Repacking Makita 18v Lithium battery with New Cells (Save $$$'s) 

I've built plenty of packs with a 150W soldering iron, works just fine.

@@axiom1650 How did you do that, I thought it was dangerous using an soldering iron on batteries.

@@brianbecking1 Quick in and out with a beefy soldering iron, the heat doesn't have time to spread.

@@axiom1650 You are not the only one. But it's not recomentded. How does it make financial to fix ~40€ pack with a 150€ spotwelder? Some BMSes needs continious power to work otherwise it counts as a fault, some are even programmed for limited charge cycles.

The initial check showed ~500mv discrepancies -- which would force than balance themselves - e.g there was 3.6V and 4.1V cells, setting them in parallel is just dumb as it will cause the 4.1V to charge the 3.6V at very high current. This the likely reason for the error. The correct way was charging (or discharging) each cell individually to the same voltage with some 18650 charger that are extra cheap.

That's because the Makita pack doesn't do any balancing. It cannot even check individual cell voltages.

I’m with you on that, I help with the Kenilworthone.

Oh thanks! I strive to put as much use into each of my videos as possible. Glad you found my channel :)

It was a lot of fun and fulfillment to try to retool, and the factory price was cheap. Brand new and original. Quality is guaranteed. contact us

It was a lot of fun and fulfillment to try to retool, and the factory price was cheap. Brand new and original. Quality is guaranteed. contact us

It was a lot of fun and fulfillment to try to retool, and the factory price was cheap. Brand new and original. Quality is guaranteed. contact us

agreed. great video but unless I'm making a lot of these to sell, I'd be ahead buying a new one.

Good catch - exactly the comment I was going to make.

I know im asking the wrong place but does anyone know a tool to log back into an Instagram account? I stupidly forgot the account password. I love any help you can offer me!

@Emilio Angelo thanks for your reply. I got to the site through google and I'm waiting for the hacking stuff atm. Takes quite some time so I will reply here later with my results.

@Emilio Angelo it did the trick and I finally got access to my account again. I'm so happy:D Thanks so much, you saved my ass!

@Abdullah Daniel you are welcome :D

Alternatively, -since I'm concerned about soldering on fully-energized cells,- if you have a charger that has a voltage readout, just charge each cell to the same level as highest-voltage cell.

Yes, I noticed he didn't match voltages as well but a safer option would be to charge to storage or nominal voltage prior to working on the pack. Avoid working w fully charged liion wherever possible.

All the cells must be at the SAME voltage before starting the build. With no balance cirquit, with inbuilt imbalance you will always be overcharging some cells to start with.

ideally you should use a hobby charger. let's you know if you have a bad cell, and charges or discharges the cells for you, balanced

​@@HobbyFinn2 hobby charger

Not really, he should have replace damaged cell covers, it is high risk of shortage and fire :) Also should have used plastic ruller to masure.

defibrillators fix heart rhythm, they don't restart hearts. CPR restarts the heart. Movies lies.

Agree. Its a disgrace that companies make ewaste like that to gain profit and it should be illegal

Just took apart a Victa battery pack. They made it super hard to take apart. I don't have a spot welder so my plan might fall apart. It seems like the cheap batteries come from China but if anyone knows of a good Aus source let me know. (I kind of need to get my weed wacker running in the next 2-3 weeks and can not wait for the China shipping...)

@@IronMan-jv6md You might be able to throw a spot welder togethr from an old, discarded microwave oven. There are some good YT videos on how to do that. Hope you get your pack back up & running.

It would help if the general populous weren't so deeply stupid. The fact is, user-replaceable cells open companies up to all manner of liability. Look at what happened when vaping went mainstream. Clueless people with unregulated mods, using the cheapest 18650s they could get their hands on, combined with sub-ohm coils. Those of us who know better saw the writing on the wall. Did the news outlets blame the idiots who were doing stupid things with their tubes of electricity and setting themselves on fire? Nope. They blamed vape product manufacturers. There is no way any tool company is going to risk the bad press and possible lawsuits that would stem from letting people mix cells, reverse polarities, run garbage cells, etc. We no longer live in a world of personal responsibility. Society chose to "protect" the stupid by blaming every company that doesn't make their products idiot-proof. If I ran a consumer products company, I wouldn't make batteries with user-replaceable cells, either.

