo Larizza], you strip away the old NiMh cells, and replace them with a custom pack (Italian, Google Translate link) made from 18650 Li-ion cells.
The build is a straightforward one to anyone familiar with lithium-ion packs, but to a battery newbie it should serve as a handy step-by-step description. He starts by selecting a range of matched cells from discarded laptop batteries and adds an off-the-shelf battery management board to keep everything safe. Interestingly he appears to have soldered his wires to the cells rather than the more usual spot-welding, sadly for many of us a spot-welder is beyond our means. It would be interesting to know both the mechanical integrity of the resulting connection and whether the heat of soldering might in some way affect the cells.
Firing up the drill with the new pack is not the immediate success he hoped it would be, the start-up current is so high that the battery management board goes into a fault condition. This situation is resolved with a model that can take more current, and he can take his drill out once more.
If you are annoyed by the rise of cordless tools, you’re in good company. Meanwhile if you lack a spot-welder for batteries, have a look at one of the nicer ones we’ve seen.
Save An Old Drill From Landfill, With Some Lithium-Ion Magic
Source: HackADay
