Budget Amazon 18650 Battery Spot Welder by SeeSii Review

hello welcome to rc video reviews today we're taking a look at this portable spot welder by seaside [Music] let's take a quick tour of the unit up top you've got a couple of ports for the probes the spot welding probes and then two buttons the bottom button turns it on so you long press it and that turns the unit on and on the lcd screen you can see you've got a battery indicator a temperature indicator in celsius what they call gears and it really means power output it's not amperage it's not meant to be anything other than a power indicator so in this case it says gear 4 and then there's a delay by default it says 0.5 seconds and that delay determines how long it takes after continuity is detected that the actual current is discharged into your spot weld you can change the delay by pressing the bottom button and you can change the power output by pressing the top button and by long pressing the top button you can change the language from english to chinese and then long press it and you can change it back to english there are two usb ports usba usbc and there's also a button this button does the fine tuning of the power output for the tenths place you might notice that it's wobbling around that's my fault when i took it apart i accidentally broke the button putting it back together the button still functions but if you do notice that wobbling that's my fault you can't blame the manufacturer for that one anyway usbc that's to charge the power bank up itself and then usb a is a power output so you can charge things like your radio or your phone or whatever so usb a on the output and usbc to charge the battery on the back there are some specifications about the unit output voltage is 4.2 volts max output current 650 amp max that's a that's a jolt usb output 5 volts at 2.4 amps max and then type c input 5 volts 2.1 max battery capacity is 7 500 milliamp hours but they do not specify in any of the material that i've read what type of chemistry it is so you do charge with usbc so i'll assume they have some kind of charge controller inside to ensure that if there's any balance requirements or voltage cut off it's handled by the charge circuit so simple usb connectivity up top to charge the unit up in addition to the power bank you also get a set of probes the book says these are gold-plated connectors and then on this side they're copper it does look like this is exposed copper but it's not there's a sheath on there i'm not sure if that's rubber or plastic but it is insulated so don't worry about that you don't you can hold on to those and not electrocute yourself but anyway nice heavy gauge wire to deliver all that amperage they do give you a little metal file which is handy because before you do any spot welding you want to make sure you scuff up your surfaces a little bit they also give you some nickel strip and on the micrometer it's measuring 0.15 and it's about 0.15 on the thickness and then on the width it's looking like about nine millimeters so nine millimeters by 0.15 on the thickness they also provide a usbc charging cable and that's it i did actually take this unit apart to see what was going on inside notice i blew up my warranty sticker and what i'll tell you about the inside of this is there's nothing user serviceable in here in fact it's not that complicated to take apart i took the front plate off and the back plate off and there are a couple of little metal rails in the side of the casing that hold the motherboard up so the terminals and the buttons stay flush with the top of the screen but that said once i got the rails out and i tried to remove the screen what i was really concerned about is there was some kind of connectivity between the motherboard and the battery and honestly without having any kind of schematic i personally didn't feel like sticking screwdrivers and tools around on the inside of this thing because that would have been catastrophically dangerous given what this thing is intended to do i decided that discretion was the better part of valor and you guys were just gonna have to move on without seeing the circuit board i can tell you that the batteries inside look to me like they're lipos they are definitely not 18650 or 21700 style cells they are they look like lipo batteries to me since i've never spot welded anything with this unit before what i want to do first is take this nickel strip out and run a few test runs just to get an idea from a power level where i need to be and i also know from past experience building lithium-ion batteries that i need to jack that power level up just a little bit when we start working on the batteries so what we'll do is i'm going to get my board out here and we're going to put a nickel strip down and we'll make a few test runs we'll just try it out since we'll try and fuse a couple strips together and see how it goes and then once we have a feel for where the power needs to be to weld these strips together we'll try working on the batteries real quick so for my batteries in case you're interested for the channel i've got a couple of malacel milliamp hour cells they're going to be going in my heat wing t1 ranger and i want to do that because i want to get some extra endurance out of that plane right so let's just plug these terminals into the pack and turn it on we'll keep the probe separated long press the power button and i want to get an idea what the screen is showing me okay regarding the power output you can press the top button to cycle through and again they label it gear and you can see it says gear 2.0 right there so gear 2.0 3.0 4 5 and it goes all the way up to 8 and then it turns over back to 1. and then if you want to fine-tune the power output you press the top button so right now on my gear 1.0 and i'll press the top button now i've got 1.1 1.2 and so on so that lets you kind of elevate it just a little bit without going up to the next level so i think in order to start this out i just gonna start it somewhere near the midpoint it's got eight main levels so i'll start at gear 3 and we'll try that out just to see how it how it works at the midpoint on the power output let's put my nickel strip down there and one thing i'll tell you after my last spot welder video i'm going to barely touch the leads just gentle touch gentle touch boy did i get comments on that they came out of the woodwork on that so i'm just going to lay this probe on there a little bit and i do want it to be flat i don't want air in there so i'm just gonna lay that probe on there and i'm just gonna touch this one and make sure we're on a rubber sheath and we are and here we go we should get a nice connection right now okay a little spark and tell you it's hot i can tell you that and i'll try and pull i'm just going to try and pull it apart and see what happens okay as you guys can see at a gear level of three i am damaging the nickel strip trying to pull that weld apart i mean it's it's literally destroying the strip yeah i can't i can't pull it apart with my hands i would need a tool so