Unacceptable old batteries from T-Mart? (Soshine 26650)

Batteries and Chargers Rechargeable Batteries
1

In December I ordered 4 Protected Soshine 26650 from DX. My Plan was to use 3 of them in series, so I wanted them to match. I placed two different orders the same day, one got shipped, and the other got "back ordered" or something. I decided to not wait knowing that could take some time. And I also wanted 3 batteries that matched.

Placed an order from T-mart in order to get 3 matched batteries.

This is what I got from them:

Battery 1 date: 19/12/2012

Battery 2 date: 08/03/2013

Battery 3 date: 13/07/07 (2007??)

The strange thing is that the one from "07" is shorter. Same length as the ones I got from DX.

The two I got from DX were both marked 11/23/13. So no complaints there.

What do you guys think of this? Im not feeling like putting these three in series. And is one of these really from 2007??? I have not contacted T-Mart yet.

2

Are the three shorter ones unprotected?

3

They are all protected. (At least the description says so..)

4

How does the negative contact plate look like?
Which cells have fepo4 on the wrap?

5

Both cells have similar wrapping with same text. Date is just on different places.

6

Lol there is still one soshine 26650 version missing in your collection, the one with the shiny negative contact plate…

Lol just checked mine and I have different button tops and I have one with different button top and shiny negative side…lol so there are at least 4 different versions out there…all my cells are around 68mm but I have read on the fastech forum that they sell cells with 70mm(I ordered one, the shiny one and it is also 68mm long)

7

Thought the PC was on the neg end, and looks like it's not there on the shorter one.. Weird. Everything there looks like to me, the long ones are protected, shorts ones unprotected - from the + cap, to the bigger disc on the - end, to the labeling.

8

You can check/feel if they have the positive connection to the protection board. Or test it with a DMM on current setting, mine shortcells have all a working overcurrent protection. So I guess they just have a bunch of different versions…

Even how the date codes are printed is very different
19 12 2012. That is clear
13/07/07. DMY or YMD
11/23/13. MDY That is clear too

We can exclude every number over 12 to be the month but what if one has the year in front and the other on the last position?

My cells all have around 4Ah @1A discharge if I remember correctly, the longer ones HKJ tested had 4.3Ah…

9

Im not able to short circuit any of them with a wire.. Nothing happens..

Length on the T-Mart batteries:

70,86

70,94

68,45

Id guess its more likely that the date is 2013/07/07.. Sure hope so, these cant be from 2007? Can they?

Still strange that all three batteries have so different dates, and even size. Same order, same package.

Ill probably do some discharge tests..

10

I would ask - does Soshine produce 26650 with 4200mAh since 2007?

I don't think so. 7 years ago Ultrafire 18650 have only 2400mAh printed on the wrapper and the Trustfire 2400mAh starts 2008 or 2009.

11

Q: that maybe the non-US members might know.

Does any place ever write the year 1st?

As in -> does 13/07/07 mean July 7th, 2013?

AZ

12

That is actually what came first to me. This is regularly used in factories - YYMMDD is the best datecode sorting method.

But then again, why the heck were there THREE different date formats? YY/MM/DD, DD/MM YYYY, and MM/DD YYYY. Really poor standardization. Soshine really need to adapt one and enforce that.