Experimenting with Next level DIY battery spot welder
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- Опубліковано 10 лип 2017
- I'm experimenting with 0.3mm Hilumin strip, and apparently there are some learnings for me on how to handle high energy systems like this safely. This video should maybe be named "outtakes", but I had fun nevertheless ;-)
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Video channel: / @wearethewatt2950
Project website: www.keenlab.de
Shop: www.keenlab.de/index.php/prod... - Розваги
Thank you for leaving your mistakes in. It helps me understand what to expect and to be careful of when I try spot welding for the first time soon.
Weld Diagonally on the spots to keep the electrodes the maximum distance apart !!! I Love This welder!!!
My thoughts too...
FIY: The purpose of that slit in the nickel strip is to drive the current into the battery, and up through the other weld spot.
This results in almost equal current in both spots.
This means you must place the electrodes ACROSS the slit, not along it.
The slotted strips are proper battery strips optimized for battery welding.
This in contrast to the cheap plain strips which are not battery strips, just simple nickel band.
They are somewhat usable (and are widely used) but they essentially short-circuit the welding current so that about 70-90% of the welding current
passes straight between the electrodes via the nickel strip.
This is very wastefull in terms of heat, welder load, and battery usage. Also results in excess of poor or failed welds.
I am happy to announce that the next batch of kWeld is in production. I
accept pre-orders through my shop. All pre-order products are on sale
with a 10% discount until Nov 30.
I totally underestimated the demand, and ran out of stock by just pre-orders in less than a week. I plan another batch right after having received the current one. I'll inform again through the newsletter. But in order help me estimate the demand, I have just implemented an "inform me on availability" button for the sold out products that puts you on a waiting list when you click it.
the unit is battery driven, there is no high voltage anywhere in the circuit. You are only in danger when touching high voltage, such as in this example (my heart almost stopped when seeing this, scroll to 7:55): ua-cam.com/video/lT3vGaOLWqE/v-deo.html
you're sure they are all staged? This particular doesn't look like that. You can clearly see the HV arc just before he touchs the electrodes. I just hope that he has a deadman's switch under the table.
By far the best engineered spot welder I've come across. I like to buy one kit. When you will have it available? As I am an electronic engineer, it doesn't need to be completely finished. I will provide enclosure, etc. Regards.
Thanks! A first batch of 25 partially assembled PCBs is already in production (partially because I decided that LCD and dial pot should be extra, to enable you arranging everything in a custom enclosure), I accept pre-orders via credit card or Paypal in my shop: www.kicksurfer.de/index.php/product-category/kspot-welder-kit/ I expect being able to deliver by mid August. There you can choose what you need exactly, and what you want to make yourself.
I bought your spot welder that is on back order, but where can I buy the 0.3 mm Hilumin strips?
I'm sorry but I don't have a specific resource, I buy them from ebay or aliexpress.
I would like to order one but was unsure of what was in the DIY kit. I know the external battery leads and Welding wires aren't included but is that the only parts that aren't in the kit?
I am currently working on an assembly manual, that will clarify a lot of these questions. I deliberately divided the kit into several parts, because a lot of DIYers will have most parts already available, or be able to source them locally at low cost. The individual articles in my shop have part lists, so you can check if you actually need that article.
To build this welder from scratch, you need the electronics module, a fuse, the bus bars, cable and electrode holders, a foot switch, a pair of electrodes, and the set with screws, washers, nuts.
I also offer suitable XT150 battery connectors, but as I am not supplying the batteries, you may also use the ones that come with your batteries. I actually have some batteries equipped with XT90 terminals, and will check if these are suitable. The T-shape Deans terminals definitely are NOT.
The kit will soon be extended by a programmer that will enable you to flash firmware updates. I will show that in my next video, it is very simple, the price for this tool will be around 10€.
I also modeled a housing for it and plan to sell that in the shop, as well to provide STL 3D models.
