"JR North" wrote in message
.. .
The folks in R.C.M. would appreciate this.

Who?

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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