I just pulled apart an old NightRider bicycle light battery pack that has five NiMH cells that are exactly 18650 size.
Light green shrinkwrap, NT410LAH printed on them, of course “Made in China”
The Intellicharger I4 fits them and is charging one now
I was thinking how useful it would be to have these to fit contemporary flashlight hosts, with appropriate drivers, to give people who I’d rather not have using li-ion cells.
Yes, they are available - I think. I bought some a year or so ago, so my knowledge of availability is just a little bit dated. I have 10 of them with solder tabs that I’d bought for a project I never completed. I’m thinking of using them to upgrade a Harbor Freight spotlight from Sealed Lead Acid so that I can upgrade it also from a dual-filament halogen bulb to a MT-G2. I had forgotten about them for quite a while and they had sat around in the packaging they were shipped in until I pulled them out a month or so ago. I just re-charged them this week. I hope they’re low self discharge! I bought them from an online battery shop. I can’t remember the name of the website. But, you can probably search and find them pretty easily.
Edit: Oh, mine are not the same as yours, but the size anyway. They have a red (or was it orange?) shrink wrap and I don’t remember what markings.
Seems there’s no strict rule about the size, they vary, but it appears these are called “4/3A”
and a lot of the remote control helicopter packs, among other things, use them.
Looks like I got one out of five that can be revived.
I have a few Panasonic branded NiMH cells of that size that I salvaged from a NOS laptop battery pack. They’re old, but they still measure a good 4.3 Ah out of their original 4.5 Ah capacity. Ive mulled over the idea of using them in 18650 lights with an appropriate driver, but their high self discharge and mediocre loading characteristics sorta made me scrap the idea. For the size, price, and convenience, I feel that some decent NiMH AA cells would be a better choice for gift lights.
Willie, you can reduce the size of those pictures if you edit them, they’re kind of big. Got more details on the light you built?
Thanks David and OL for the pointers on the Sanyo and Panasonics.
I got a few Tenergys on sale for $4/apiece to experiment with, and find they’ll run an amber emitter 20 minutes in a cheap zoom light before it gets uncomfortably hot — using one driver I had around
(I found I had one driver identified as “LDCH 7880 1xAA” that I think is supposed to be multi-level — got to figure out where that came from.
but I, uh, mistakenly fed it a li-ion and now it’s a single level. Decent enough to give away for a first experiment, runs 20 minutes before it gets uncomfortably hot in a cheap-cheap zoomie.
I’m going to keep hunting for simple multi-level L/M/H or moon/L/M/H 17mm drivers that will run off single NiMH before I start buying better batteries to go with them, to make giveaways.
Then I’ll have to come up with charger extenders of course, to charge these bigger cells.
If you have any ideas toward making those Ni-MH 4/5SC Sub C useful, I’d try them out.
(I actually have five NiCd in that size and three C size NiCds, from long ago replacing batteries in power failure lights — still good)
I’m not sure what I could do with those cells offhand, I’d need a host that would take whatever number of them would add up to useful-with-a-driver.
Maybe just put them in a battery box with a switch/heatsink/driver/emitter, I guess.
That 4/5C Sub-C is a common size in battery tool packs, I think. If you have an old defunct De-Walt battery pack, I think those would be useful in there. Although less capacity than the original, I think.
I got a couple of lights working on lights using a single 4/3AF “18650-sized” NiMH cell
mwahahahahah …. going to get rid of some of my old flashlights now
.
Using the DX SKU 7880 driver (it’s out of stock at the moment)
It’s one of several made by “LDCH” — the one idescribed as
(there are other “LDCH” drivers like a “LD29” meant for 2.4v and above — maybe good for 2xAA lights)
They are FDK (formerly Sanyo) model HR-4/3FAU. A google search of the model number will find you a retailer somewhere nearby, most likely a speciality battery shop. Click the link then scroll to the bottom of the page: FDK NiMH
Has anyone here used the “LDCH” 1.5v / 1.2v drivers?
(Not the “LDCH-29 3v-and-up driver, that’s discussed several places)
They look like this:
(that’s from some guy selling them for over $20 apiece, but they sell for maybe $5 or less somewhere, I’ve forgotten where)
I’m wondering because I’ve put them in two flashlights that use the 4/3AF NiMH cells (18650 sized, repurposing “last year’s flashlights” to give away - using XPE amber emitters))
and I’m seeing strange behavior — basically high, low, and a rapid flicker for a few seconds in between. Wondering if it’s a bad ground or something.
The ones I bought claimed to have multiple modes and switch between them but I’ve never seen anything but the high, low, and fast dim flicker levels.
Meanwhile, from suggestions there, I’ve tried 1.2v NiMH with amber emitters, with both the LDCH20 and the LDCH30 — similar descriptions, I’m not sure what the difference is supposed to be.
Neither driver is very happy with a single NiMH cell, though they work fine on low; medium is iffy, and high goes immediately into a flickering and mode-changing confusion.
So having gotten the wise advice that this input voltage is likely just too low, I tried and am getting good enough results with a couple of Tenergy “2/3 A” 1600 mAh NiMH cells — plus a 3/8 or 1/2” long magnet to fill out the needed length — to give the driver 2.4v. That works fine, giving the driver 2.4v.
So now I’m hunting for really cheap 2x18560 cheap hosts. Sigh. did I say cheap?
Also looking for a cheaper than usual source for SolarForce’s 1x18650 extension tubes (which cost around $7 apiece retail) and their 2x18650 battery tubes (which cost anywhere upwards of $13 apiece)
The ones I found so far certainly aren’t high drain.
I put a LDCH30 driver into a 2x18650 Solarforce, and it does
— barely moonlight
— high, and
— higher
but the higher brightness only lasts a few minutes before the driver drops to moonlight level.
Checking the cells, which started fully charged, they were both at 1.2v on a DMM, after only five or six minutes of use.
I wonder if the LDCH30 will handle 3x NiMH without melting.
