SR-71 Bluebird | Hummie | 110 Artic Blues | 12s7p 30Q

Before you look any further, I know that it isn’t perfect but bear with me lol

I know I could have spent more time making the fishpaper not look helter-skelter, but I didn’t. Deal with it. :rofl:

Anyway, I basically finished my battery today - took another 5 hours of soldering and tedious annoying work. Next battery I build will consider different methods to make it less tedious. Pics time!

Took forever for the last few parallel packs to charge up, but I got them wrapped up and started soldering em together.


Laid them out next to each other to get a feel for what it would look like in the end

By now I realized that there wasn’t any way that the series wires would fit all together pressed into the Hummie cutout, so gotta flip it over so the smaller side is in the cutout. No big deal really, just not what the original plan was. Another realization that I had was that I’d definitely need fishpaper all the way around the sides of each group of cells to protect them from shorting on other things.

I shoved all the balance leads into the cells just to check all the voltages and make sure that I was gonna set up the balance leads in the correct order. Everything ended up checking out, so from here on, I started soldering them all up.

I ended up soldering all of the balance leads on the positive sides of the cells, and added some little fishpaper bits and hot glue to secure each of them.

About halfway through soldering on all the balance wires. I realized I’d have to extend four of them as I was going through but wanted to keep going anyway. Lots of time between the last photo and this one.

At some point between the last photo and the next one, I soldered the series connection between 6 and 7.

Lots more time organizing and extending the necessary wires between last photo and this. Honestly I think it looks pretty good and the balance wires in the middle have a perfect channel to run through.

Next, I had to do something with the main pack leads, and in my circumstance, I’ll be doing a charge only Smart BMS. Thus, battery negative into B- and B+ to load and charge+ and then charge- into C- on the BMS. I haven’t soldered up the charge port or loop key yet so there’s some unpopulated ports. I used this diagram for the notes because I couldn’t remember off the top of my head, however, this diagram is a discharge configuration, so obviously I had to change that.

The B- on the bms uses a solder trace to go between the two connections and I didn’t really trust it to hold 100A so I added an additional 12AWG wire between the two B- connection spots. I put some hot glue on it and fishpaper on top between it and the heatsink before closing it back up. A miscellaneous note - I stuck one of the thermistor probes about mid way in the pack, and I plan to stick the other one on the BMS heatsink or the heatsink for the MakerX (on its way)

After soldering that and closing it up, I proceeded to drop the battery on the ground. Just kidding… No really, I was attempting to place the extremely unwieldy pack into the hummie deck to fit check, and somehow it ended up on the ground. I was fuming :upside_down_face:

Fortunately, everything held up just fine and I was happy I had taped all of the balance leads well so there were no issues. It took a few minutes to untangle it, after which I added the tape across each alternating P group. This made it a lot easier to pick up and flip over into the hummie deck.

The fishpaper looks a little bit uncomfortable, I won’t lie to you, but it will do its job perfectly, and realistically, you guys are the only ones that will see the inside, so whatever. If I was making it for someone else I would have pre-cut all the fishpaper so it looked better in the end.

Anyway, the whole reason of putting it in was to fit check and move on with the build.

The phase wire routing might be a little tricky, and of course like normal the sensor wires are barely long enough, but I think this configuration will end up working out.

Wowow things are getting exciting! Can’t wait to get this finished up.

Surprisingly there is still quite a bit left. Loop key, charge port, all the threaded inserts, padding, skinning the enclosure, etc.

For the loop key, I think I’m gonna use @mmaner 's low profile XT-90S mount, but I will have to see how much the loop key will stick out because it might have pretty low ground clearance. It’s printing right now. I saw one the other day in another thread that mounts right in front of the rear truck, which after checking my wiring, I think it would fit. However, I have no idea where the file is, anyone know?

Exciting times - hopefully I can finish this build this week so the batteries don’t have to sit at 4.2v for too long. I really just need to figure out the loop key location so I can solder the wires at the right length and get a test done on the electronics with 12s. I’m curious what my motor kV actually is and how close it will be to 60k eRPM

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