Two new members of my Bosch Fat Pack BAT836 family!

I was able to pick up 2 more Bosch Fat Pack 36V BAT836 batteries yesterday unaltered so wanted to take a picture of them with their fellow BFPs. These two were inside a Currie battery pack where they replaced 3 lead acid batteries! I got them and the electric bike for $75!

They have small metal tabs inserted into the power connectors so that I could charge and check the voltages on them. I'll be running them through my LBD to see how much capacity they contain. 

The lovely duct tape pack to the right of the new BFPs is my home made pack constructed from 20x Doctorbass reclaimed Sony/Konion 18650VT cells. Essentially, the DTP (duct tape pack) consists of four groups of 5 cells from the good Dr. Doctorbass reclaims old Makita tool packs that contain the Sony/Konion VT cells and resells them as a service to the electronics community!

The good thing about my DTP is that it's ready made to check each cell individually and trouble shoot them very easily.

The individual 18650VT cells look like this:

They are nicely nickel tabbed so it's easy to solder them to the next cell. I hope to be able to make a tab welder in the future, but now, soldering is easier.

The Makita packaging includes a nice rubber pad underneath the cells to give them a bit of cushioning. Here's a shot of a pack minus one cell showing the rubber pad.

Even with this pad, the pack comes out much smaller than a BFP which saves a lot of room. Here's a comparison of the thickness of my DTP vs. a BFP.

With 10 packs it can save a considerable amount of room and a little bit of weight. The DTP is also much easier to stack and arrange since they are flat. The BFP has rounded corners and big rubber end bumpers.

The reason the BFPs are so thick is that the cells are staggered instead of side-by-side. There's also considerable amounts of plastic "fins" which give the packs extra protection from abuse and some heat dissipation.

More later,
Ambrose