My old hand drill was damaged beyond repair. One of the commutator conductors had broken off from the shaft, and the carbon brushes were fractured when the motor was turning.
So I bought a new hand drill and was very happy about its performance. It had a higher wattage, was able to take in larger diameter drill bits, had an impact function for drilling concrete, was able to start with a lower rotation, and was even able to reverse its turning direction. (Actually, I did not like the latter option, because at one time, I had accidentally put it on reverse and broke a drill bit while trying to drill a hole. I had to disable the reverse changeover switch by taping over it so that I won’t make the same mistake again)
Anyway, today’s topic is about storing my new hand drill.
As I tried to place my new hand drill into the box that I had used for my old hand drill, I noticed that I had to bend the wires coming out from the former. The box was simply too narrow for the new drill. I knew that after repeated bending, the wire would surely break at some weak point.
What to do? Did I need to make a new box?
After much thought, I decided to make new space for it by creating a depression. A square hole was cut away at the side of the box just where the wire would need to protrude. A spacer was made from a hollowed out square piece of 12 mm plywood. Another piece of plywood was cut and secured on top of this as the cover.
This setup gave an additional 22 mm space for the wires – 10 mm obtained from the hole cut out from the original box, and another 12 mm plywood spacer. When I tried the box later on, this extra space was found sufficient for my new hand drill.
If it had not been sufficient, I could still afford to cut a pocket of 7 mm depth out from the 12 mm cover and still be left with 5 mm. I could do this using my movable bed cnc machine.
The modification on the box worked. However, the hand drill seemed to be stored upside down, but I could live with that if it made my drill last longer.