Create Your Own Drill

This project started a few month ago and has gone though some major changes and upgrades.
I learned a lot…

How it all started

Well I wanted to create my own powerful drill. Don’t ask me for a reason, it is JBIC (just because I can).
I have always been curious about how stuff works and being able to (re)create stuff is, to me, a good way to prove that I know how it works.

By creating something you will experience things you van not really get from a book.

It starts with an idea…

The idea

I want to create my own power tool and specifically a cordless drill.

Then you need to decide what you need to get it all to work.

Lists

  • Batteries 18650. (I already had a bundle of these from old laptops)
  • circuit board. S6 to protect the batteries against over-charging and over-emptying and balancing the batteries. Li-ion batteries don’t like that much.
  • Power converter
  • LED lights
  • charger
  • housing for the drill
  • switch(es)
  • tools for assembly
  • DC motor

The list seems easy right? now the real thinking starts.

  • What do you mean by housing?
  • charger?
  • where to get the switches / circuit board(s) etc.

Getting things done

These ideas often float around in my head for a while before I start acting on it.
It directs some of my youtube searches for research purposes when I have some spare time.
At some point I think I have enough information to start gathering material.
I already had some experience with 18650 batteries and their circuits, so I went to ali-express and started ordering stuff.

Now the waiting game starts again. some items arive in a few days some in weeks.
So in the meantime what about the housing? First I thought to make it out of wood, but I don’t think I have the tools
for it at this time, so what else?

Time to go to a hardware store and just stroll around and let your mind and feet wander around.
At the plumbing section I think I hit pay dirt.
For this project Aesthetics was not my main goal. I wanted to create a fully functioning tool from just an idea.
Practice and evolution is they way to beauty IMHO so let’s first practice and make it work.
Plumbing pipes it is.

intermezzo

It is good to realize that I have many of these kinds of projects in my head, and I am not always actively working on them.
I have this bullet journal to draw and keep track of these ideas. Sometimes I have no inspiration for months on end or
have had to shelve a work in progress idea again because I have to go back to the drawing board.
Failed proof of concepts or just having ordered the wrong parts. Actually that last part happens more often than I
thought when I started making stuff. Ah well learning by doing.
Eventually most of my projects do get done though because it keeps nagging me in the back of my head.

This drill is one of those projects. I have had to shelve it multiple times because I learned something while working on
it that would delay the final product.

In this case most of my delay came from that pesky thing called Ampere.

The first protection boards I bought could not handle the load of a 775/785 DC motor or the peak load.
I had not taken that into account at all and had to try multiple times and even by specialized tooling to measure these
loads to get to the load I needed. Which was way more than I had calculated.

I had measured these DC motors without and they would draw like 1,5-2,5 amps. I had neglected to measure startup load
and load when actually having to do something 😄. Kinda a big difference!
On peek load it sometimes drew 10+ Amps and none of my circuit boards came even close to handling these kinds of power.
So back to the drawing board again.

I had the hardest time finding the push button trigger. I had no idea how it was called and finding something you do not
know the name of sometimes hard. Knowing what it had to be but not even able to describe it for searches, well it took a while 😄.

Stuff like that, but in the end small steps forward…

building it

Now slowly but surely assembly could start to happen. I thought I had all the tools I needed and all the parts so…

Battery pack

Power was one of the main things, and I wanted to do it safely. I had seen many youtube movies where the 18650 li-ion
batteries would be directly connected to the motor, but all my research tells me that that is a very bad idea,
and I do not like bad ideas.
It is one the reasons though that I underestimated how much work this would end up to be.

In the end I choose to go for a 40 amps S6 balancing board, so I could deliver 24 volts and quite a bit of umph 😄.
The image you see is still of an S4 configuration with double battery per slot. That didn’t deliver enough power though.
I am sorry, but I don’t have a picture of the final configuration, but I choose to go for the S6 in single battery mode.
It delivers more than enough power and lasts all day with normal use.


Drill part

The drill part came next and was fun to make. Making it all fit, and it is always fun when it actually happens as imagined.
It not often does.









final assembly

Now we are actually getting somewhere. Nearing a finished product.

First the handle…

now to a finished product…


Tools used

This complete build has been done with simple tools:

  • Hand steel saw
  • Screw drivers
  • Stanley knife (carving out some holes in the pipes)
  • Soldering iron (electronics)

Result

In the end I also added a light to illuminate the drill while drilling. I also learned that this drill can’t be used
as a screwdriver (not enough tork) so having build in a two-way turning head was something of an overkill 😄

Hope you liked this build.