How to fix a cordless drill with a dead battery pack
How many cordless drills have you seen that are perfectly good, but have a dead battery pack? The sad bit is that it is usually cheaper to buy a new drill than to buy a new battery pack. End result, a drawer full of old drills.
It is possible to find a few more months life by separating dead, iffy and ok cells from several battery packs and combining them into one 'best of' rebuilt pack.
This is easy enough to do, but in reality is a rather temporary fix - as the cells are rarely in the prime of life
A more interesting solution is to strip the battery pack of all the cells, solder some jumper leads onto the battery pack terminals and hook it up to an old car battery.
It does mean that the drill is no longer cordless, but I have an old car battery that - two years after retirement - is still strong enough to power my drill for a solid day's work. Attach a rope handle to the battery and you can once again say goodbye to your power extension cords.
End result: a tool that I use regularly as my first preference drill, and one that is still useful 6 years after it 'died'.