Work Light From Broken Drill

Hi there. The other day I at work, I was looking for my work light. (just a little 8" extendable LED flash light). I could not find it anywhere. turns out that I actually left it on a Mack truck, that I was working on the night before. GREAT!! so now I have no work light. I need one badly. So I took an old 12v LED driving light from a freightliner and touched the wires to my 18v dewalt tools battery. I knew it would work, just was not sure for how long. But hey, I have a light now. back to work.

The light, 12" of wire and a battery provided a lot of light. but became quite the pain in you know what. I had to make something better than this. I decided to try and combine an old broken xrp hammer drill and this driving light. Would be great if it somehow worked out.

I was actually quite surprised to find so little number of pieces inside. The last drill I opened up was jam packed full of crap.(lots of wires, circuit boards spacers, bla, bla, bla) i won't mention the brand name. (it was orange). any way... I took a look at all the pieces and decided that it's doable.

As for the switch. it mounts low in the handle of the drill. The battery prongs actually come up into the switch when inserted. it's a variable speed trigger switch. I need it to be an on/off switch. At first, I thought I would just bypass the switch all together and install my own rocker switch. I installed it in the rear cap of the drill. Then I started thinking about the LED light. as with most, if not all. LED lights can only be hooked up to + and - one way. you can not reverse them or they won't turn on. so I decided to just use the foward/ reverse selector switch for the on off switch. To make the trigger switch stay in all the time. I took off the black trigger cover with pliers. I then took a self tapping screw slightly larger in diameter of the trigger switch tube. tightened it into the tube while switch was depressed. this caused the tube to jam up inside the switch. now it always on.

I wanted to use as much of the drill body as possible. I sized up my light bracket to parts if the drill, to see where I can possibly mate the two together. I decided to modify the aluminium nose cone. I cut off the smaller diameter part. then reamed out a little bit of the inside. just enough so the bracket would fit. I used some s-cam washers and a fender washer in the inside of the nose cone. and installed the light bracket to it.

got that all figured out. time to test this ugly duckling out. I re assembled all the pieces of the drill body. then installed the nose cone with light bracket. hooked up the two wires to the switch. doesn't matter which way, since I'm using the forward/reverse selector switch. and viola. it works. it works great.

it worked out really great for me. I have alot of dewalt 18v tools which I use at work alot. now I have a super, super bright work light that uses the same batteries. now alot of people will tell you that it's not safe using 18v to power a 12v light. there kinda right. in this case, as with many led lights in the heavy duty or trucking industry. most led lights are rated for use between 12v-24v or even 12v-36v.
most of the packing will tell you. they have all the resistors and such already installed on the circuit board inside the light body.