Soldering 18650 batteries

You should go hot and fast to avoid ruining the battery.

w.

I thought the accepted procedure was to spot weld nickel strips to the battery terminals?

I have no spot welder.

You should look for some batteries that alreaady have the strips on them. It is difficult to solder to batteries with most soldering equipment. If you do try it, you need a soldering iron with lots of mass on the tip so you can do it very fast.

There are several tutorials on line from DIY ers on how to build one from a MOT (Microwave Oven Transformer). These days they use car batteries with pulsing current controllers or capacitor banks that discharge to produce the high spike of current necessary. Youtube probably has some homebrew solutions.

A lot of work just to weld a few tabs, but if you were thinking of building your own electric vehicle it would be worthwhile.

But like someone has already said, soldering to batteries may be difficult or impossible since a lot of them use stainless steel jackets that don't take solder very well. You might need a high power soldering iron with a hefty tip and some very active flux to solder to them.

Anyhow, you can hurt yourself trying to solder to a battery especially a lithium ion type.

On Wed, 8 May 2019 16:47:14 -0700 (PDT), AK wrote as underneath :

The trick I use is to grind the plated surface 2mm-3mm patch (diamond dremel etc) and wet that with flux solder very fast (about 1s @ 350C). put the cell aside for a few mins till stone cold again. Then go back and fast solder the wire. You run into major problems with rech. button cells they seem to be made of some very high chrome alloy which is difficult to get anywhere with (except spot welding!). C+

I will probably get the batteries with the tabs. Though they cost more.

Andy