Destructive ideas welcome (YT Video in OP!)

If the cell fits in the shotcup, and the barrel is not choked, it will be safe.

One word.

Tannerite

Well I see two possible outcomes, a screwed up gun and/or personal injury… or it fires like a normal projectile and is boring.

Yea, you probably shouldn’t be posting that word on the internet. :open_mouth:

Why is that? It’s perfectly legal, as far as the ATF is concerned. :cowboy_hat_face:

@JoshK, since I’m the kind of person that likes to be friendly to my surroundings and the general environment, here’s what I would do:

1. Discharge the cell to 0V.

2. Go outside with a bucket of water.

3. Wear two pairs of medical gloves, and a full laboratory suit.

4. Open the 18650 by removing the top cap with a dremel.

5. Proceed with the disassembly of the cell, by first putting the steel casing in the water to clean it, and then doing the rest WITH GLOVES ON. DO NOT TOUCH YOUR FACE IN, and wear a respirator if possible.

Then I could use it for a custom flashlight body :slight_smile:

Yes, but make sure to put the casing in water so that the electrolyte(comprised of HF and other solvents) gets converted into a safer form.

So yeah, just don’t open the cell up without gloves.

Some things I discovered:

1. The cell casing and anode can easily be recycled. The casing can be melted, while the anode can be rather easily separated into graphite and copper. The cathode is another story.

2. There’s quite a bit of copper inside of a cell. With thousands of cells, this could actually get rather profitable if you were to actually recycle it.

3. If you could actually weld them shut, you could make conductive spacers. :slight_smile:

Donate it to the BattleBots

I think this is the best answer so far. You could probably add threading for a twisty head and use the body as a AA or AAA battery carrier. I’d be partial to putting the emitted inside a small hole on the negative end and using the positive contact as a clicky switch. A LOT more work, but it will still kind’a look like an 18650.

Bump for results/video please

I am planning to short it out using some of that nickel strip used to build battery packs. Any day now I should be getting my spot-welder parts, then I can give it a go.

These guys on Youtube are messed up in the head and hilarious with claims of being professionals.

They charge an 18650 at 6v 11A and smash with hammer and with ice pick.

18650 destruction! Spoiler at 2:04 and 5:14

They’re wonderful…

Joshk, please be safe but can’t wait for the video. I don’t know how long a direct short takes to cause venting/explosion, but that might be an iffy time window to get out of harms way after the spot weld? Just a thought. It sounds silly to say, “be careful while intentionally causing that lithium battery fire/explosion”. Hopefully you can operate the welder from behind a shrapnel guard? I don’t have a lot of experience with lithium batteries compared to a lot of folks on this forum, but I won’t ever forget the time I accidentally placed a 25R in a metal holder with leads protruding on top of the microwave. the microwave had an all metal housing, and the sparks from where the lead fell scared the living daylights out of me as I franticly swatter the bettery off of it. Taught my stupid-self a lesson quickly.

The Pos and Neg strips will be 2 different pieces of metal until the time is right. :slight_smile:

Video here: Samsung 30Q vs Nickel Strip - YouTube
It’s rough because it’s my first YoutTube video. Go easy on me :slight_smile:

It doesn’t really show on camera from that angle, but the grass and ground are wet from a rain that morning. Plus there was a large pail of sand just to the left of the volt meter.

Thanks for the video, that was an interesting watch from a technical perspective. I haven’t seen someone do that test with a voltmeter attached before :+1:

Full discharge in about 4 minutes, or 15C, so anything up to about 45A. Looks like the resistive bottleneck was the contact point between the two nickel-plated strips, since that got hottest. I’m mulling over whether a high-amperage switch might be the way to go in a future experiment, but switches can have surprisingly high contact resistances too…

Food for thought :slight_smile:

Thanks :slight_smile:
The first point I noticed show hot on the thermal camera was a point in front of the vice-grip where the nickel strip touched but weren’t well connected. The nickel strip were definitely offering significant resistance because of it was only 0.15mm thick. That resistance could probably be roughly calculated, but I didn’t bother.
A boom would have made a more exciting video, but no-boom is also good to help us understand what the batteries can handle.

The resistance of the nickel strips increases with temperature too.
What you want to do if you’re after dramatic effects :smiling_imp: is use a short thick copper strip and clamp it in a vise.
Oh, and then run away… :smiley: