This is Not a Drill

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A few months ago I bought a mini electric chainsaw from Lidl to cut up wood for the stove. Going by the reduced gas bills I think the chainsaw has almost paid for itself. The chainsaw uses the Parkside 20-volt lithium-ion batteries and I bought a 4Ah battery and charger to run it.

Since then I have bought a couple of other Parkside gardening tools and a larger 8Ah battery which was on offer. In all I've spent about £60 on the batteries so I want to get maximum use out of them.

Now over the last few years I've acquired free or for a couple of quid, several Bosch drills. These are the last of the tools that used NiCad battery packs. The big SDS hammer drill above came with two 24-volt NiCad battery packs, one completely dead and the other almost dead. I bought a couple of 18-volt NiCad packs to run this and a smaller Bosch drill and they have been really useful, especially last summer when I was working on improving the patio lean-to.

So could the Bosch drills be powered by Parkside 20-volt batteries, paving the way to powering all sorts of other things like lighting or USB charging?

I had kept one of the Bosch 24-volt battery packs and gutted the NiCad cells out of it. Next step was to purchase a Parkside adaptor on AliExpress, which cost less than $5.

A bit of tinkering and I had my own adaptor. The only thing that required a bit of ingenuity was keeping the connector at the top of the battery pack firmly in place. It had been held in place by the NiCad cells, but a fettled piece of black plastic pipe of a similar gauge did the job.


And it works. With all of my Bosch drills.

I've ordered up 3 more Parkside battery adaptors and some inline fuse holders, so keep an eye out for more of this.

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