Hackaday: The greatest enemy of proprietary hardware and components is time. Eventually, that little adapter cable or oddball battery pack isn’t going to be available anymore, and you’re stuck with a device that you can’t use. That’s precisely what happened to [Larry G] when the now antiquated 7.2V NiCd batteries used by his cordless drill became too hard to track down. The drill was still in great shape and worked fine, but he couldn’t power the thing. Rather than toss a working tool, he decided to 3D print his own battery pack.
2 comments:
I think this is cool. Necessity is the mother of invention and in this case, this individual had a necessity. This is also just the beginning in terms of 3-D printing and its capabilities. I’d be really curious for a follow up to this article after some long term testing to see how the parts held up to repeated use, heat, dust, dirt and other factors that can determine the lifespan of an electronic. It also highlights something that I think we are losing as our parents age and the generations grow up and move on. In today’s society, most people are ready to throw away stuff that no longer works rather than take the time to fix it. Here, it really was only the battery that was the issue and instead of tossing the item in the garbage and getting a new drill that could end up dying sooner than it should because of the general quality of most products on the market now. Because our world has become more of a throw-away society, most manufacturers don’t make long lasting products. They make things fast and cheap, even if we don’t get it cheaply, it is still made that way. I love to find products that are still made the old fashioned way because I know that they will last me a long time. Although 3-D Printing is cool, I don’t want a house full of 3-D printed stuff.
3D printing saves the day once again. I agree with Joshua, I would like to see how this printed battery pack holds up over time. And while I, too, do not want a 3D printed house, this technique could definitely be applied to other appliances. The house I grew up in is fairly old, and the appliances have been breaking down slowly since 2013, and the landlord never wants to put in the extra effort, and my family never wants to pay the extra money, to have any of those appliance fixed, so we made do. This involved having two hot water handles on the kitchen sink – by this I mean that the hot water and the cold water handles both spun counterclockwise to work, rather than having them both spin inwards like a regular sink. This may seem really trivial, but when every other sink ever created works with opposite rotating handles, it takes a bit to get used to. The original fix was done with another counterclockwise handle because the manufacturer of the sink no longer made the parts, and it was by pure coincidence that the landlord had an extra hot water handle in her house from when the sink was installed. I feel like little items like this, or even old, broken appliances bought that are just missing that one piece of obsolete hardware, could be easily and cheaply fixed with a 3D printed part. I think that in this age of 3D printing everywhere, somebody needs to start a business that does jobs like this – making new versions of no longer manufactured items.
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