Video: Cheap, portable spot welder for making your own battery packs - any good?

A neighbor recently totaled his fairly new e-bike and was wondering how to properly dispose of the also-new battery.

AE5X to the rescue - I'm happy to take care of that issue!

The battery is a 60-volt, 24AH collection of Samsung 18650 Li-Ion cells. 112 of them!

I tested a few of them on my battery analyzer just to make sure it was worth the effort to re-combine them into something useful for my radios. All those that I've tested perform as new.

And I wanted to combine them in the same way they are combined now - with spot welds. I've been vaguely aware of the fact that spot welders for battery assembly are available, but didn't know how effective they might be or what they cost.

Just a bit of research answered the cost question and, with Amazon Prime's fast shipping, the "How effective?" question was answered less than two days later.

I'm quite happy with the performance of my Kerpu Spot Welder. The learning curve was quick and painless and the kit contained everything I needed to start welding the batteries together right away.

Another similar welder (Seesii) contains a digital display that shows power level, temperature and delay - I'd probably order this one if I had it to do over again, but the Kerpu is perfectly adequate.

The internal circuitry of these welders is probably similar to that of a camera flash - a big capacitor gets charged and it then dumped onto the contacts when placed onto the nickel strip.

Instructions for the welder refer to the power levels as "gears". There are 11 levels on this particular model but I got the best performance at Level 3. Thicker nickel strips would probably require a higher setting.

In the video below, I keep referring to the strips as zinc - they're nickel.

Directly on YouTube

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