BatteryHookup.com are we talking about this?

a look around.

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New power cells

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So cheap :exploding_head:

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the original purpose :grin:

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Ridiculously cheap. Tempted but looking at the housing, the difficulty with recovery is gonna negate much of those savings. They even say in the description “or you can always try and recover these cells”. Basically “good luck” lol.

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Now i want to try even more :rofl:

… Maybe I’ll regret it. But it’s cheap enough for new cells to be worth the look

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I’ve had P42A’s in storage for five years with only a bit of degradation. If those cells are still above 2.5V and don’t have to be brutally manhandled to salvage then that is an awesome deal.

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Got the battery in and took a look. Bunch of screws on top and still didnt want to come off

Couple big solder pads holding the PCB to the battery cage, took a few minutes of holding my iron at 900 on it to liquidify the whole pad at once to pull the PCB off

Then after the 2nd pad my iron broke. Love it.

Resorted to caveman tactics. Highly effective

Snipped the other end connector instead of desoldering it

final snip to take off the rest of the PCB. Turns out these wires run right to the case connectors


Pretty simple to finish from here. Sadly not in any P groups that are easy to reuse though


There’s convenient pockets in the plastic that are perfect to jam a couple screwdrivers in and push the sides apart


Just some minor cleanup required. Some good flush cutters take care of it without an issue

Overall, about an hour to disassemble. maybe another couple to clean up the cells, but we’ll see. I’ve been meaning to watch fallout anyway, so hey, perfect 2 for 1. For a broke fuck like me, pretty damn solid deal. I just ordered another. Oh, and all the cells I’ve tested so far are at 3.6v

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@null up in here doing God’s work!

Excellent photos and play by play. :clap:

This is exactly what I’ve been wondering about… what it takes to salvage these sweet sweet cells.

Now off to purchase some!!

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Any advice on taking these apart @null ?
I’ve taken a lot of their lifepo4 batteries apart (literally over 3500 cells) and had them short more than a couple times. With these being ion chemistry and high power as well is shorting disasterous? @Battery_Mooch

whats the stuff wrapped around the cell?

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In my experience its only disastrous if it shorts for long enough to completely compromise the can. And even then i’ve never had a catastrophic event, just a circumstance that I couldn’t trust the cell.

I’ve shorted a good number of packs/cells and never had any reason to believe that the cells have significantly suffered for it

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Unfortunately…it depends.
Ten thousand people could short a “standard” chemistry li-ion cell and nothing visible would happen. But any person could short one and have it burst with flaming debris going all over. It only takes a quick search of YouTube to find examples of this.

Even LiFePO4 can go into runaway and send out tons of toxic gas/smoke. It’s harder to do this compared to standard chemistry li-ion though.

It all depends on how charged the cell is, how long it’s shorted, how hard it’s shorted, and whether the cell is already aged/damaged. There’s no way we can predict what will happen.

All we can do is salvage them when at a low charge level and make sure that if they ever get shorted it’s for a verrrry short time and not via a good low-resistance connection.

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Grabbed a couple after seeing your salvage efforts @null. A thousand thank you’s :pray:

Also appreciate the heads up @hummieee :+1:

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It’s actually really straight forward. I think the biggest advice would be to not waste your time on a soldering iron/heat gun if you don’t care about the board. Snip the through hole connections at either end, ape on the PCB to snap it in the middle at the connection point to the case, then you can reach in and snip those.

Shorts weren’t an issue because of how it’s built. The cells are RTV’d in place on both sides of the plastic housing, so when you pull it apart they’ll stay in one side or another. Just snip the leads hanging off as you pull them out of the housing and they won’t short on eachother. I didnt do that, and had a couple get too close in my stack and throw some sparks. The leads they used are so thin they just burnt up and the can is unmarked though

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It’s a loose fish paper/kapton ring

@Battery_Mooch Will the individual cells need wrapped before gluing together and wrapping the group because they don’t have the standard vinyl/whatever wrap?

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You’re saying they have no wrap and just the loose fish paper n kapton? Cant we just use that again?

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Right. The problem is it doesnt cover the whole cell. It’s also fairly thick, so I don’t know that you could fit them side by side in a normal 3d printed holder to glue them together, and if you do, the cells themselves will still roll around

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