I have been building a 16x10 wood shed to replace a "temporary" shed I threw together a couple years ago. We all know the old saying, "Nothing is more permanent than the temporary." But I wanted a new, bigger shed so that I can store all my wood cutting equipment in one place and out of the weather. I will show the shed in a later post.
But what is relevant to this post is that after I was done working last weekend and was putting away my tools. I somehow missed my two Ryobi batteries, which were sitting on a stump. So they got rained on, a lot. I would have thought that these battery packs would be water tight, but they are not. Yesterday, when I tried to charge them, they wouldn't take a charge. The charger showed there was a fault. Yup, water got in the batteries.
These batteries are $79 a piece, not cheap. And these were two fairly new replacement batteries.
Well, I had no idea what damage had been done but I learned long ago that nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I decided to take the battery packs apart and see what I could do to revive them. Fingers were crossed.
The battery pack is held together by five star-drive screws; one in each corner and one at the top of the post that inserts into the drill handle.
These all came out very easy with a star-drive bit that I have. I got this set at a Lidl store near me. Very good quality tools.
Below, you can see the star-drive bit.
Once it was opened up I found two more tiny screws holding the circuit board to the bottom of the battery pack. I was really surprised to see such a full circuit board but these are smart batteries that sync with the smart charger to protect the components, to not burst into flames (a big problem with lithium batteries), and to regulate the charging process.
My guess is that water was short-circuiting the bare solder spots. I dabbed off as much water as I could, shook the piece to get water out from the inside, and then dried it further with a hot air hair dryer. It took about twenty minutes to do each of the batteries. I let them cool down, reassembled them, and then tried them in my drill. Both work perfectly.
Money saved.
Each time I do a repair like this I learn something new, which helps me to repair other things. Having a solid background in science, especially Physics, comes in very handy. I have a huge assortment of tools as well. But for this job I only needed a star-drive bit and a tiny Phillips Head screwdriver (from a glasses repair kit to do this repair.
Don't throw stuff out until you give repairing a try. Even if you can't fix the item, you will learn something usable the next time.
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