For the record I just got 2 more packs of these samsungs all came it at around 2.5 volts and no cut fingers, pretty happy camper!
As soon as I get paid I’m buying at least one pack. How well do these work in direct drive lights?
I only have 1 DD light, an hd2010 with a dedomed xml2 and I don’t have any of the high dishcharge batts to compare but it runs good. These are IMO a good bang for the buck, genuine, and ship fast
Looks good though I have not personally done pack pulling before. Any one have a link to a good tutorial? I have bought pulls from a member and found ends not smoothed after tabs removal as well as 25% with damaged shrink wrap covers, 5 of 20, so need to get some new shrink wraps from Illumn.com. I smoothed the ends with 240 grit wet or dry sand paper.
There is a tutorial I read on this site, can’t recall where, but basically all I do is what was mentioned , use a 1” chisel and put it in the seam and twist after you remove the tape that covered some of the seams and keep working your way around until you can grab it with your fingers and pry it open like a clam, pull the battery pack out, cut the batterys apart with a pair of dykes and instead of ripping the tabs off I cut them as close to the weld as possible then burnish the sharp ends with the round end of a crescent wrench and they flatten right out smooth, no risk of tearing holes in the batts
Actually just this eve I included one of these cells in a battery test cycle I went thru on a BLF17DD light. Main goal was to test the new Pana BD's I just got in, but these Sam 26's are right in-between unprotected Panasonic B's and the Pana PD/PF/BD class.
Host: SupFire L6 w/BLF17DD, XM-L2 T6 4D/copper:
Pana BD:4.21v - 5.28A
Pana PF: 4.20v - 5.24A
Sam ICR26C: 4.20v - 4.53A
Sam ICR 28A: 4.29v - 4.58A
Pana 2900: 4.18v - 4.24A
Pana B 3400: 4.16v - 4.16A
On the best cells, this light does over 6A.
I finally have one of those adjustable-voltage charging boards on the way from Richard [for the 4.3v –28As’], but if I can get similar performance just by jamming cells into my i4 that would be wonderful.
I have a cheap 4.35v charger (one HKJ was not so happy with), though it seems to only charge up to 4.30v.
And I have a charger marked as 4.20v, but it charges to 4.30v. Looks exactly like this one - http://www.fasttech.com/p/1046800 - except mine says on the back '650mAh' where that one says '600mAh'. The internals could be totally different, who knows. But mine will charge the 28As to exactly 4.30v if you leave them plugged in. I think the light does change color at 4.2v, but checking voltage with no cells in it it's at 4.30v.
This one came bundled with the first cheap 501B I got off ebay.
Any one sure what the actual proper charge voltage is for the batteries from these packs? I do have the XTAR VP2 charger which gives a choice of 4.2V or 4.35V. I know most lithium Ions are 4.2V but LG and Samsung do some 4.35V units. I have some of the LGs. Who does 4.3V and is there anything other than a hobby charger that can properly fully recharge the 4.3 volt batteries?
Purple Samsung ICR18650-28As are 4.30v. These pink 26F/26Cs are 4.20v.
Very very few hobby chargers support 4.30/4.35v cells, I'm not sure if there are any that will natively support both (though you may be able to do it with some fiddling, like adjusting the calibration voltage).
I bought four of the Acer packs and have opened two so far. Batteries inside clearly marked Samsung. Full marking as follows:
ICR18650-26C
SAMSUNG SDI
2A11
Pink wrappers.
The 2 packs I recently got all charged up to 4.2 except for 3 at 4.19 measured with a fluke meter, I’m letting them sit for awhile and see if they hold
For anyone who is interested, this is info I've been able to pull from one of those Acer packs via SMBus:
Design Capacity (mAh): 5200
Design Voltage: 11100
Manufacture Date: 15500
Cycle Count: 1
Voltage: 11.10
Full Charge Capacity (mAh): 5107
Remaining Capacity (mAh): 497
Relative Charge PCT: 10
Absolute Charge: 10
Temp: 25.95
Current (mA): 150
Minutes remaining for full charge: 1844
Cell 1 Voltage: 3707
Cell 2 Voltage: 3700
Cell 3 Voltage: 3696
Cell 4 Voltage: 0
State of Health: 0
Charging Current: 4160
Charging Voltage: 12600
I read all this out as I was about done charging to 3.7v/cell. I think this pack was more like 2.5v/cell to start. At that voltage, the pack asks for a much lower charging current. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was an order of magnitude lower (not a big surprise I think 1/10c is the general recommendation for "pre-charging" overdischarged cells.)
Still need to decode the manufacture date (I think this one was made April 10, 2010, but I need to double check my bit-math), and also figure out how to read out the fields that contain strings, rather than numerical values.
I have this working with packs from Acer, Dell, ASUS and Lenovo. Still working on Samsung, Sony, and HP.
Here’s some discharge numbers for 2 packs that I got a month or so ago measured with a Accucel 6 at 1A.
2611, 2579, 2545, 2543, 2545, 2539, 2511, 2560, 2546, 2513, 2571, 2578
I’ve seen similar capacities. Another datapoint, a few days ago I checked the voltage on 18 cells I pulled from these packs and charged about 5-7 weeks ago.
12 of them, which came out of the packs above 2.5v, are at or just below 4.2v. The other 6 came from a pack where at least a couple cells were down near 2v, and all but one of them is at 4.17v (the other is at 4.11).
I was beginning to wonder if these would ever sell out, but it appears it finally happened. I noticed a few weeks ago that they’d done missing from some of my standing searches on ebay.
I’m having really good luck with these cells and not that I need any more but it’s too bad they sold out cuz there kinda fun to tear apart and stock up 