You can choose to order bare parts, or let me do the machining work. But I have to take a relatively high charge for the latter, because I have very limited time for this kind of work.
The assembly manual will also list the required tools for the individual steps.
Nice spot welder you have there. I was just going to say you should be welding with the electrodes either side of the slot , but then you did that at the end of the video. Are your electrodes just standard copper or the special hardened copper made for Spot welders.
The electrodes are standard copper. I have carefully rounded and fine-sanded the tips, which provides a reasonable lifetime. I realized that if the tips are too sharp, then the tip to nickel strip contact receives too much energy and tends to bake.
I noticed that in the 60j, you had both electrodes on the same side of the slot. Do you think if +and - were on either side it would of worked better?
Then you did it again. The slot is to separate the two electrodes for a better weld by forcing the energy to travel threw the two points and battery top instead of just threw the strip.
yes definitely, that was quite stupid. But it showed that the welder wasn't highly impressed from that ;-)
Hello, your website shows super capacitors in stock. Can I use a bank of several capacitors to power this welder? How many capacitors would be ideal? I do have a 50A 0-18V power supply with CV CC to keep charging the caps.
Thank you.
Capacitance should be >> 10F such that the voltage doesn't drop too much from a pulse. kWeld isn't a classical CD welder that completely drains the caps. 12V is optimal, 30V max. Cap bank ESR is most critical. 1500A target current, welding unit contributes ~ 3mR. Add another 1mR for a typical weld spot.
@@wearethewatt2950 thank you for reply.
I have purchased one of these kits and I lve in the UK. I thought I had a complete kit but unfortunately was missing many if the fittings and dasteners which I had to purchase separately mainly from EBay. I made the bus bar from solid copper and tinned it with flux and solder.using a small butane torch. I cleaned all contacts and soldered them to the copper wire using either the butane torch and separate flux or an old Weller induction soldering gun. My relatively powerful soldering iron was not up to it. The cut ends of the insulation were protected with silver foil snf Ksoton tape from the flame. I bought 10mm copper bar drilled one end for the cable and soldered it in directly, the ither end was turned as a cone. I used lots of copper washers on the cable ends and bus bar which I had in stock. I can see no logic to crimping cables when having a low resistance is so critical. Squeezing two dissimilar metals together both with oxide layers seems to ge asking for trouble. Galvanic currents must also be set up between the metals. My overall resistance as measured by your device was 0.003 ohms despite having a total cable run of 1.2 metres. First attempts today with the finished welder gave excellent results at 10 joules and the power did not need to be raised.
It does strike me that pulling heavy currents through these tiny spot welds in use must cause excessive local heating. Would it be interesting to measure the resistsnce of the spot welded components, say nickel tape to nickel tape, nickelised metal tape to itself and both to a battery base ( cut free from an alkaline cell) to see what is going on and whether two or more spot welds reduces the resistance and how penetrating ir wide a spot weld area should be.
I am very pleased with the unit. Regards
I'm sorry for our mistake. You could have contacted me and I would have sent spare parts asap, we have permanent stock. Glad to read though that you could sort this out and are happy with the tool. If you tell me your order number, then I would like to send you the missing busbars. This is because they are part of the current measurement circuit and a copper replacement will likely lead to false readings. Regarding crimping: when done with the right tool (enough clamping force, should be at least 5 tons for these lugs) you get a so called cold weld. This is air tight and also the best possible solution in terms of electrical conductivity.
It occurred to me that the reason for the 2 prongs on the strip is to force the welding current through the entire weld, and not allow it to pass through the strip itself without touching the battery... however in this video you appeared to be avoiding this option.... is there a reason for that?
Yes I just wanted to comment on it as well. The correct way is to touch opposing parts accross the strip division. It should force more current going through the weld and less shorted through the strip.
did you watch the whole video?
