The battery builders club

Braided cable as a series connector is nice.

A tip for when I did these. I first tinned the cable entirely and then cut them with heavy duty snips. This makes the wire not fray at all and leaves a nice clean line. If you are doing a longer length, just tin both ends lightly so the middle stays flexible

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You should have seen me the other night trying to get 200mm heat shrink over an 180mm wide battery covered in neoprene, lol.

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Clean fuckin work @Linny very nice!

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Remember the pack I dropped? It got a little makeover and now looks like this:

10S5P → 15S4P
DieBieMS → ENNOID-BMS-SS 15S

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How much is 2 12awg wires series connection good for?

:arrow_heading_up:

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How is my series connection?

Definitely a bit gnarly man.

More flux, more heat.

Tin your wires well and also make a nice blob on the nickel. The tinned wire and blob should pool together pretty seamlessly when everything is correct as can be seen in many pictures here.

Use something like these to hold the insulation of the wire as you’re soldering the wire to the nickel

https://www.amazon.com/Finger-Grips-Steel-Spring-Clamp/dp/B07V2JRF3C/ref=mp_s_a_1_6

Hemostats also work well for clamping the tinned tip to the blob, then just applying heat onto the blob until the wire just drops into the molten pool.

What is that funky yellow insulation? Reminds me of crimp connectors and not sure why you’d be using them

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They are crimped connectors! I want to be able to disconnect the p groups

Gonna go out on a limb and say you honestly cannot use those in Esk8 dude. Except maybe in a top mounted brick pack build. Somebody else can go into more detail, but it’s simply not safe.

Bullet connectors are far more safe, XT-60’s much more so though bulkier.

But you can’t use those crimp connectors. Safely at least.

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They are bullet connectors

There’s “bullet connectors” like those for automotive or other use, ant then there are Bullet Connectors for high current RC use.

Those are NOT the kind of bullet connectors you want. I would not trust them anywhere near the current levels we normally run, with the amount of vibration a skateboard sees.

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So I should just solder both ends and make it nonremovable then?

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These or these are bullet connectors. You should definitely not be using anything crimp to carry current. And frankly I would suggest abandoning the idea to disconnect P groups unless you’re dead seat on flying with the battery, which is going to take a good bit of work to be possible as regulations aren’t just under 99wh, because all you’re doing is adding fail points.

You need a lot more heat. The solder should look smooth, anything jagged or rough is cold and will break.

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That, or buy some RC bullet connectors, and solder them in place.

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Yeah… was going to try to say this but didn’t want to sound incredibly rude lol. In the end, sounding rude on the internet is definitely better than a fire or him street facing from some sort of electrical related lockup.

Draft I deleted:

Cannot overstate just how much amazing knowledge there is in this thread. Seriously, it’s fucking unreal.

Scroll through this thread and look at pictures. Attempt to copy how things look from others. Others will definitely have some fancy tools and such, but you can get pretty close without. There’s more than a few modular pack builds being posted in here… follow what they’re doing. If what you’re doing looks nothing like those… chances are you’re doing something quite wrong and dangerous.

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How do I get more heat? I have a fixed 60w solder gun. I am not using flux paste but I have flux core solder so it won’t look as shiny
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Step one:
Don’t use a solder gun. Use a soldering iron.
Something with 65-80+ watts, temperature controlled.
A TS100 is a good choice, or a Pine64 Pinecil, or one of a myriad of chinese irons that take Hakko T12 tips, or an actual Hakko that takes T12 tips, such as a 951.
If you’re really strapped for cash, the Saneryigo SH72 is just about the cheapest possible temperature-controlled iron that still takes integrated heater-tips.

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Btw. I wouldn’t have believed this until I actually had it happen to me after a decade of soldering with apparently quite ideal wire.

Some wire sucks fucking dick for reasons I don’t understand even though it looks perfectly fine. Starting out soldering with it under less than ideal conditions (knowing how much heat to use, iron wattage, tip size, flux usage, etc) could be quite discerning, because it just sucks lol.

Wire from Hobbyking has never once let me down. Would recommend sourcing from there instead of Amazon or wherever else when starting out.

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I have a boss level spot welder with two 3s lipos in parallel and 8awg wire. I need these max settings to get a weld with 0.2mm nickel where it sticks to the cell after pulling? Does this make sense? @Anubis