DIY Lithium Car Battery to start my V8 from a123 LIfePO4 cells

good day everyone today i'm going to be building 12 volt battery that will be able to start the v8 camaro that i have i'm going to make it out of live pl4 cells there are a123s 26 650s i was able to find them on the ebay they come in four different uh modules like that they're collect connected in parallel i also found the bms it's 4s bms 330 amp continuous on a discharge site and it can do over a thousand amp bursts and uh also i was able to find the battery box that i would be able to package this neatly into so if you guys are interested stay tuned [Music] these live po4 cells they're ideal for the for the 12 volt builds because they run a little lower nominal voltage of 3.2 volts compared to a regular lithium ions so using four of them and sirius actually matches the 12 volt batteries voltage pretty good so the first step as far as these go i have 16 of them connected in each module and i'm going to connect each module together in series in order for me to have 4s battery what i'm going to be using to connect these modules together is a nickel strip uh the maximum you can do through this nickel strip is about 10 amps per strip piece uh so uh in order for me to have uh 330 amps to match this bms i'm going to need to run uh 33 pieces of nickel in between each series connection so i'm going to run one from here to here from here to here from here to here so i think what i'm gonna do is uh i'm gonna turn this one over like this uh take this insulation off and then i'll connect them together and then i'm gonna just kind of fold it like that and then i'm gonna connect the bottom together and same thing i'll use the folding technique on this side and this is going to be the main positive negative of the battery pack so i'm going to get going on that all right so spot welding did not work out very good at all all i have is just this diy spot welder connected to my battery and it was not doing the job spot welds kept breaking off and uh especially being inside the car with high vibration and all that stuff it's unacceptable so i ended up scrapping that idea and used some 12 gauge wires the copper wire and i ran nine different bus bars all the way across and ended up just soldering them on it's not pretty and soldering is not ideal because it kind of heats up the cells and it makes them uh degrade a little bit lose a little bit of this capacity and stuff but i was trying to kind of go with my spot welds in between the cells so i wouldn't heat them up as much i was trying to do it and then go as quick as i could so i didn't heat up the cells as much so that's that's how it is i already had this side done i just did the same thing i ran nine 12 gauge copper wire which should be plenty for 300 plus amps since it's just such a short distance just couple inches or so so i did this and then i folded it over as you can see right here so this side is done and then i'm going to do the same thing on this i'm going to fold it over and then i'm going to connect the bottom two together so it's going to connect from a main positive down to here from here over to here this one connects to that one and this will begin to be the main negative of the pack and i'll show you when it's done all right just finished up all the serious connections as you can tell the total voltage of the pack is 13.36 volts my positive and main negative of the pack just to recap there's a serious connection between a negative and a positive then there's another one down here and another serious connection down here i also tidied it up a little bit so i put some of these insulators on the bottom just to kind of help secure the pack so i wouldn't shirt out up against anything so the next step would be to connect to bms bms connects on the negative side of the pack so the positive is going to go straight to the pole of the battery the negative one connects to the bms and on the bms one side will say b minus for the battery negative that's what the side will connect to the battery and the other side says p minus that's the power output and that side will go to the pole of the battery also and i'll show you what they look like on the other side they're just uh there's a couple allen screws that will hold them in so what i'm gonna use oops what i'm gonna use i'm gonna use uh some of this 10 gauge wire i'll do the three of them going on this side three of them going to the bms and then uh that wire is at eight gauge wire i'll just run two of them it's going to go to the pole and also run some eight gauge wire i have that blue one that's gonna go from the bms to the other pole all right let's get going all righty guys it's all uh wired up uh another thing i did the camera died again there but uh another thing i did is they hooked up this balance cable uh so these ones are pretty simple you start with the black one the black one always goes to the main positive the next one over next goes to the second connection next one over goes down here next one over goes here and then the last one goes on the positive side of the battery so this last fifth one right here connects to the top and i just soldered them on i also got this all covered up nice and this plugs in to here and once that plugged in the bms should turn on and we should be able to get voltage off of both of the terminals right there so the next step i'm going to put this all in a box and take it out to the car get it all hooked up and then give it a test run make sure it starts up the car i'll meet you guys there all righty guys i got it installed uh so this right here is a chevy 383 stroker with 11 to 1 compression ratio so it takes a lot of power to turn that over and uh so i got the connectors plugged in focus there we go i'm gonna go turn it over and see if we'll start now kind of moment of the truth i haven't tried it yet so you guys are the first one to see it first wants to see it let's see if we'll focus a little bit there we go everything lights up voltage light is right in there see if it'll start turning over pretty good i haven't been started in a while but as you can tell it turns it over real easy that's awesome all right another thing i want to do is see how much weight it's going to save me so this is the standard lead acid battery so let's see how much this weighs 31.4 pounds and this is our our battery there we go all right 13.6 pounds so it's less than half of the weight huge weight savings between the two all right let's take it inside and finish it up button that up real nice and we'll talk a little bit about it alrighty guys got everything buttoned up there added some packing peanuts to kind of keep the battery in place from sliding around and rubbing on things so the next step would just put it back in the car and see how it works i call this project a success uh it seems to be uh doing what it should be doing it's starting that big v8 with a high compression it's real hard to turn over so it started that no problem even after sitting for a while uh it should last a long time being lithium iron phosphate chemistry uh this these cells have like 2 000 cycle live plus been especially being in the car it's not going to cycle that much they should stay charged up all the way i checked the alternator current and then the alternator peaks out at 14.5 volts which is about 3.65 volts per cell which is pretty it's great for these cells where within the limits everything is uh seems to be working seems to be pretty good alrighty guys i hope you liked it and enjoyed this video i really enjoyed building this i had a lot of fun hopefully it'll last me for years to come i've had that car for you know 10 plus years and always working on it always add new things to it and stuff so this is going to be a great new addition to my camaro i'm going to get it all bolted in there and i hope you guys enjoy the video and i'll catch you in the next one [Music] [Music] bye you

Channel: Side Project

Views: 10,249

Keywords: lithium, ion, lifepo4, life, car, battery, 1000a, 330a, 12v, diy

Id: 7AGPvAEQo8Q

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021