HaTaX

Well I've ordered a second charger and battery pack and that may be one I test a rebuild on. Then I can keep the old set of cells on a shelf for reuse. I noticed that when using them in the sawzall they get warm and shut down after about 5 minutes of use. (Just cutting up some branches in the lawn) Looking at this chart: http://www.samsungsdi.com/battery/cylindrical-rechargeable-battery.jsp I see the batteries are the 10A models, yikes... Not a whole lot of current available from those cells... My plan was to replace them with the same series of cells, just with a higher current draw rating. If I can get my hands on some INR18650-13R cells that'd be great, but anything looks to be better then what's there now. If I tear it down and replace the cells I'll post up the work here. And as an aside, a high end RC battery charger / conditioner does WONDERS for Ni-Cad cells that look dead. I made a modification so I could get half of the pack on the charger at a time and it has brought most of my Ni-Cad packs back to life. Well, if you consider life being 5-10 minutes of 100% power before they fold, still better then not taking a charge at all.

Well, here goes my first post here! I haven't seen much info out there on the Skil 18V pack (SB18B-LI) that is a drop in replacement for the Ni-Cads that are known for being horrible in every regard. I decided to pick up one of the kits from Home Depot as it was only about $90 from the online store and I have quite a few of these tools floating around including a full sized 7.25 saw that has always been a favorite of mine. The tools were all in great shape but a small amount of neglect to the batteries have resulted in 4 dead packs. Since I've looked at rebuilding the Ni-Cad packs as well I was curious which cells they used in these packs and have taken some pictures to share with the thread here. Looks like this is where you're getting the Skil name, looks to be a well designed product and then they get the lowest rated cells to do the job. When these cells are getting weak I think I'll replace them with some 25-30A units and see how that helps torque and such. Great info here! Thanks for giving me a reason to open these things up.