This is a bit of a rant, sorry. Not sure if anyone has trodden this ground in another thread before - I'm too tired to go look - but I have to get this off my chest.....
I have a perfectly usable old Black & Decker Firestorm drill (13.2V) with two knackered NiCad battery packs. They did sterling service - lasted for over 5 years!
I enquired at B&D for the replacement cost. It turned out that two new battery packs for the old drill would cost more than just buying a brand new drill kit. I gather this is a common finding. I guess the drill manufacturers want to sell new high $$ drills rather than fix old battery packs for way less moola (Admin: we need a symbol for peanuts ).
I opened up one of the dead NiCad packs to see if it could be "repaired" using individual cells. No easy way AFAICT. The cells are all spot welded to each other and they are stacked so that the end cell's terminal forms one of the battery pack's connections. It would take quite a bit of surgery to replace the cells and make it work as intended again. BTW, I did try the old NiCad rejuvination technique using a large capacitor charged to 20V or so - this gave them some more life, but they are all done now.
I wonder if any of you have done this, acheived the impossible, and a) found a source for new NiCad cells with connection strips welded to them and b) managed to cobble a new battery pack together with them. Tell us your story please. Hopefully I will get inspired and fix my old battery packs up.
It just seems like such a shameful waste to junk a perfectly working drill.....(shakes head and tuts).....
Is there anything we can do to make the drill manufacturers be more earth friendly and lower their replacement battery pack prices?
Dave Fifield