Malectrics spot welder...lipo or car battery?

Just wanted to throw this up for general discussion as I just order the Malectrics spot welder. Should I invest in some lipos? Or find a cheap car battery?

What do you use and what works for you?

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What ever comes cheaper for you.
Both seem to work fine.
I run mine with the green 3s 5Ah graphen pack and welds are nice and I made a 12s7p without need to recharge the lipo.
I did take my time while welding so the lipo as well didn’t got hot.
I think I paid like 60€ for the lipo pack.

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Andy. What size Nickel where you welding and what settings.
Mine just got here Monday. Also running off a 3s. I ended up ordering .2 8mm

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If I would already have a big bad Car battery I would use it. If I like u have none available atm I would go for the lipo. Smaller, lighter, cheeper if new. Just feel like a better ide to go for a lipo.

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I’m running a big van battery. Works really well.

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0.15 was what i used.
Others said they had good results with lipo on 0.2 as well.
With settings you always need to play a bit.
It’s hard to recommend something.
I got good solid welds with 9-11ms others needed to go up to 17-19ms @rafaelinmissouri

You also might to change the settings when your system gets warm, but you will understand that by the look of the welds.

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62,89$ with shipping to me.
That’s my stand. Only the batteries are missing.

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This time really depends on your battery strength I found. It varied depending on lipo performance.

I was having to use 0.25ms to bond 0.22mm together on a 50C 3s 5000mah lipo (cheapish)

If you press and hold the switch after a weld it will do a quick diag and tell you your current & voltage drop. I usually adjust until I’m in the 430a+ range.

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That’s how it should be. On mine something seem to be wrong with the measurements. I get 1400A at anytime :joy: so I started with 5ms and than went up step by step till welds showed small burn marks. Reducing this setting at 1-2ms and the welds are perfect. If you rip off the nickel there still remains some nickel on the cell terminal.

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Whoa. That’s crazy. I notice it will actually start to not weld completely at 25ms on my cheapo battery once it starts to get low, checking diag it shows amps falling to 350a or so.

I actually ended up switching over to 2x 40C 3S batteries in parallel and it made it much more consistent across the drop.

So far I really like my Malectric. I just watch my welds visually and adjust as needed. Overall it provides a much more consistent weld than my crappy Sunko.

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This is the battery I got.
https://hobbyking.com/en_us/turnigy-bolt-5400mah-3s-11-4v-65-130c-high-voltage-lipoly-pack-lihv-xt-60.html

Malectrics says: 0.2mm nickel strip: 26ms

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Wondering if anyone has been able to make a handle for the 2 weld leads, kind of like what kweld has for their set up

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Looks good.
Definitely get some old laptop or power bank cells to try and adjust everything first.

Can just agree with it. The sunkko I had before doesn’t get any good welds done on 0.15 nickel.
One problem I have with the maelectrics is that like one out of 100 welds or so get out of the row and blast half of the nickel strip away. It’s not that strong that it would affect the cell, but each time I’m close to shit in my pans because of the big spark.
Didn’t fully figure out from where this is coming. Might be a not so good contact between nickel and cell surface or the probes too close to each other. Maybe.
Anybody an idea?

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You’ll need a hefty car battery btw

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I’m rocking a big car battery as well.

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I find this happens most often when I’m tacking nickel to PCB (pre-solder), or if there is airgap between the materials or beneath the weld surface.

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Where do yall get your nickel strips at? And fishpaper stuffs?

Nkon and Ali. Check the battery build thread, there some helpful links mentioned. Unfortunately not every vendor on Ali sell pure nickel strips, so good to know from which shop to buy.

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these batteries is available for purchase with amazon prime, seems like a good deal, does anyone know about the quality of these?

https://www.amazon.com/Graphene-Battery-5000mAh-Vehicles-Brushless/dp/B07R6PTB1V/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?keywords=3s+100c+lipo&qid=1580843924&sr=8-1-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUEyS0sxOUNEUDVWVTgxJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUExMDMwMDUzMTFQQVRNUUpDR0MzSyZlbmNyeXB0ZWRBZElkPUEwOTQ4MDcyTkVZNUczV1BGOEQ0JndpZGdldE5hbWU9c3BfYXRmJmFjdGlvbj1jbGlja1JlZGlyZWN0JmRvTm90TG9nQ2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ==

https://www.amazon.com/Zeee-8000mAh-Battery-Traxxas-Associated/dp/B07K1B79P3/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=3s+100c+lipo&qid=1580844057&sr=8-4

trying to see if these will be ok for my malectrics welder that is slated to arrive today.