Inspired by discount and his electric reel I spent a few hours over the christmas welding and so on. I have mounted the reel in the van, cut a hole in the back door and put in a roller. I was without iot yesterday because I forgot to charge my drill battery and really missed it. To anyone thinking of doing it, go for it, I think it speeds me up and I am less tired in the evening.
Going to get it painted up tomorrow and will post a photo if anyone is interested?
I put mine in before Christmas - bodge mounted on wooden frames while I iron out the problems, when I'll have some frames welded up. They worked fantastically well, speeded things up significantly and reduced my levels of knackeredness greatly,
The biggest problem that I have is that long before the batteries run out of juice they stop producing enough torque to wind the reels. That realisation coincided with the battery charger giving up the ghost, so I needed to fix another way.
The solution (which I'm hoping to work on tomorrow) is going to be to fit the two 12v batteries I recently had replaced on the van in series and run the drills off those. They'll be holding 84 or so amp hours (even though the batteries are slightly ropey). The drills are 18v but all my research suggests they'll run fine on 24v (I guess I'll prove that over the next few weeks).
Well worth a punt IMHO.
Vin