Powering A DeWalt Drill With A Makita Battery Workshop Projects

I guess you could call this a happy accident project, since it only happened from two things that went wrong. First was the project I was supposed to do this week, that didn’t turn out as expected. The second was while talking about cordless drills in general in this video, I happened to take out a drill that I’ve owned for more than 10 years and tried to charge the battery.
Of course, the battery was long dead and would not charge, but it got me thinking about modifying the drill so that it could run off of the Makita batteries that I have. Also mentioned in the video are all of the worn out Makita impact driver I have, so I could use one of those for the battery connector.

Anyway, it went surprising well. It only took a total of about three hours to do the “surgery” and bring back to life a drill I haven’t used in half a decade. Here’s a video showing how I did it:

Here’s the finished drill:

Powering A DeWalt Drill With A Makita Battery

Of course, the drill itself is not in the best shape. I did use the heck out of it back when I was doing doors and hardware for a living, but it still works and definitely worth the effort just for the novelty.

A better look at the “scar” (click to see fullsize):

Powering A DeWalt Drill With A Makita Battery

Powering A DeWalt Drill With A Makita Battery

The screws do the bulk of the work holding the parts together. I mixed some of the grated plastic from both drill housings into the epoxy as filler. Kind of makes it look a bit unhealthy, like the Frankenstein monster it is.

One thing that I used to do a lot of that’s really hard on these drills was driving big #14 screws, usually self drilling into heavy gauge steel doors. Lots of big wood screws as well, so I tried one to see how it worked:

Powering A DeWalt Drill With A Makita Battery

It had no trouble at all, even though the battery wasn’t fully charged.

I’m not sure how much I’ll use this drill, since whenever I use something out of ordinary in a video, I normally get a bunch of comments about it. Not really a bad thing, but can get to be a bit tiresome after reading the same comment over and over.