djozz, your post is valid but someone who doesn’t know anything about it may be misled to think that the issue is bigger than it is really.
When talking about CuBe toxicity please be specific:
Only its dust is toxic, unless someone grinds the spring there is no risk for them.
I assumed that the reader knew what the risk was as it was discussed in Blue’s spring thread before, but you are right to add that piece of information here also. Still the risk of being in contact with Be-dust is not just theory, as a modder I have sanded many springs for various reasons, it is one of the common things that is done on BLF. Question is of course if when you finally die, can the cause of death ever be backcasted to your BLF modding days? :partying_face:
Nickel/silver plated copper alloys springs are very easy to solder to, and there is no gain in sanding these kind of springs, unless you want to completely remove the plating for some reason.
I sand tops of springs a bit flat to solder a brass button. Also after a spring-bypass I tend to flatten the solder blob for better battery contact, also some spring material comes off then. The blue springs hardly need a bypass of course.
Sorry, it has become slang on BLF: a Blue spring is a very low-resistent nickel-plated BeCu spring that was custom-ordered by BlueSwordM and sold to many BLF-members lately.
Not quite sure why you’d want to do a spring bypass with a low-resistance Be-Cu spring. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of using a low-resistance spring? If doing a spring bypass, might as well use a steel spring.
Well, the word ‘bypass’ infers something that isn’t true, namely that the spring is no longer conducting electric current. Actually, doing a “spring bypass” is exactly equivalent to stacking resistors. The current flows through BOTH paths. In the case of highly conductive springs, our real-world results may not show much change, because there are other possible bottle-necks. But there is definitely a lot less resistance in a circuit that includes a Be-Cu spring compared to one with a steel spring when both are bypassed (or if they both aren’t bypassed, obviously).
Bypassing a single BeCu springs can still yield a non-negligible difference in performance at very high currents. One massive advantage of using a BeCu spring though is that if the bypass fails, your build won’t catch on fire because of a melting spring.
This is why people like Dale always bypass springs no matter what they are made of.
Unless you’re me and you are a lazy incompetent person that can’t bypass springs no matter how much practice or how good my equipment is
That’s why I actually designed a dual spring setup. It’s an extremely potent setup, supporting 20A+ currents without much problem at all. It can actually handle higher currents as Texas Ace and I have tested, but reliability has not been tested above 21A(max current of my testing setup), and it’s not probably going to fare well.
That last one actually comes from one of the R&D centers of the spring manufacturer.
It’s a prototype alloy, from what I understand, having slightly less beryllium and a touch of titanium.
Much more expensive than BeCu C17530, and still quite a lot more than C17500.
But its conductivity crushes C17530 by a long shot while having similar mechanical properties.
If we can actually get this in our springs, that would make them the absolute best.
However, the price would easily double, or even triple, according to the manufacturer.
Will stay in the R&D phase for now.
BlueSwordM, if you have updates on the topic, where will they be posted? Here or in your springs thread?
I don’t read the latter but I’d love to be up to date with this development.
I dont like doing spring bypasses, I am not very good at them. If I can just replace the springs and get the performance that I am after… well, I am going to do it.
Besides, springs in and of themselves are not very expensive, and it is quite time consuming for me to get perfect spring bypasses… I have wasted so much wire trying to get perfect bypasses made. (I know, I am a newbie… .I suck, etc etc etc)
I imagine that it will probably take me several hours to do the spring bypasses on my Q8.