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March 12, 2007
Shock it back to life
I have a cordless drill. It's one of my favorite tools. I've had it for about 8 years now and after all that time, the Ni-Cad battery packs were pretty much shot. There was so little juice left in the batteries that the drill was more of a noise maker than a drill. One of the batteries was worse than the other and it wouldn't even turn a screw when it had a full change.
Then I came across a hint on Instructables.com for reviving dead nicad batteries. So I tried it. I didn't have anything to lose since the batteries were already shot. Plus, it had the added bonus that it might explode. I like it when things explode. The hint suggests using a welder. Sadly, I don't have one. But a car battery also has a fair amount of current, and I do have one of those. So I got my jumper cables, popped the hood of my trusty little Hyundai, and attached a drill battery-pack to the car battery for a few seconds.
The result: now the battery packs for my drill give full power for about an hour of work! They seem like they're almost as good as new. It's amazing. This makes me want to hook all sorts of other things up to jumper cables.
Posted by neal on March 12, 2007 12:15 PM
Comments
I'm staggered and amazed - not only because of the shock to the battery bringing it back to life, but because of the shock to my RSS reader seeing an update from you. Great to know what you're doing with your spare time!
Please consider hooking a laptop up to your car battery and let me know how that goes.
Posted by: brian on March 15, 2007 10:47 AM