I love cordless drills! I hate cordless drill batteries…. They never seemed to hold a good charge and always died at the wrong time. But since buying myself a Milwaukee kit containing a combi drill with an 18V Lithium Ion pack that has become a distant memory. Except for my cordless SDS drill.
Now combi drills are a nice idea. A clutch so you don’t destroy screws with them and a hammer mode so you can poke holes in bricks. The Milwaukee kit came with an 18V 1/4″ impact driver so I never use the combi drill for screws. And I live in a house built in 1890-something from proper bricks and the hammer action on the combi drill makes a lot of noise and gently tickles the brick rather than making a hole.
I had to drill a big hole for a water pipe so I borrowed the cordless Dewalt SDS from work and WOW, I HAD TO HAVE ONE!! A quick search showed a good few (it was 2009, they were not as common then) but blimey the prices! Off to ebay, lets see what can be found second hand…. This!
A second hand and slightly battered (now more battered) Ryobi CRH-240RE. The 2 joule impact knocks holes in bricks REALLY nicely! The downside… it came with old Nickel Cadmium batteries… It would drill a couple of 6mm holes and then die. *sigh*
I sourced some replacement packs from ebay which came with Nickel-metal Hydride cells instead of NiCad and they worked really well. I used this drill to put a 4″ hole in concrete with a diamond core drill. I was swapping the packs on and off the drill and charger with almost no rest time.
Skip forward 7 years and the packs are not holding charge any more… Time for some investigation!
Each pack has 20 cells each. I think they are ‘half C’. Marked ‘Panasonic’ but I’m doubtful as they came from China. Note that I put the NiMH cells in the old cases as the Chinese replacement packs would not latch properly!
Portly! Nearly 1.5kg per pack!
Hmm… quite a bit of space in there… I wonder what will fit?