Bent battery :)

Oct 27, 2003 3 Replies

Hello;



Well, the Bee was in a pretty good-sized mishap some time ago...



Happily, all the damage to the airframe has been repaired, pending one aileron servo, but my battery pack has a slight bend in it two fifths of the way up. It's made of two lines of five Sanyo 2400 mAh NiMH cells, soldered or welded end-to-end. The bend is about three degrees.



It still provides power, but naturally, I hesitate to send up a four-pound plane on such a questionable battery. I'm wondering now, if the connections could have survived the bend; if anything else gave way (such as the ends of the cells having been pulled loose); and is there anything I can repair in there. I think I could replace the soldered joints, if I could successfully get them unsoldered.



How would you proceed? Try to repair this battery, or chuck it and replace the whole thing? Or, would you even dare to test the battery under load and, if successful, put it back into service?



Waiting on pins and needles... Thanks, Dan.


If the bend is across the cells, definately replace the whole thing. If the bend is lengthwise to the cells, open it, check the joints, and test each individual cell. Dr.1 Driver "There's a Hun in the sun!"

One question:

Is the cost of a battery worth the cost of something going very wrong?

Thanks for the input, everyone;

Yes - intuition would say "pitch it and get a new battery", but at sixty bucks a pop, I decided to at least peel back the shrink-wrap...

As it turns out, the cells aren't welded solidly end-to-end like I'd imagined they were; there are tabs between each pair of cells, which absorbed most of the shock. So it appears the only damage was stretching the shrink-wrap a bit...

I'm going to put on a new layer of shrink-wrap, and pending some more bench testing, see if she'll fly again.

Thanks, Dan.

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