that looks actually pretty good let's do let's do another one what i want to do this time is i'm going to do a couple of welds in succession i'm just going to hit it a couple of times in a row just to see how how it performs doing that so again i'm going to make sure there's no air in between the two materials and then i'm going to lay the probes on and just barely touch boy i got a lot of feedback on that barely touch business so just barely touch there we go yep didn't seem to do very well that time i'm going to try it again that was better and we'll try it one more time set this guy on there okay just barely touching and it seems to be doing a pretty darn good job of fusing that material together on three and you can see on my board there's the heat coming through um yeah i'd say it looks fine i mean that that's definitely that's definitely welded on there okay let's do a battery all right i know having done this before that you're gonna have to increase the output power just a little bit when you connect to a battery so i've got it set on gear level of four and a half a second delay so i'm just going to touch the terminal to the strip and let's see how it does welding to the battery so there's the first one and i'm gonna try and i want to try and peel it off and see see how it does and see how sturdy that is yeah that's on there pretty good you're gonna you're gonna wind up destroying the strip yeah you're gonna destroy the strip to pull that off that's definitely on there i want mine maybe just a little bit more i don't want to necessarily see a hole in it but i definitely okay that was a pretty good bind at four i'm going to turn it up just a little bit more i just kind of have that feeling that i want a little bit more punch on that one i mean it was at that point where it's damaging the strip to remove it so i think it's sufficient but just a little bit more i kind of want to push it to the point where i don't actually damage a strip but it's close anyway so here we go i'll just lay that terminal on there make sure it's lined up on this side and we'll just touch the second probe and there we go that's a nice fuse now let's go over to the other side the positive terminal we'll just make that connection here gentle gentle touch gentle touch man i got so much feedback on that gentle just barely touching that probe my intention is to keep them close together but yeah barely touching the probe okay that's the second side and i'm going to go back to the negative and we'll touch that one one or two more times just to make sure that thing is on there nice and secure so gentle touch and gentle touch again that one actually blew a hole through at that time so with that said i'm going to turn it back down you don't you don't want to be blowing holes through it down to 4.2 and we'll do one more one more mark on on this guy yep 4.2 that looks pretty good that's on there for sure that's very solid and a couple more on the positive terminal okay that's sufficient for me now we'll flip it over and we'll do a so we've got positive to negative and then we need to do this one will go positive to this negative gently lay the terminal on there no real pressure not pushing hard just gently laying it on there then the second one there we go i'll switch to the negative side let that cool just barely touching there we go and then back to the positive and then back to the negative again i do want it flat i want it flat i don't want air in between the strip and the battery bottom i want this battery to be able to carry 20 amps so these strips are good for about five at their thickness and width they're good for about five so in order to get the full 20 amp capacity and not waste energy due to heat dissipation and heating up the nickel strips you just have to add layers so i'm adding a few more layers of my nickel strips to these batteries so that i can carry a full 20 amps without worrying about the current carrying capacity of these strips you do want to make sure if you're building like lithium-ion packs that you understand your current carrying capacity of the strips that you use this very gentle touches that's all it needs the plane that i'm building these for has 20 amp sc so 20 amps is the maximum current draw i don't believe that the plane is taking that much current to be honest but i don't want to find out that my battery let go in flight because i overheated my nickel strip so we're just going to add capacity i'm adding current carrying capacity that's all that's going on so far the spot welder seems to be doing a pretty good job keeping up with me i'm not noticing any issues with the welds kind of slowing down or getting soft they seem to be fairly consistent which is important you know as you weld especially if you do larger packs if you're spot welding larger packs you definitely want that to you want the battery or the unit to be able to keep up with you so the desktop units they do a pretty good job of that but these portables they can they can slow you down a little bit depending on how well mannered the batteries are this one seems to be doing just fine all right okay that wraps up my first look at this portable spot welder by seaside i guess all i can say is it works i mean i had no issues at all i landed right in the middle of the power output and i was using 4.2 to spot weld my nickel strips on my battery and it did fine i didn't have any issues with it they're on there tight enough i'm have no concern like i'll be damaging the nickel strip before this battery comes apart so i have no concerns at all about the longevity of the welds and uh the thing maintained its composure throughout the entire event it's sitting at 31 degrees celsius and i use the middle power level so what else can he ask for well it does it does what it says it's going to do and that's all i ever ask of this equipment now as far as long-term durability i'll have to see how that goes i'll try and use this for other pack builds but i do like how it is compact and self-contained i like the fact that it's got a usbc charging interface and i like the lcd screen it's easily understood it's not hard to figure out what's going on there i basically plugged it in turn it on and charged it up for a little while and got it running no problem at all so yeah i'd say two thumbs up for me on this one i don't have any problems using this unit and it feels cool to the touch i hope you liked the video and if you do like this kind of content make sure you hit the subscribe button and the notification bell so you know new videos hit the channel that's all i've got for today take it easy hey if you like the work i do here on rc video reviews please consider joining me on patreon for about the price of a cup of coffee you can help me keep making videos just like this one if you'd like to help out there's a link in the description and on your screen

Channel: RC Video Reviews

Views: 83,655

Keywords: RC Plane, Radio Control Plane, RC Airplane, Radio Controlled Airplane

Id: i-Elda-oDk8

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 10 2022