12 Volt Drill Modification

Thanks for the compliment there Pop.

If anybody asks me I'll tell them I stole the idea from you OK. LOL
I'm always stealing ideas so there is nothing new there.

Cheers mate, Bruce.

Hi Bruce,

I suspect some smart Alec, Fred, George or whoever looked at his old 12v drill and a car battery and a little globe (12v of course) lit up above his head..lol long before either of us had a brain wave. The surf doesn't get very high on my beach these days (:-((.

As far as the drill's power goes, it doesn't seem to be much different to when the original batteries were new. It wasn't any fire ball then but did the job. My newer Panasonic 18v would run rings around it but bloody hard to find an 18v car battery...LOL

Cheers
Pop

Hello

Yes you have re-invented the wheel :)

One previous 12 Volt/battery drill thread..

and another...

crikey another one...

Good reminder though.

Cheers
Greg

Hi Ron,
You sound like the chief navigator now. LOL She reckons I am too smart for my own good also. LOL.

I have not tried to do any big jobs so I cannot say re heat build up.
It is just a 12 volt battery drill and as such is not suited to heavy drilling jobs I guess.

I would think common sense would dictate that if it is a big job then a 240 drill would be the go. I would imagine if someone decided to persevere with a battery drill in those circumstances they would pay the price and be up for a new drill, and rightly so. There is always a price to pay for stupidity.

But for general light duty jobs, or a big job in an extreme emergency, this will probably fill the bill.

Thanks for the positives there Ron, Greatly appreciated.

Cheers, Bruce.

You could even strap the 7Ah battery to your belt and use a short lead Herbal.

There you go, one person has an idea then several others add to it and improve it, that's how we move forward isn't it.

Cheers, bruce

Hi Phil,
No drop off in performance that I can ascertain. In fact I cannot stop the drill by grabbing the chuck so in that regard it is better.

I have only just completed the modification and have not had a real chance to give it a good road test as yet but if I find any negatives I will post them up for those that may be thinking of doing it as well.

So far so good, looks very promising to me.

Cheers, Bruce.

Hi Batt's,
I have a couple of new 3Ah batteries for the drill so there was no thought of disposing of the drill but I always take it away with me when I am on the road, you never know when you want to drill something. I tinker to pass the time when on the road, as most blokes do.

I have been playing with 12 volt solar and solar hot water at home here for a while now, mainly experimental, and I got to thinking that we should be thinking everything 12 volts, not 240 volts. There are more and more things coming onto the market all the time which only require 12 volts.

I have 12 volt LED lights in the house for basic lighting but I am not getting serious with that yet. All my phone and battery chargers are 12 volt and I have 12 volt chargers for the video camera and the still camera so that I can never be without them when traveling as happened on a trip out about 2 years ago. I almost forgot my 12 volt electric shaver.

I have also used 3/4 black poly pipe at home as a solar water heater for years and a 240V pump circulating the cold water from the bottom of the heater tank to push the hot water into the top of the heater tank, which works very well for about 8 months of the year.. I am about to set it up again after some renovations a couple of years ago but this time using a 12 volt circulator pump driven from a solar setup. To this end I have also bought some 12 volt timers from ebay which have a large number of programmable functions which will enable me to run the pump for a predetermined duration every hour during the day to cycle the circulator pump.

I might say that I made up a programmable timer from a Jaycar (Electronics Australia) kit a long while back. The kit and additional boards ended up costing around $70 whereas the timers from ebay cost around the $8 mark and leave the one I made up for dead with its features.

All this got me thinking and my thoughts eventually turned to the battery drill.

I utilised an old battery pack so that I can revert to the good batteries anytime I like, or the reverse.

As you can see, I am always thinking.
Cheers, Bruce

Batt's - If you have a drill or tool that uses Ni-Cad batteries, and the battery case screws together, you can usually rebuild your batteries.

I've got an old 12V Chinese Ryobi I bought from Bunnings about 15 yrs ago.
It still works a treat, believe it or not - but I can't buy batteries for it, because it's an oddball battery, and Ryobi refuses to recognise the drill exists.

I bought some Sub-C cells from a crowd in the U.S. and rebuilt my battery with them and it's still going great.
The Sub-C cells only cost me about $2 each (the battery holds 10 for 12V) and I actually bought 30 of them in the one hit, so I could reduce the postage cost and give me enough batteries for a couple more rebuilds.