The red is just to show the p-groups, the yellow would be the nickel. It’s an awful drawing, but I think it gets the point across. I’d have 5 of these groups per side with the pack being 2 wide. The top-down would be something like this:
With the bottom layer having 16 cells total between both sides and the top layer having 14.
I actually just started going through this thread from the beginning and saw a few examples of people soldering copper braid to the strips at the ends of the cells without a tab. Is there a good way to do that? I’m not sure how to weld if that is already there and obviously you don’t want to solder with the nickel already welded to the cells.
Edit: Also the sides won’t be touching in the middle. I’ll have a divider and fish paper in there.
Alright yeah you should be fine in this configuration. You can wait for other peoples input though if you want. If you don’t exceed 80 Battery amps you’re golden. Just a sidenote, a 10s3p made of 18650 won’t give you much range, and also will sag a lot under draw. 21700 cells would be better, f.e. Molicells P42A.
Due to the size of the enclosure 21700s just seemed like a bad choice, though my choice to try to squeeze a double stack in there may not have been the best. I think they actually do single stack 18650s in their prebuilt with this enclosure, but it’s ~33 mm deep so I thought I could fit an offset double stack 18650 pack in there. I need to make a gasket anyway to match up the flat enclosure to a slightly concave board. Anyway, double stack 18650s seemed like a better route than single stack 21700s and now I’ve kind of committed to that for better or worse. Range shouldn’t be a big issue though. I’ll be fine with 10 miles and I think this should give 10-15 miles. I’ll be using urethane wheels and a single belt drive.
what would be the best way to wire this,
I have:
10s 4p P42a
110 inches of 10mm x 0.2 mm nickel
about 70 inches of 10awg wire
a lot of fish paper and captain tape.
and hopefully enough solder.
and I plan on putting a loop key in somewhere.
I plan on building the battery tomorrow
thanks again for everyone help
Looks like you have enough width space. Build the pack something like this. Have the nickel fold up and use braided cable or silicone wire as series connections.
In this type of configuration, do you use any kind of insulation between consecutive P packs (i.e P1 to P2) or are the nickel strips touching?
I imagine there is no issue with them touching but would flexing (connecting/disconnecting) continuously cause any trouble?
I’d advise against that. Also 10awg is extremely overkill and will make that pack thicker. Dual 14awg will handle all of the current from that nickel just fine.
