Category Archives: Battery Tab Welder

Faced with a potentially large number of welds for rebuilding a DeWalt battery, I finally integrated two improvements that have been waiting in the wings:  a MOSFET charger disconnect and a foot pedal to disconnect the charger and fire the … Continue reading →

I put the foot switch together entirely from scrap.  I found 2 microswitches on a little bracket, a scrap of paneling, and old hinge, a block of wood and some closed-cell foam for a spring.  The wire is a scrap … Continue reading →

An old battery charger, re-purposed as the charging supply for the welder is rewired and functional.  With thanks to some correspondence from Bob Van Valzah, I went with the dual half-wave arrangement using the center tap to get one diode-drop … Continue reading →

I’ve connected/assembled enough stuff to actually test the first version of the battery tab welder.  And it works!  It’s certainly not in final form, but it very clearly functions as intended, and the welds test good! There’s really nothing to … Continue reading →

The new “Volfenhag” capacitor for the battery tab welder arrived.   Here is it with the old crummy red Pyramid “1.5F” cap.  Doing a discharge test with a resistor, voltmeter and a stopwatch to find RC, it measured at 1.2F.  Not … Continue reading →

The capacitive discharge battery tab welder (inspired by various web postings including ledhacks and the seminal philpem note) has been sort of on hold since I discovered the nominally 1.5F cap I bought measured at 0.3F.  I had even made … Continue reading →