Cordless Drill Repair

[zeebad1]

I have a 4 year old Craftsman Professional 18 volt drill that was working fine.

I believe that the batteries are shot, but don't want to spend $70.00 per battery to find out that the drill has issues also. I think that leaving the batteries on the charger continuously has damaged them.

I just picked up a new Milwaukee 18 volt drill, which is very compact & lightweight, but was wondering if it's worthwhile to have a cordless tool repaired. Does anyone have any experience with this?

 

[billymade]

Cost effective? Typically not; as the new stuff is way cheaper then the older drills... especially, the new 19.2V C3 series (one battery/charger compatible with a whole line of tools). Are you hell bent on repairing it and don't care? Well, you probably can get parts and batteries from www.searspartsdirect.com. Figure out what is wrong with the drill; see how much the parts, batteries cost and then make your decision from there. You could also have the battery packs rebuilt from places like; www.batteriesplus.com, when I worked at Sears, the older battery packs seemed to be in the $50-$80 range which caused most people to just buy a new drill kit.

 

[zeebad1]

Thanks for the advice. That's kind of what I was thinking, but just wanted some assurance.

I looked at the new Craftsman models, but wasn't too impressed. Maybe they are great, but I did like the looks & feel of the Milwaukee a little better. I've had good luck with the Craftsman Pro units, but didn't see anything comparable.

 

[DanCo]

You could see if a friend or co-worker has the same drill battery and borrow it for testing to see if it's the drill or just battery. Just to help eliminate some of the guess work...just a thought.
P.S. My partner just pick up a milwaukee set, for the size of the unit it's real strong.

 

[vssjim]

Batterypackrebuilders.com they do good work and stand behind them when done, they charge about 1/2 price of new ones

 

[truckdriver]

An 18v drill will usually run on 12v. Hook 2 wires to your car battery and run those to the terminals on the drill to test it.. I'll bet it's the battery. If your comfortable with soldering you can buy the individual cells online to rebuild it. They are 1.5v sub c cells and there are 12 in a 18v battery. Or http://www.voltmanbatteries.com/servlet/StoreFront can do it for $45.

 

[bmxr4life87]

I recently requisitioned a dewalt xrp 14.4 volt drill with both batteries and a charger for free. The problem withb it was it would always clutch and wouldn't apply any torque so I tore the gearbox apart found out that a pin housing had busted so I just bought a new gearbox for $30 from a dewalt store it took me about 5 min to have it back togwether and working like new so for $30 I have a nice dewalt xrp drill that I love

 

[slip knot]

9 out of 10 times the batteries give up long before the tool craters. My 18 V C man drills had a problem with the batteries that in turn fried the chargers. I've got 3, 3/8 VSR drills, 5"trimsaw and light but no batterries. Going to get rid of all my Cman stuff and replace with Ridgid brand drills, lifetime warranty on batteries.

 

[kbs2244]

truckdriver has the idea.
You won't have to replace all the cells.
Open up the battery pack and check the voltage of each cell.
Mark any one that is less than 1.2 volts.
But don't take the stack apart.
Some of them a built kind of strange and you don't want to forget how it goes together.
Buy the replacments and swap them out.

They sell books and DVDs showing all the steps,

 

[warmpancakes]

you can rebuild them for about 2 bucks per cell. stop by a rc hobby shop they sell the "cells" there for the rc car guys. just did my snap ons for about 15.00 per battery. Usually one or 2 cells die in the battery and need to be replaced,

 

[Major Ramifications]

9 out of 10 times the batteries give up long before the tool craters. My 18 V C man drills had a problem with the batteries that in turn fried the chargers. I've got 3, 3/8 VSR drills, 5"trimsaw and light but no batterries. Going to get rid of all my Cman stuff and replace with Ridgid brand drills, lifetime warranty on batteries.

Good luck finding some place to replace your batteries. That warranty is completely useless unless somebody is willing to order you new batteries for free, or just hasn't realized that they are losing money on battery replacements.

 

[Major Ramifications]

9 out of 10 times the batteries give up long before the tool craters. My 18 V C man drills had a problem with the batteries that in turn fried the chargers. I've got 3, 3/8 VSR drills, 5"trimsaw and light but no batterries. Going to get rid of all my Cman stuff and replace with Ridgid brand drills, lifetime warranty on batteries.

Good luck finding some place to replace your batteries.

Oh, and the Craftsman 18V ain't worth fooling with. Do yourself a favor and throw it away.

 

[zeebad1]

Thanks for the info on the battery repair/replacement. I'll check out the cells, and see if that's the issue.

Oh, and the Craftsman 18V ain't worth fooling with. Do yourself a favor and throw it away.

This is my 2nd "Professional" series of drills, and I'm very pleased as to how they held up to the abuse that I've given them. I'm not giving up that easily.

 

[billymade]

So, what is the model # on the drill? It should be like this: ***.XXXXXX

 

[Davefr]

I've rebuilt several battery packs. You just need to buy the same size/capacity replacement batteries with solder tabs. It's usually much cheaper then buying a new OEM battery pack.

Don't bother replacing individual batteries. It's generally foolish. If one or 2 cells are bad then the rest aren't far behind.

There are also some tricks. One is to freeze the battery and the other is apply a reverse voltage surge. Results seem to be mixed.