Black and Decker Matrix Battery Swap Hitachi 12 Volt

The Black and Decker matrix system is the same thing as the Craftsman Bolt On system - you can swap out the head unit for a drill, a sanding tool, a sawzall, a chop saw - all sorts of stuff. These tools are great and I had a wired Matrix drill, but I also had some other cordless tools from Hitachi that took a different type of battery. Then I saw a cheap Matrix drill on Ebay. This is the process where I took a $16.00 12 volt drill body from Ebay and made all those black decker attachments work with a hitachi battery and my existing toolbox.

So - lets look how to make this drill run on my existing batteries.

Things you'll need:

1. Black & Decker 12 volt drill (no batteries needed)
2. Optional -Flashlight from your 12 volt donor drill type (I used Hitachi)
3. Screwdriver to open everything up
4. Soldering iron to wire it up
5. Some metal scraps for terminals
6. Hot glue to put it back together
7. Gaffers tape to cover up your glue
8. An hour of time

Disassemble both the B&D drill and the flashlight - take a look inside the drill - both ran on three wires, positive, negative, and something else.

Remove the Red, Black, and Blue leads from inside the B&D drill - these are connected to the terminals for the B&D battery but you want the wires to go to your own terminal.

Find the + and - terminals on your preferred battery and put the Red+ and Black- wires into them respectively, then plug the blue cable in where appropriate - it is listed as NTC on the B&D but on my hitachi battery I had to poke around and in the end I needed it to connect to the LS terminal. You will know if it works if you can get the drill motor to spin- be careful as it is easy to spin out of position. Now you know how to wire it correctly so solder stuff together.

Wire up a mounting bracket - I did this by using metal scraps and hot glue. I soldered appropriate wires to the metal and then double checked that it still powered up the drill.

Now you can put it together - Chop up the plastic housings - the flashlight housing was used to hold the battery but you could just use velcro straps - the flashlight housing was not great at keeping the battery in and afterwards I ended up using velcro strap to keep battery in place when doing heavy work.

Hot glue the wire mounting bracket back into place where you feel appropriate. I set this up so i could slide the battery in and lock it in place.

Screw stuff back together and glue it with hot glue and tape it back together - I used some twine and gaffers tape to be sure the stuff stays together.

Try it out! Congratulations! It really is incredible to add this flexibility to these tools. I'm sure you could do the same for any like-like tools like two 20 volt ones. But this is not bad for $16 bucks. Good luck.