The folks in R.C.M. would appreciate this.
JR

ian field wrote:

Yesterday I went to the tool store for a replacement battery pack for my
KC14C Black & Decker cordless drill, as the previously repaired shorted
cells had burned out the charger - for which I'd since found a replacement
transformer, I also asked for a price on this item, and the batter had since
started self discharging.

The battery was over £46 & the charger over £18 the £46 is about what I
originally bought the drill for (special offer) and at the cut price DIY
store I could buy 3 cordless hammer drills for the combined price!

A quick rummage in the junk box turned up an Electrolux battery pack with 12
cells (I assume its for a cordless vacuum cleaner) The cells were slightly
longer than the ones in the B&D pack, but that turned out not to be a
problem since the impressively sized battery pack is half full of plastic
spacer - once this was taken out and thrown away the bigger cells fit just
fine, the battery inside the connector stem took a little more effort, it
has a plastic cap inside that centres the cell with moulded plastic webbing
to take up the slack of the shorter cell, it was easy to break most of this
away with pointed pliers and mill out the rest with a rotary drill bit in
the modelling/PCB drill.

Interestingly, a while back I found a 12V version of the drill put out by
the bins - which I obviously grabbed in case any spares were good for mine,
it turned out that all 10 cells were S/C and as usual this had burned out
the transformer. The cells were easy to "unstick" with a 12V SLA and I put
it on charge with a replacement transformer (Hayes modem transformer), it
has since worked fine with no evidence of undue self discharge.

Obviously B&D supply crap batteries with their tools, and I noticed that
when I phoned B&D to ask about spares their recorded message announced
"De-Walt and Black & Decker tools" so you won't get any better there either!
Indeed I've seen one or two threads on this group by people having trouble
with De-Walt batteries as well!

So there you go Black & Decker - if you weren't such greedy *******s you
would have made some money out of me, but instead you tried to rip me off -
so I fixed it myself, improved your crap product and told everyone what a
load of crap your product is!




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