@@TheCharleseye True, but some lithium battery standardization would solve that problem. It makes no sense to have an infinite variety of lithium batteries when alkaline batteries are reliably standardized and easy to shop for. An intelligent sentient species wouldn't power its tech with non-replaceable power modules that fail years before the devices they power. What we are doing is stupid & wasteful. And polluting of our environment.

Consider it an investment. With the spot welder, you never have to buy another tool battery, just replace the cells. Over the last 15 years of doing various types of construction, I've gone through easily more than a dozen 18v tool batteries. At this point, I'm ready to start looking at ways to stop spending $100/battery every few years. Plus, there's the fact that he not only swapped cells but gave it an Ah boost in the process. Over time, the spot welder will definitely pay for itself - even without the fact that every new tool opens up new possibilities for other projects. I guarantee I won't be stopping at tool batteries once I pick up a spot welder.

I bought a li-ion based spot welder for 69USD, it works well . Similar to the one reviewed here ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-mt0229lU9sU.html

@@TheCharleseye i really doibt the economics. Both time and the money for the cells themselves also need to be taken into account

@@MartiniPinball That's a false premise. I never get paid for my down time. If I choose to use my _literal_ free time to do something that is beneficial to me, that's me compensating myself during the time I'm not earning money. If that benefit helps me to keep earning money (I use my tools for work) then that's a bonus. The fact that I enjoy tinkering with this stuff means I'm "paying" myself to play with things that I enjoy and will make me money. The downside is what, exactly? As for the cost of cells, they're not that expensive. $5 a piece, new, if you're not buying in bulk and that's for higher capacity, high draw cells. You can use the same kind as what came in the pack for about $3/cell.

Some people get pretty good results from cheap 20 dollar spot welder kits. Not as robust but maybe worth the try. I'm about to try one myself.

you can buy 7 new Makita batteries for the price of 1 welder!

Soldering is OK(but not great) to connect cells together as long as you are experienced with soldering and have a high wattage soldering iron (100w+) so you can melt the soldering fast and remove the iron. Most likely the worst that can happen is you will lose some of the cells capacity if you heat it up to much.

I replaced more ni-cads with lithium than the other way around.!

BOSCH not Bosch Pay attention to detail Make sure the brain sees exactly what the eyes are looking at Also - learn that all CORPORATE {Legal} names are ALWAYS in the ALL CAPS ITERATION The reason for it is above your level of present knowledge. You would have to understand Law and Latin as well as the CORP'SES in the cemetery ** That is your clue **

@@andrew_koala2974 many thanks for you're comments. Just one question if I may. Are you referring to my level of present knowledge in law and Latin? If so, then you are correct. It is above my level of present knowledge in those two subjects, but if you are going to write patronising replies then please try to be specific.

@@andrew_koala2974 Is VANKER a German Co ?

I think you mean a spot welding machine. Tack welding is the temporary welding for non-electronic parts. Since I was misled so I hope you don't mind me pointing that out.

Spot welder* kweld to be exact

bloody comedian.....🤣

lol

I watched this video knowing I was going to do this but knowing it probably wouldn’t work loolollllllolo

You are not alone.

So did I !!!

thank you really helped me a lot you are very good at your job and this video is wonderful I recommend it

Right, battery was OK in the first place, didn't need to drill few hundred holes :)

Exactly

Yea, tbh the lights aren't the most straightforward. Thought I had 2 faulty batteries myself when I first got mine. And mine has lines connecting the bottom lights directly to the battery fault row, as if that's only what they're for... -___- Took more than a few minutes of staring at it before it clicked that the other dots aren't even lights, they all have to use the bottom.

@@drankydrank1 yep. Thats mukeeta...

Yep I was going to say that as well, spot on.

Agreed. Especially since this BMS doesn’t have cell balancing.

They won't be making PCB's there I guess. Too much pollution.

Uddersfield sounds best with a "brummy" accent Ary....

Thats near cleckUDDERSfact

To me it looked like he balanced them. Maybe he forgot to mention it🤔.

He didn't balance them. Also, his Makita pack is an old one that doesn't have a Balance function, and doesn't even have individual cell voltage monitoring. So starting off with a unbalanced pack is just a disaster waiting to happen.

