How-to Make a 2s 18650 LION Battery with Balance Lead

This music causes my brain to expect: "Hello, this is Chef John from Foood Wishes and today..." Nice how-to, I'll be creating some packs for my first drone this weekend :)

OK So first, Good instructional video John, so thumbs up for that👍 I hope you don't mind, but I'd like to add a couple of tips:- 1) Only attempt to do this if you have a good QUALITY Iron rated at AT THE VERY LEAST 50W. Higher the better, and as a large tip as you have as it will have a better thermal mass. If you have one, a genuine 200W soldering gun is ideal for this kind of work. The faster you can get the solder to flow on the terminal, the better. You want to have the "Dwell time" as low as possible, to reduce the chance of the battery being damaged. 2or 3 seconds is all it should take, any longer, you need a higher wattage iron/gun. 2) Do NOT use plumbers flux or acid flux to tin the wires of the battery terminals. It's corrosive. Use Rosin Activated (RA) flux instead. Clean the terminals with alcohol once solderig is complete. 3) Have a fairly damp towel at hand when doing this. When you tin the terminals and/or solder the wires to the terminals, as soon as you have taken the soldering iron/gun away from the joint, and the solder has solidified, turn the battery over and press it down onto the damp towel. The towel will act as like a heat sink and drain the heat away from the solder joint, reducing the chance of heat from soldering damaging the battery.

Great tip regarding soldering XT connectors.

oh wow, he has some beautiful radioshack solder. Remember when Radioshack existed? good times

Spot Welding is much safer for these cells. No heat to damage the cell. You can make cheap spot welders using 18650s btw ;D You can solder onto the metal strips that you spot weld onto the cells if you still need.

Build a 6s lion battery with balance port. It's a very nice 'how to video'!

Greate video. Greetings from Mexico.

Great video. I just build a 6S 18650 Li-ion pack a couple of weeks back. It was for a low current application, so I actually used 2 3-cell holders glued together to avoid having to solder to the tops of the cells. I'ev got ~60 functional 18650s on hand after breaking down a bunch of old laptop batteries and am debating building a few packs like you just made for a couple of my planes. I also use the same XT30/XT60/XT90 soldering tip. I 3D printed a cool plastic vise from Thingiverse that I use along with and a couple of sets of "helping hands" to hold parts like this as I work on them. It makes life a lot easier. BTW, I just used up my last roll of Radio Shack solder a while back. That was a sad day. 😥

could we get a 4 cell holder, wire up balance leads to it, and use standard RC hobby charger to charge and balance any random 4 cells we put in?

You're the Chef John of FPV hahaha

Super 👌 👌 film

Hello. Thank you for this step by step video. I would like to make a 2S battery pack (with a JST & Balance connector) from my old spare laptop batteries for my RC car. Exactly like what you had there. Question. Can I charge it with just a balance connector which what it came with from my RC car. Original battery charger that came with the RC car only has the balance connector slot for me to plug in to charge the battery. Can I charge the self made 2S battery the same way? Or I need to invest in a smart charger and charge the self made batteries which I am going to make? Thank you in advance. Cheer! :)

Can I tin the power leads AND the balancing leads together (according to their respective polarity) BEFORE I solder it to the battery? Just wondering because it only exposes the battery to heat only once instead of twice.

Hello. May I ask another question? From the battery pack you made from this video, what mAH rate would you put in charging the 2s pack batteries? 2500mAH or 5000 mAH? I am trying to figure out the correct mAh for my 2s pack. Thank you in advance. :)

I have differnet voltage bateries (3.7V, 3.8V and 3.85V). Can I use these batteries in series? If I do this any damages for the batteries? Please help!

Can I use 3.7V Li-Ion phone batteries for this?

Is the balance lead used for recharging the battery?

can this be done with the batteries being end to en rather than side by side?

stupid question: wasn't it easier to make all these connections on a battery HOLDER rather than the batteries themselves? so you can swamp them out if needed anytime you want. just curious... :-) thanks

How about For parallel connect?