Up yours Black & Decker.

[Marra]

Yesterday I went to the tool store for a replacement battery pack for my
KC14C Black & Decker cordless drill, as the previously repaired shorted
cells had burned out the charger - for which I'd since found a replacement
transformer, I also asked for a price on this item, and the batter had since
started self discharging.

The battery was over £46 & the charger over £18 the £46 is about what I
originally bought the drill for (special offer) and at the cut price DIY
store I could buy 3 cordless hammer drills for the combined price!

A quick rummage in the junk box turned up an Electrolux battery pack with12
cells (I assume its for a cordless vacuum cleaner) The cells were slightly
longer than the ones in the B&D pack, but that turned out not to be a
problem since the impressively sized battery pack is half full of plastic
spacer - once this was taken out and thrown away the bigger cells fit just
fine, the battery inside the connector stem took a little more effort, it
has a plastic cap inside that centres the cell with moulded plastic webbing
to take up the slack of the shorter cell, it was easy to break most of this
away with pointed pliers and mill out the rest with a rotary drill bit in
the modelling/PCB drill.

Interestingly, a while back I found a 12V version of the drill put out by
the bins - which I obviously grabbed in case any spares were good for mine,
it turned out that all 10 cells were S/C and as usual this had burned out
the transformer. The cells were easy to "unstick" with a 12V SLA and I put
it on charge with a replacement transformer (Hayes modem transformer), it
has since worked fine with no evidence of undue self discharge.

Obviously B&D supply crap batteries with their tools, and I noticed that
when I phoned B&D to ask about spares their recorded message announced
"De-Walt and Black & Decker tools" so you won't get any better there either!
Indeed I've seen one or two threads on this group by people having trouble
with De-Walt batteries as well!

So there you go Black & Decker - if you weren't such greedy bastards you
would have made some money out of me, but instead you tried to rip me off-
so I fixed it myself, improved your crap product and told everyone what a
load of crap your product is!

I have designed for black and decker and they screw the last penny out
of suppliers so no wonder the batteries were cheap rubbish.

 

[Dave Dunfield]

My beef with them is that new packs list at $79.99 (Canada) while

why do people expect low volume goods to sell at the same prices pro
rate as mass market goods? No use blaming B&D for the realities of
business.

Any why would these be low-volume items? (because the drill is
disposable due to the fact that it gets replaced for free at the same
cost of two replacement batteries). This drill has lots of life left in it,
and could easily go through several sets of batteries (in other words,
battery sales should be at least a significant portion of drill sales,
and might be an even higher total volume - with the added bonus
that fewer drills might be tossed in the landfill every year).

Nobody is suggesting that replacement packs should be the same
price as the two that are included in the drill package - but the same
price for two batteries as two batteries + drill + charger + carry case?

 

[jakdedert]

Any why would these be low-volume items? (because the drill is
disposable due to the fact that it gets replaced for free at the same
cost of two replacement batteries). This drill has lots of life left in it,
and could easily go through several sets of batteries (in other words,
battery sales should be at least a significant portion of drill sales,
and might be an even higher total volume - with the added bonus
that fewer drills might be tossed in the landfill every year).

Nobody is suggesting that replacement packs should be the same
price as the two that are included in the drill package - but the same
price for two batteries as two batteries + drill + charger + carry case?

Exactly...and I really can't understand the economics of it. If most
people toss the drill and buy a new one (due to the high cost of
replacement packs); how is it more profitable for the supplier? The
only reason I can think, is that the batteries are second-sourced and
not really produced by the manufacturer of the drill itself.
Consequently, they have a much higher cost to the OEM drill maker, who
is in the business of selling *drills*, not batteries.

There must be some sort of agreement in place with the battery pack
producer to not sell the specific packs to end consumers at a reasonable
cost.

jak