ALCON,
Some, if not most of you know this but for those who don't, this may save you some dough. I was able to salvage my RIGID drill driver and right-angle impact driver batteries by giving them a little wake-up. I bought these cordless tools about 5-years ago and was never very happy with their charging ability. During heavy use, I would usually get no more than 10-15 minutes per charge, although re-charge time was fairly quick and I had a spare. A year later, one of the batteries would not take a charge so I set it aside for warranty replacement which never happened. Then about a week ago, I went to use one of the tools and the second battery wouldn't take a charge.
After finding no joy with RIGID to replace the batteries and knowing replacements are $50-60, I found a few sources that explain how you can revive NiCad batts. using short bursts of voltage to remove crystal dentrite or "whiskers", that develop from overcharging. There are a few methods that can be used so check out the link below for more information.
If you try this, be careful and make sure you get polarity right. I used our car charger to "zap" mine and was able to recover both.
Also see the information on how to properly maintain NiCads, or don't be like me and actually read the manual... I'm getting better!
Orion
http://sup-remodeling.com/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,print,0&cntnt01articleid=4&cntnt01showtemplate=false&cntnt01returnid=39