You are absolutely right, that's why the charger went in faulty situation, he should have balanced the cells first. Moreover, first time I see such a BMS, normally should have 0-4-8-12-16-20V connection points....

That would be nice to see the difference 👍🏼

It's the same..he actually Downgraded...The Pack he has is rated for 3.0 AH....the pack he replaced it with is 2.6AH ...both 18Volts but the time maybe he lost about 5 minutes worth and little less power too.

@@paperlessdigs6169 that is incorrect. The cells he used are 2.6Ah, that is correct. But, you must remember that this is a 10 cell pack that is 5s2p. The lower row of cells are added in parallel to double the capacity, making it 5.2Ah. AH ratings only generally reflect run times and not amperage output, and typically speaking lower capacity cells are rated for higher amperage, as long as they are not super cheap knock offs.

Exactly, that original pack had 1500mAh cells. 2 in parallel = 3Ah. He used 2600mAh. Double that= 5.2Ah...

Could you discharge the ones that measure at a higher voltage, so they all end up the same?

@@Mickparrysstepdad yes you can. The thing is each and every cell should have similar MAh and similar charge level. They can be all full, half or even without charge. As long as capacity and charge in each and every cell is same you should be fine.

Thanks mate! I appreciate the high ratings ;)

I was confused too🤷🏻‍♂️, I was like.. am I missing something? he said the charger thinks the batteries faulty! cuz I have tested new in package Makita batteries, good used ones and an old faulty one on my charger, so I know what the lights means. Lol

lol, those battery indicator keys take a bit of study to read sometimes. I totally missed it the first watch through that the rays off the lights mean flashing and that there was even an 80% charged light combination which I guess is useful if you need the battery now and don't want to wait for the final '20%' but that's absent in most other brands I think (I'm most familiar with Ryobi)

@@TwoTall1988 80%-100% takes as much time as 20%-80%, so it's very useful indeed. I now have over 30 18V Makita batteries which I take to the job, so I rarely even take my charger anymore, but I used this feature a lot when I only had a few batteries;

@@Tools-awesomeness You got it, like many guys say, read the manual. So many things you can learn there.

I like how you can change the tune on the charger, so it plays a different song/ notification. The chargers can be hard, I remember making a similar mistake as in the video and almost got rid of a good battery.

Great video otherwise! 👍

right now, in USA at my Local home depot, it would only take about 3 bad battery packs of 4.0 amps to justify the spot welder for fixing my old packs instead... But sadly time is too precious and I probly will not get around to it

But once you get the spotwelder, you can build other battery backs too. I don't think that it's a waste, more like investment.

@@innocentidiot9521 I agree, but the initial investment is pretty steep if your'e not gonna keep making packs... luckily a collegue has invested in one...👍 will probably try it when I'll try and swap cells in my daughters airboard...

I own a kweld because I build battery packs for electric skateboards and large power wall type battery packs. I also rebuild power tool packs.

Dont !!! If you dont understand basic battery layouts then id advise you stay well clear until you have a solid understanding of whats going on..

That's what I do too. Way cheap

@@randybobandy9828 on doing yrs do you have to weld the nickel strips or can they be soldered.

@@6lr6ak6 - if you don't rip off the old nickel strips, then you can certainly solder those strips together. In fact, that makes a better connection AND there is less risk of damaging the cells by tearing/breaking the old welds then grinding them flat!

all bms have internal balancing circuit

@@yolandfathe2863 you just watched a video featuring a bms that doesn't have a balancing circuit. The only management it's doing is disabling charging due to split pack voltage variance and temperature protection along with under volt protection.

I soldered 2 cells using a shitty iron, they work fine, it is def. possible but... Let's keep this as secret knowledge. Someone might have a more susceptible cell, they could get the solder between + and - parts, people are dumb and many bad things can happen so it's best to say not to do it. I definitely won't redo that process.

So what is your suggestion? Is there a safer way?

and?

@@Nikolasz1173 And so it shouldn't be done by people who don't know exactly what they're doing. I also have professionaly rebuilt Ni-Mh and Ni-CD packs and even though I'm professionally trained there's a damn good reason they don't let us rebuild lithium, and that is because one tiny mistake or short and you can lose your fucking hand. The creator of this video acts wayyyyy to cavalier regarding how dangerous this can be, and gives few too many warnings.

​@SuddenPaintball I think anybody attempting to do this (myself included) knows the dangers of this already.

