Dewalt battery hack

Presumably, nothing in the drill will mind the higher voltage. Since the tool was old and the 18V batteries relatively new, [jleslie48] decided to limit modifications to the tool only leaving the batteries intact for use with the newer tools. We might have turned to duct tape or zip ties, but bungee cord works, too, as you can see in the finished product.

Honestly, though, the bungee is good because you can stretch it to remove the battery for charging. We might have just cannibalized the drill for its motor, but next time you have a tool with no battery, it might be worth looking to see if you could modify the tool. Bungees are great for robots , too. Or, you can lay siege on your neighbors. Seems like a win to me.

Assuming the tool holds up as well as it seems like it will, actually wondering about getting another one second hand anyway as they seem pretty cheap. I have been in the same place too many times.

I stand there and contemplate the perfectly fine hand tool and the battery that no longer holds a charge and it makes me angry. Instead of getting angry, you actually did something about it. The Post Apocalyptic Inventor has just made a video doing something similar.

He used Makita battery form factor and does an altogether more professional job than this. He used it to standardise all his scrapyard find power tools, and also used 6 x You went from one obsolete battery to another obsolete battery.

You should have upgraded to the li-oin packs. They sell a cheap wire breakout adapter for the DeWalt packs. I agree. NiMH batteries were much better than NiCd, but there just no comparing to lithium. The last one I used, some years ago had a battery that would last a few minutes. I bout a cheap little li-ion 20v Black and Decker drill back in from Sears—still works great today.

You can. DeWalt part DCA will let you plug 20v lithium into 18v tools. They skipped right from NiCd to LiIon and put the over-discharge protection smarts in the new batteries and added additional contacts for the LiIon capable chargers. I feel like Ryobi deserve more praise for this — and the rest deserve our scorn for switching standards every few years and screwing everyone over. In these environmentally conscious times we should be kicking up fuss about the whole market refusing to standardise — if they can do it with USB albeit under pressure from the EU they can do it with power tool batteries.

Lithium ion tools usually have battery protection circuits built into the tool itself. True you can put a lithium ion battery in an old nicad tool, but you need to be very aware of how low you discharge the battery, as well as how hard you push the battery. Over overheating cells destroys lithium batteries as well. Ideally the electronics in the tool should only be concerned about protecting the tool itself and the battery only protects itself.

It varies widely between brands actually. This is a weakness and made them more expensive than others in their class. Other brands have more of the bms in the tool. Having looked at handheld house vacuum cleaners lately, there is an insane price premium for Li-ion powered models that last at most 50 or so minutes.

Lightweight models that work on mains power are quite hard to find, because cordless is apparently the new hotness. No need to charge yet another appliance, and best of all, it results in a very lightweight handheld vacuum.

Shark makes some decent light mains powered vacuums. To simplify emptying and small workspace tidy up, I spliced the ends of an extension into the one I picked up. You can get the cells cheaply online. To make the experience fit your profile, pick a username and tell us what interests you.

We found and based on your interests. Choose more interests. The Flexvolt battery incorporates a switch in the body of the battery which, in part, controls if the battery is wired up in series 60v or parallel 20v. The other piece of the puzzle is the connection between the C1 and C3 terminals. If the C1 and C3 terminals are connected without the switch depressed, two cells are shorted together which instantly bricks the battery won't charge or run tools.

The adapter body was printed in PLA with a 0. Trace isolation, holes, and board cutout are all done with the same 0. The middle terminals on the PCB should be cut down to half-height as shown using a dremel or file. The PCB can be screwed into the adapter body or glued, making sure that the PCB sits flush or just under the inside surface of the adapter body.

The middle two barrier block terminals are not connected to anything. They can be used to attach extra wires or components, if desired. Note that the gerbers included with this project plot the bottom copper layer. If you are not using the Flatcam workflow build. Alternatively, you can flip the layer in Kicad, move the C3 terminal to the other side of the C1 terminal, and then plot the top copper layer.

The tools normally used with these batteries provide important protections against various adverse conditions. Thermal, over-current and discharge protections are bypassed with an adapter like this, so shorting the terminals, letting the battery get too hot or too deeply discharged will likely permanently damage it or worse.

Create an account to leave a comment. Log In. Thanks for this project. I also found this youtube video very helpful. If my project is successful I will be sure to contribute an updates back here. Are you sure? Thanks for describing how the 60V works. I figured out to depress the switch and to short c2 c3 but I bricked one battery because I did not figure out that the switch had to be depressed first. Thank you! I would assume the downside of a catastrophic failure with this type of battery is much less than a LiPo.

I have been around both types when they get shorted, trust me, it's ugly when a big LiPo gets shorted but these Li-Ion typically just stop working and sometimes bloat up like the infamous Apple Laptop battery bloat. Treat this project and anything you power with it the same as any mains wiring.

Bungees are great for robots , too. Or, you can lay siege on your neighbors. Do you like badges? Of course you like badges. Which reminds me: we need to talk about a thing, Spacehuhn. Rat Grease is the solution to rodents chewing up cabling and wires. Rats are our friends, though, which makes me want to suggest this as a marinade, or at the very least a condiment.

The flash point is sufficiently high that you might be able to use this in a fryer. He posts his stuff online and does YouTube videos. A while back, he was approached by DeWalt to feature their tools in a few videos.

He got a few hand tools, a battery-powered table saw, and made some videos. The Internet then went insane and [Matthias] lost money on the entire deal.

Part of the reason for this is that his viewers stopped buying plans simply because he featured yellow power tools in his videos.

Elon Musk is the greatest inventor ever. No scratch that. The greatest person ever. Need more proof? How is he doing it? Luck, skill, and concentrated power of will. This deal has been years in the making , with reports of an acquisition dating back to Of course, that time, the deal was set to go through but was apparently put on hold by Chinese regulators.

Could he stay true to his brand and stick with his huge stock of yellow tools and batteries, or would he succumb to temptation and add another set of batteries and chargers so he could have access to a few specialty lime green tools?