A Bit of Black & Decker

I recently repaired my old Black & Decker DNJ62 ½-inch 2-speed drill. My mother bought me this for my birthday in 1977, together with an orbital sander attachment. I got a lot of use out of this drill.

Here it is fitted with my much-revered circular saw attachment, perhaps one of the best add-ons ever invented (for me, anyhow), but Black & Decker made a whole host of them to make the best possible use for this sturdy little 350-watt power unit.

This link will take you to the firm's catalogue from, I'm guessing, the mid-to-late-1960s. Notice how in those days of Retail Price Maintenance they were able to print the selling prices because, quite simply, prices were stable and were not subject to change without prior notice. 

In there the closest drill in style to my DNJ62 is the D820, although that came with a ⅜-inch chuck at £14.19.6d. Around 10 years later, mine cost around £20, perhaps a quid or two more from a mail order catalogue.

The old catalogue states that "The D820 drill has a really powerful motor", though it doesn't say what size it is, so I'm guessing that it would be around 300 watts. Whether the motor would in fact be "really powerful" – or rather what I would call "strong", meaning that it would take working like a powerhouse to burn it out – is difficult to gauge at this time. I know for a fact that the smaller D500, with its 5/16 -inch chuck (also in this catalogue) was long-lasting, with the ability to replace the carbon brushes – a feature that was not as easy with the newer drill bodies as used for the D820, which was a forerunner of my DNJ62.

Perhaps it was here where B&D went wrong, by fitting motors that weren't as strong. When I was repairing these professionally, I found that the older motor units had just a single field coil, whereas the newer ones had two, and the gauge of the copper windings was noticeably smaller.

By the 1980s B&D had introduced other ranges of tools to accommodate more serious usage. Okay, so there'd been an industrial range much earlier than this (I will upload a catalogue at some point), but there seemed to be some marketing ploy in separating the users into

·        DIY

·        Mastercraft for more power, more features and higher performance

·        Professional for tradesmen and industry.

It was my experience that offering these other ranges meant that the reliability of the DIY range was subject to significant failure rates. This was confirmed when a Black & Decker sales rep told me that the DIY range was intended to be used only 2-3 times per year. Not much, was it?

On the plus side there were numerous service centres around the country, and no other power tool manufacturer could offer this level of after sales care. Repairs done under guarantee would be posted back to customers free of charge; spare parts were available; reconditioned tools were sold with long guarantees. And the staff tended to be flexible. Those were the days.

I'm not certain what happened, but someone told me that the company wanted to re-launch its Paintmate system. This was like some strapped-on carrying harness with a tank that fed paint to an applicator. You walked round the room with this thing on your back and it slapped on the special Berger paint. Well, the early-80s' Paintmate sort of failed and it should have been left where it was. But instead the company thought it would have another try, this time using Dulux paint. This was a shaggy dog approach if ever I saw one. And to finance it B&D sold off its network of service centres.

Fancy doing that – flogging off a major asset and brownie point generator for an idea that had already shown its determination to fail.

The service centres became BMJ Power, and both it and Paintmate are no more.

Just in case you're interested, here's alink to the later Paintmate TV advert. 

Please don't think that I use only B&D home user power tools, will you? Not now, I don't. I've even had heavy Bosch drills fail on me. No, for my professional work I use a DeWalt drill/driver, backed-up with a Titanium SDS hammer drill for doing big holes and smashing through walls. But I'm thankful for the usage that Black & Decker has provided in the past and, after all, DeWalt is from the same stable, even though its DNA was an import.