*POSSIBLE* 18650 and charger for $10 at Home Depot (YMMV and some (dis)assembly required)

Welcome to BLF! I for one am interested and will probably go check my Home Depot for one. :)

Heck, I could use one of those for the cats...dang bread-munching little ba$tards !

I got the battery pack opened. It is an 18650 in there but it has an external protection circuit. If the charger relies on this circuit, it may not work to charge a raw cell. I could not salvage the battery pack.

Why weren't you able to salvage the battery pack?

It was very hard for me to take apart. Someone with more grace and skill could probably do a better job. I have all the elegance of a rhinoceros on crack.

The protection circuit is a pcb directly over the + end of the battery. The battery is a Sanyo UR18650W2. Nothing spectacular. The back of the charger states output at 400mA so the charger would be super-slow.

I guess this might not be the hot deal I thought it was but at least I can keep the cats off of the counter with the other ones!

Well, that is an IMR battery. If you want I can walk you through it. It really is not that hard.

Have you opened these cases before? I can rip the protection circuit off to get to the raw cell. It was the actual platic cases that gave me fits. What is different between an IMR cell and a non-IMR cell? Thanks for your help!

Not those cases but lots of other battery packs. An IMR cell can supply larger amounts of current that an normal Lion battery. The disadvantage to this is they have a lower capacity. The one that you have is a 1500 mah battery.

First take a pair of pliers and snip the wires that connect to both ends. Now you can take the battery out. Then you tear off the wires. Chances are there is a wire on the flat side, (negative) and a strip of metal on the positive side. Either way tear it off. Now you should have a bare battery. Then you just use it. :D

Thanks scaru. I figured since I toasted the battery housing, I might as well see whats in the charger. It has tamper-resistant torx heads… but… I have the cover off (thank you Harbor Freight). The wall-plug-in dealies seem to be plastic-welded to the case. I guess I could un-solder them.

some of the imr batteries can deliver10/15/ 20 amps ..I just salvaged some sanyos from a ryobi llithium drill pack ...i'm calling them lmr because i don''t want to get into what chemistries are being used these days ..[Too much battery research in the past few days]

..They are what they are ..able to be hammered on .. a bit safer perhaps and 1500mah....

Panasonics and sanyos are hard to beat .

Did you get the battery out? From my experience with making home made chargers they almost all run on 5 volts. If you can access the wires going from it to the charge board you could measure the voltage. If it is 5 volts then just use any USB power supply to power it. That is what I am using to charge lifepo4 batteries. :)

The ones he found can do 20 amps. If you give me the model number of yours I can look them up for you.

Oh yeah! Battery is out. The charger is also a wall wart, so no worries about power supply. On the back it claims output is 4V at 400mA. It has nice flashy little lights to tell you when it is 1/3, 2/3, full, and two different fault types. I realize the 400mA output will make it a slow charger. I just hope the charger does not rely on the (formerly affixed) protection circuit!

Do you have a DMM? If so measure the voltage that it puts out when charging the battery. (Disconnect the PCB) If you tell me that I might be able to tell whether it needs the protection circuit.

With a fully charged but rested cell in the charger, I get a constant 2.92V (with a cheap HF mm).

With no load it bounces between 1.55 and 2.19V

EDIT: that was with a battery with a protection circuit. Please disregard till I can hook up some leads. Might be tomorrow…

That was a different battery? When you say it was with a protection circuit do you mean one built into the battery? If so then it doesn't matter.

Welcome to Blf Stuart. Thanks for the heads up on that.

I don’t mean to be ignorant, so please forgive me. It was a different battery (one that I did not take out of the housing) that still had the circuitry involved. The only way I can attach the raw battery to the charger would involve making leads to get it to connect. I probably wont do that tonight. I truly appreciate all of your help!

If it was a different battery that is fine. That most likely means that the charging circuit is part of the PCB since 2.9 volts is not enough to charge a lion battery.

Welcome to your new home, stuart!