All,
I have recently gotten into the hobby of building battery packs. I have made a total of 3 so far, all for my boards. I am advertising my battery building service.
Goal: Provide battery building services to those who do not have access to materials or lack the skills to produce a quality battery pack.
Parts:
Sunkko 788 Spot Welder (Looking to upgrade)
Various supplies from Amazon
BMS from manufacturers or battery builders off the forum such as @ZachTetra
Cells from manufacturers or battery builders off the forum such as @Skyart
Price:
50% of battery price up front ($75 non-refundable)
Hi @AviatorEsk8er
It’s always nice to see people offering their services to the community.
Although as a battery builder myself i got some concerns about the safety of your packs…
1st and most important: put fishpaper between your parallel groups (as pictured). Otherwise they can rub against each other and over time short the cells.
Also under the bms (and top of the battery. there seems to be nothing between the C- and B- cables and the nickel…)
2nd: Fuses! Just use them. They will save the pack and your house in case something goes wrong.
→ fuse the main discharge cable and also the charge cable.
3rd: use a different spotwelder. The sunkkos are not the worst ones, but better ones can be had for a bit more $ (Kweld is the choice of pretty much all battery builder here. Malectrics and the sequre sw1 also seem good)
4th: Wide 25 or 30mm nickel saves you a lot of time and is a much more reliable connection because we kinda stopped putting nickel strips on top of each other.
5th: this is just guessing but the xt60 connector u used seems like a fake one. Use genuine amass connectors only. They can handle the current they say.
6th: as @Athrx mentioned the balance leads shouldn’t cross over each other but i see u fixed this with some fishpaper between them in a later picture.
7th: on the negative end of the cell the spotwelds should’nt be in the middle. This is where the battery has the internal connection. A spotweld there can damage this connection.
Okay just to point out things to improve, no mean thoughts behind
Your welds looks weak, your nickel cut are bad but that’s mostly aesthetics, the wiring is a mess and it’s not made to be the safest
You shouldn’t get your supplies from amazon and resellers from the forum if you wanna sell batteries: you need to cut the middle men as much as possible, get your cells and supplies from reliable source like nkon or fogstarr for example or it’s gonna cost much more than necessary
Be precise on your pricing, with different cells and bms the price from one pack to the other can vary greatly, and saying approx 45 dollars for bms makes it looks like you don’t really know what you’re talking about
Finally, your pricing is high in comparison with other battery builders, and they have the advantages over you that their packs are proven reliable and safe
I can overlook the other pricey listing, but a daly bms doesn’t cost that much, even after single order from Amazon with fast shipping for a 20s version
Thanks for the advice fellas… I really appreciate it. I will be reducing the labor cost to $3 per cell for now. In addition, I will also be building the packs to a set standard which includes fixing all the items that you all noted.
I would recommend getting more packs under your belt before advertising your services.
Keep building, maybe build for some close friends if they ask, and post everything here on the forum (and on Instagram and Facebook if you want). This community will help and guide you to making the best packs possible, and once your quality and consistency is up to standards people will start approaching you about builds whether you have a post up or not.
Building and selling a pack to a random stranger is a huge liability. If something goes wrong with the pack, even if it’s caused by misuse, that customer could ruin your life with lawsuits and possibly even criminal charges depending on how aggressive their lawyer is.
Be safe, be smart, go slow. Learn, watch, listen.
That’s my 2¢ anyway I wish you luck man.
This is great advice from @BenjaminF I’ve been building batteries for about a year now and this is pretty much exactly what I do. I have local listings on Facebook and Craigslist and get a customer every now and then, for various applications (alot of car audio guys want super powerful packs), and i post my stuff on IG and get feedback from alot of the guys on this forum. Every pack presents it’s own challenges and i learn greatly on how to improve and innovate my packs everytime.
There’s also just wayyy better builders on this forum who’s services i simply can’t compete with, which is a hard pill to swallow, but simply forces me to seek customers elsewhere.
I think you have one of three very good options here.
Find someone local and volunteer to help them for the experience.
Find someone local and ask them very nicely to help you (I’ve done this tysm @jack.luis)
Build brick batteries, which are simple, easy, and much safer for beginners.
A lawsuit will fuck you over very hard. Try your best not expose yourself to a lawsuit by jumping in head first. You’ve dipped your toes in, now keep going in, but slowly and let yourself acclimate.
This is the way. I technically offer battery building services too but I have so many friends in this hobby that I can barely keep up and therefore never advertised on here.
Just don’t get discouraged! I know theres a lot of comments on here with lots of negative things to say; but it’s only because we want you to succeed. Theres a huge demand for high quality packs, I can’t tell you how many times ive reffered people to @BenjaminF or @Skyart or @JoeyZ5 because I didn’t have the time.
Also, this is great advice. I give a $100 discount to brick packs because of how much easier they are to build.
only building for friends that you know will not sue you. Take an insane amount of photos of everything, especially steps taken to make things safer. This will serve as proof in any incident that takes your build into question.
yeah, all the rich customers will pay that without a bat of an eye. All the poor customers will go away to other builders.
And you’re left with the exact amount of jobs that you have time for.
Thanks for the advice! I have been working with @skyart , asking him for help and advice. By brick batteries, do you mean such as the one I have pictured above?
Even more brick then that, that is actually kind of a complicated layout.
Buy yeah
1 - get rid of sunko
2 - offer to build packs for friends
3 - let people here see your work
4 - practice practice practice and always exercise extreme caution
Anyone going to talk about how little time OP has spent on the forum?
OP, how long have you been doing esk8? I could have published battery services long ago based off of just the builds I’ve seen in the battery thread. I haven’t, because one, I don’t have time to build batteries professionally, but also, because I have built less than 10 batteries, and I think you need to have at least 10 running batteries before selling.
Have you read the whole battery thread? Do you actually know what you’re doing? I feel like it’s a bit early for someone like you to start selling batteries. In fact, I’m surprised no one complained that a level 1 member is trying to sell batteries lol
Anyway, there is a lot of good advice here, but I don’t think its time to start selling yet.
Alextech, anyone remember that? Similar situation, very young kid didn’t know what he was doing, and lots of people were burned. Not saying that’s going to happen again, but still.
I wish you luck man.
