Introduction: Cheap Drill Conversion

About: College student perusing a degree in electrical engineering

This is a super easy way to make your cheap drill run as either a corded or cordless drill, that way you dont have to throw away the battery. It took me about 15 minutes to do it and it can be done with just about any drill.

Step 1: What You Will Need.

Any drill that is battery operated expensive or cheap you wont be damaging it,

A Direct current (DC) power supply the same or greater voltage of the battery, when it is running the drill it will have a considerable drain on it so dont worry if you go over, I did a 24 volt one and my drill is 12 volts.

Wire cutters or something sharp

An alligator clip, one that works well and is got the plastic shield covering part of the clip is best.

A soldering iron, and solder, you will only need if for a minute.

Electric tape.

Scissors.

Step 2: Step One

As you can see with my drill it has 2 different leads coming out of it that would connect to the battery, at first i was going to solder the wires directly to it then i thought just clip them on.

so you will take your gator clips and cut them in half at the middle as pic 3 shows, then you want to strip about 3/8ths of the end of them, get all the plastic off,

do this for both ends, then twist the copper so it will not fray.

you can strip them easily by using the pliers to score the plastic in a circle all the way around then pull, be careful as you don't want to break the copper wires.

Step 3: Step Two

This is pretty easy, all you have to do is attach them to the drill leads and make sure they fit and dont come in contact with each outer. As you can see with mine they fit perfectly.

Step 4: Step 3

now take your ac to dc converter and cut the end off where you would have the round plug make sure not to cut the end connected to the square converter box.

Plug in you soldering iron so it can heat up.

Now take the end of the wire and split it so it looks like a Y see pic 2

Once again you need to strip the wire like you did for the gator clips, and twist it when finished. yours should look like mine in pic 3

Step 5: Step 4 Connecting the Wires.

so now you can take your gator clips and the ends of the power converter, and put them together, like shown in pic 1,

then twist the two together so they are making good contact an wont fall apart.

do so with both clips and in the end it will look like pic 4

Step 6: Step 5 Solder

for this you will need to solder the ends so they cannot separate, you want to do each area that you just twisted this way the gator clips and power supply will be locked together,

Next tape each end separately so there is no exposed wire,

next tape both ends together, this will help them not break form movement.

Step 7: Last Step Hooking It Up and Testing It Out.

This is the easy part

take each clip and put it on a different lead like I did in picture one, it dose not matter which, as your drill will be a dc motor which works regardless of polarity,

next plug in the power supply and test the drill it should run just like normal, two things can go wrong

either you don't have a big enough power supply and the drill runs slow or you have too big of one and it goes way too fast, either way it shouldn't be a big problem you can switch out the power supply or put a resistor in series with it all to burn up excess power.

then unclip the gator clips and hook the normal battery up, it will work either way,

overall this will give you the ability to make a drill work as either a plug in or cordless depending on your choosing

it is a easy and cheap project,

if you have any thoughts or insight or whatever just leave it in the comments and i will read it.

thanks for looking and have some fun.

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