That's why you do it in your neighbors garage, duh.

Old laptop battery.

Dunno where you live but no it's not. New circuit board 20€, salvaged cells 20€ and time used 2 hour let say 40 € so all total 80€ and i can buy new battery cheaper.

@@dare2dare No, laptop cells are low current drain. Definitely not suitable for the high current demand of a powertool battery.

Laptop battery, phone modems, etc.

@@mr.wizeguy8995 I don't think it would take 2 hours especially after a couple of goes. If you did multiple at a time you'd probably be more efficient. Also I struggle to justify putting at $ value at time used unless you were seriously going to use that time productively. I'm a salaried employee so it's not like every time I watch a show it's costing me $50 an hour because It's not like I could do extra work to earn more money than say if I was a a trademen =_=. Even then you would have unproductive hours in the evenings when you couldn't work anyway. Would I rather spend a $1000+ on 10 batteries or $160 repacking 10 on the weekend instead of playing games or watching Netflix. For those who are a bit thrifty and like to tinker I can't say it's a bad idea.

It seems like the highest resistance in the circuit would be the narrow point of connection at the spotwelds rather than the conductors. If I was running into current problems, my first reaction would be to add another weld or suspect that my welder wasn't working well. (I agree that if you're finding manufacturers use thicker strips, that must be the "real world" answer... just thinking out loud & wondering if someone can explain why the weld isn't the bottleneck.)

Some Milwaukee use nickel plated copper. It's far thinner than straight nickel.

I've seen a video where the guy welded multiple strips on top of the other, so you could use the thinnest (0,2 or even lower) and weld two of them in succession?

Yes, my spot welder us good to .12mm. I double it if needed. The Chinese knockoffs use nickel plated steel alot. It is junk. Carries ½ the amps of pure nickel

Laptop batteries usually, but that's disappearing fast

@@TheGuruStud My guess is ebikes or escooters since you can't find laptops with cells like these anymore.

18650 batteries are extremely popular in the vaping community

like the spot welder,out his ass. like,,$16,, joke..

for sure the bms monitors the pack voltage as well. the lxt platform does not allow for deep discharge and this is controlled both on battery level and the tool level. the tool will give a little sign of power reduction and then shortly it will completely stop. it will not crawl to stop, discharging the pack to unhealthy levels. i'm not a specialist in electronics but i think they can spot easily faults by knowing both full voltage and 4 out of 10 voltage. So they can calculate the other 6 cells voltage. It's a rougher estimate but enough to detect single bad cells and not have extra wires and more complex bms.

Makita is famous for using only of the cells (or 2 here) to feed the BMS, effectively wearing the cell unevenly, and disbalancing in general, esp. with longer dormant time. It's probably one of the worst BMS I've seen - virtually all ICs nowadays incl. monitoring on each cell.

@@hhcosminnet this particular pack cannot be controlled on the battery level, it'd require at least 2 (likely 4) very beefy MOSFETS.

The charger does that itself

The bms will balance the cells when the pack is fully charged.

@@randybobandy9828 - The BMS WILL NOT balance anything. That Makita pack doesn't have BMS that balances (most power tools do NOT have balancing). In fact this Makita pack doesn't even monitor the individual cell voltages.... watch the video before commenting!

@@randybobandy9828 it would need more balance leads. It has 1 sense wire.

@@johncoops6897 what? I have rebuilt a dozen ryobi packs and they have bms in them. Each cell has a balance lead.

Very professional expert

Very professional expert

Very professional expert

Very professional expert

there was no issue with the battery. the charger lights both green and red when the battery reaches 80%. if the battery is faulty then the red light would flash.

There are quite a few around at £30 ish that are quite good these days.

I was thinking that. Not sure I would want to be messing with Li batts hope he had a bucket of sand handy.

Plus the cost of the nickel strip and your time. Your cost savings will start kick in by your third or fourth battery.

People have been known to use the spot welder more than once, for other battery packs for example. Each time you use the tool the base cost seems to diminish.

Yes, it is possible, but it must be rated at least for 20 A of continuous current.

Yes he did exactly that in this video. The cells in the original pack where 3ah(2 1.5ah cells in parallel) he replaced them with 5.2ah(2 2.6ah cells). Almost doubling his ah.

