Right now Nkon is checking how many people have bought this batch of plated steel and thinking about what to do.
Frankly it’s too much of an open chequebook to cover any packs built as well, but they should give anyone who can prove they built a pack some kind of recompense - discount against next order along with a refund of the nickel cost. Maybe you could cut the pa k apart and then the layer of plated steel is just like an extra thick anode/neg, it’s a short journey to the real nickel you would lay down on top. Would not rip it off if it’s going to pierce the negative end of the case.
I’d still buy batteries from them, but I guess this is a big lesson to them to check and qualify their stock & to also to work on their passive-aggressiveness, this is not pure nickel and Arjan is flat wrong here.
I would say picked a wrong customer to get moody against. Arjan Kon wouldn’t happen to be the Kon in Nkon? Double jeopardy as business owner.
Ps. esk8 is probably not their major market, but in this era the other e-divisions find out too…whether he likes it or not, tough shit business 2019 lesson
I have had a bit more communication with Arjan. He has also now had a complaint from Australia about the 0.20 stuff (mine is 0.15). Looks like he ran out of stock a month ago and replenished and at least some of that is not 99.67 nickel and is plated steel. Needless to say he is in work today testing all of his stuff, if he has sold a lot of the plated stuff he is in trouble I guess. He said he might have something to compensate me and he will let me know today. Honestly you cant send a pack out into the wild with steel strips - especially in the UK. Within 1 or 2 days it will start getting rusty. Did you see that strip I put in but didnt grind too far down? That started rusting at the edges where there was no plating, that will happen to the pack just being out side in the UK but over a longer time. Steel rusts, flakes away and now not only are you left with open circuits where the welds used to be but you have flakes of metal inside your pack potentially shorting stuff. If that’s for me, I could live with it and just keep an eye on it but I cant give that to my customer.
Is there any sort of coating/spray you could put on it to protect it from rusting? And keep it for yourself. No way can you sell this to a paying customer like you said.
Meh, shrink wrap it as water tight as you can and sell it “as is” With the buyer knowing why, sell it for just the cost of cells so you’ll be able to reorder. Sure someone will buy it.
Yeah I can see you don’t mess about with the welder, they would be a bugger and several nervous hours with a high damaged cells ratio. The perspective that the nickel-plated steel will rust and cause additional resistance is pretty reasonable, if not a worst case scenario. The cell itself is made from steel of course…you are simply adding another 0.15mm thickness to the casing is another perspective.
I’ve seen nasty nickel plated steel with a thinner amount of plating than this & it seems it was pretty hard to get the rust going, so I would proffer that it is ‘premium’ nickel plated steel (if that is a sane thing to say) and that the nickel plating should stop rust forming on the top/bottom <-> cell | steel plated nickel | real nickel & were there rust to form it would much more likely to form on the edge. There is no nickel plating to protect the steel of the actual cell itself, how often do we see a pic of a rusty cell ends in a pack?
Understand if you do not like that or the added resistance/heat even if it works out to part of an amp & a Celsius or two on that part of the connection. Of course a third party is entitled to not have to compromise like that, so yeah you are entitled to stick to your guns. It would not be unreasonable to expect to be able to send back the cells welded to the dodgy nickel and have the lot replaced.
There is such a thing as business insurance, damaged goods tax writeoff, suppier credits any of which he could avail of.
Fair play to Arjan to decide to use his lithium fire extinguisher here & I wouldn’t recommend he does anything but make it right, no point posting here unless he likes arguing with all of us keyb warriors. I think he’s smart enough to stay clear and deal with this reasonably now it’s been outed and cannot be denied anymore.
Nkon’s reputation is probably worth a small container of 30Q’s, maybe like Enertion paying attention ton testing Unity f/w changes with dedicated rigs, there is a lesson to be learned here about testing your cells/nickel before selling it & enjoying a good reputation and not taking for granted the massive effect it has on your sales.
In fairness I have had a good experience when I needed to change an order in the past and it was handled very effectively.
Oxidized or not does not matter much for DC current unlike for high frequency AC.
What does matter though is the increased resistance of steel vs nickel and the resulting reduction in current capacity.
Agreed, he could have just said, “it is possible, I have had to change suppliers as we sold out of inventory, please do the salt water test and we will move forward from there.”
Boom, done!
customer service is just as important as legitimate stock, there are other places with the same stock, and if you can be assured you’ll be taken care of if need be, you’ll shop there instead.
If he’s only used the plated strips for the parallel packs the current will not be that high, now if he’s gone ahead and used it to make the serial connections, maybe a slight cause for concern, also depends on potential buyer of that pack, if they are going to use it on a single at 30a prob no big deal
the second you work in support and you start with “other customers are having problems…” you should not follow that with - “we don’t really believe you”… if he worked for me I would fire his ass lol
Man I was lucky, I bought a huge 10x0,2 roll from them and built like 15 batteries this month got scared shitless sawing the thread but tested the nickel and it came out pure
But mine was ordered like a month or so ago