@@jimmysyar889 Perhaps I didn't... :p
James Lewis haha only took 2 years 😂😂
@@jimmysyar889 That's the problem with making such a repetitive video... as evidenced by the fact that I'm not the only one to make this comment, it's hard to get through more than 5 minutes of this, so to have a "oh by the way I was doing it wrong the whole time" right before the end is not ideal.
new stock is coming, and I've just opened for pre-orders at the shop! --> www.keenlab.de/index.php/product-category/kspot-welder-kit/
This is awesome, off to place my order I think.
Where did you get the nickel strips from please?
Thanks :-) I get them from ebay, no special source. Also Aliexpress has tons of them.
WeAreTheWatt Thank you 😊
Your unit looks great, I like the fact it is driven by energy not time, I assume you designed it this way to compensate for battery voltage dropping from fresh charged state to discharged while maintaining constant quality welds? So with 0.3mm you were using 200joules, what do you think 0.15mm nickel would need - 100 joules? Or is it not linear
I doesn't depend on which voltage it gets from the power source (can be 4 - 30V), nor the current that flows (can be 1000-2000A), because it measures the power that is delivered to the weld at the electrode tips. The 200joule that is shown in the video is wrong because the algorithms were in a very early development stage at that time. 0.3 nickel typically needs 50-100j. I haven't tested if this is linear, the normal procedure is to find the right energy level by testing. You start with a low setting, make a test weld with a scrap part, and increase the energy until the nickel strip just tears apart when pulling if off.
The gap in the plate should be between the electrodes. The current path will be different and welding will be more efficient. This gap is specially made.
yup, exactly. I only saw that after the video was online *facepalm*
.3mm is what is usually used on Nicads, is it not? I've never seen the 18650 with anything above .2mm. I'm not surprised the cell bottom gave before the strap. Still, good demo. Thanks.
Quite a few LiIon battery builders in the online community use 0.3mm, as good modern cells can put out 15A continuous current or more. Some even experiment with aluminium or copper replacements.
Why does my unit say " remove short " ? ( Version 2.9 )
please contact me via frank.boeh(at)keenlab.de
Any video using the Supercap ?
Sorry, on my todo list but lack of time :-/
My friend can weld with a thickness of 1 mm?
Asaib Abd haven’t tested it but I bet it can
probably 115 juole looks good enough. It just has to be tight enough without punching a hole in the battery. Very impressive, the plug in models from china are only recommended for 1.5mm and your battery powered unit was easily welding double that.
jony joe I know that I was taking it to the extremes, but that was on purpose. I'll be doing a regular weld task on a custom 6S2P and show how it's like working productively with the welder.
New video online showing some substantial improvements! ua-cam.com/video/rQnODV4VQjU/v-deo.html
Sec 0:53 .. 243J!!!! you scared the crap out of me !!!!
Where did you buy those electrodes?
nothing bought here, all designed and made by myself :-)
great project and it works well . but those lipo batterys are going puffy and wont last long
I'm not recommending the model that I show in the video, but have tested a few others. There are special high discharge models that can handle this use well, and they don't show swell after a number of discharge cycles.
i like to buy one kit, how much price
I am afraid but at the moment I am completely sold out.
As this is the first production batch of this new product, I will wait for
customer feedback before ordering a second, larger batch. I will accept
pre-orders by Sept~Oct and expect to be able to deliver again by Oct~Nov. If
you are interested, I suggest to subscribe to the website newsletter www.kicksurfer.de/index.php/newsletter/
Check out the shop articles, the price varies depending
on what service your order and what you like to make yourself (soldering,
making cables, ...) or what parts you already have available. Many parts can
easily be sourced from your local hardware store.
Where you can buy this welding machine, a good job is impressive.
have you seen the links in the video description?
www.keenlab.de/index.php/product-category/kspot-welder-kit/
Why not just plug it into the wall outlet ?? Batts are expensive and must be charged all the time
How do you get 1500 amperes from that?
LMAO
0:48 are you f-ing kidding me? you just energized it !
as long as I don't get my fingers inbetween and burn myself from the heat, there's no problem with that.
Auto kills 😃