Friend had a bunch of them for his construction biz and they worked OK, no comparison to these modern 20v packs though. The 18v lithium batteries were expensive and low amp hour by today's standard. This makes the batteries a bit cheaper to manufacture. The 20v line is designed from the ground up to be lithium power so the the control circuitry is instead located on each tool (or the adapter). They also require a different charger to charge the lithium cells. These were made as a retrofit, to use lithium on nicad tools. The older 18v lithium packs had the control circuitry on board each battery. When a charge is introduced to shorted cells, the cells can almost spontaneously burst into flame and it can pack a pretty good punch with a big battery like that. If they get stored in a run down state they can continue to discharge below the safe threshold. That's why the charger will refuse to charge some batteries. Charging a lithium pack that's been run down beyond the safe limit can be kinda dangerous. Copper shunts form inside the cells and can short them out. If lithium cells discharge too far the chemistry becomes unstable. That is the circuitry turning the battery off. That's why lithium tools don't seem to run down, they kinda just suddenly quit. Lithium batteries require circuitry to turn off the battery when they reach a certain discharge point. That's my experience and opinion and the whole 2 cents. Reinvest and buy stuff right around Christmas and it wouldn't cost much more for the bare tools and then invest in the batteries. I didn't check the big boombox and other tools. I wanna say the crappy flex flashlight was around $30. Stuff like the little vacuum and angle grinder was like $80+ ea. I looked on ebay a few weeks ago and am amazed at what that stuff sales for. In the end the bulk, weight, runtime, everything of 18v and even my smaller 14v drill was realized.It was like wearing cinder blocks as shoes compared to sneakers. I got the adapter and use it sometimes with some of my more special tools like right angle drill and angle grinder. But then I bought a 20v brushless driver/drill combo to get me by and then decided to just wait it out for the long awaited 18v/20v adapter to use with the older tools. Even had about 8 or so 7-cell R/C packs that I could've tore down to use if the cells were still good. I used to build my own nimh packs back in the R/C days so it would've been no problem. Would've cost me like $100 to do 3) 18v and 2)14v packs from decent 2200mah cells from ebay. A few years back I was going to rebuild mine.
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