Yes, i was thinking the same thing. Just bought a broken bosch battery and it was still charging the Battery but two cells of the 5s2p configuration were at 2,85V and the rest highly charged with 4,23V. Bosch usually only charges to 4.1V per cell pack. You should defiantly match the cells and not just trow them in. Could get dangerous that way. It's probably more dangerous than soldiering the cells in my point of view, even though I spotweld.

so if you just drill a few hundred holes like in the vid would this drain the batteries to a more equal voltage of the individual cells before charging, thanks.

@@eddy3314 not really. The thing is, that the batteries have similar capacity and if you charge them they will all rise in the voltage but the board connected to the batteries does not balance the individual cells. Meaning the will just cycle in the voltages the had between charging and discharging. In many batteries they have bms boards which will balance on a full charge meaning they will all have the same voltage but not in the tool batteries. Maybe in some but not in this one. So you need to balance them individually by yourself. I connect one at the time and charge them so they all end up having the same voltage and then they should cycle in the same voltage range. However if one battery is way lower in the capacity it will drain faster meaning the voltage drops quicker and you have balance them again over time or you could replace the bad cells. That's how I do it and it works for me since a long time. No need to always buy new batteries but don't assume that the manufacturer always has a balancing process. They simply sell more batteries that way and make more money, which is very unfortunate I think

@@jannisalexander1 Thankyou for taking the time to explain, that clears thing up . Have a good day.

@@eddy3314 no worries mate 😊

Realistically speaking most people don't have clue what they are doing, including the author of this video, and you too. These are high drain cells, that continuously deliver 30 A. And the battery has 2 parallel lines, which means it easily delivers 60 A continuously. Peak current is even higher. For example, cordless rotary hammers easily draw more than 1000 W of power. And because of all this high current the original tabs are made of Nickel plated Copper and are 0.25 mm thick. The larger tabs, that cover 4 cells, are approximately 40 mm x 40 mm in size. And you have to make 4 solder joints on these. With each consecutive solder joint made, it increases the thermal mass and hence the heat loss... Even 200 W soldering iron doesn't help, the battery overheats and the heatshrink melts... Ordinary soldering irons are useless here, resistance soldering may or may not help. Google it, see what it is. Than there is no DIY spot welder that can weld thick Copper... Now compare that, to your usual tiny-winy tabs you use - 0.1 mm thick and 8 mm wide Pure Nickel strip... Yes, these are easy to solder, but they glow red under 60 A of current. So you have no idea how wrong you are... Since Copper is around 4 times more conductive than Nickel, you will need 1 mm of Pure Nickel to replace 0.25 mm of Nickel plated Copper. Try and solder this too... A picture is worth 1000 words, and here is what happens with a thin non Copper tabs from China under 60 A load: i.imgur.com/BaohgD4.jpg www.78294.ru/_fr/3/7115813.jpg So, you say "NEVER catch fire or explode"? Trust me, it will, definitely - sooner, or later... It gets red hot after all...

@@2L40K can you spot weld copper tabs diy or you need a more expensive spot welder.

@@EdgeMasterPro K-Weld is the best DIY spot welder and it can not do it. That's because copper requires at least 10000 to 15000 A of current, while K-Weld can deliver 2000 A max. Cheapest commercial welder ( ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-tqhJyy2hUdw.html ) is around $25000 new. Used may be less, but still not as cheap as K-Weld. But there is the "Copper/nickel sandwich" method. Just google it. There is a lot of discussion on the Endless Sphere, for example. Here you have 0.1 mm copper and 0.2, 0.15, 0.1 mm nickel: i.imgur.com/TAO8i1E.jpg The bottom 0.1 mm nickel is rather weak, but the other two are pretty strong. And they are equivalent in conductivity to 0.55 mm and 0.60 mm of pure nickel respectively.

Yes solder is fine IF you have experience and are using a powerful iron. I would never recommend it to other because most people don't have that skill. You will lose a little capacity from heating the cells up but not much.

Also no to the 3500mah panasonic cells. They do not have the power output(amps) required for a power tool. There isn't a 3500mah cell in the market powerful enough for a power tool battery pack. You need 20amps+ and 3500mah cells are 6-10amp depending on brand and model. Imo the best capacity cell with enough power for a tool are sony vtc6 cells. They are rated at 3000mah and output 25amps. A perfect balanced cell.