The Best Spot Welders Are Only $20!

what is up folks it is bat tube here and today we are going to be looking at one of these amazon spot welders that you can get for super cheap around 20 us dollars or uh mid 30 canadian which is in my case so these things allow you to easily replace something like that sun code that i featured in the other video uh one of these pieces of crap that you can kind of see it's a piece and i'm not even gonna pull that out uh so the one of those goes for about like 150 canadian sometimes more sometimes a little less that's if you get it off of amazon you can get a little bit cheaper directly from china with a bit of a weight but with this so cheap you would wonder why you would not go with an option like this other than obviously the interface on the other one which is not great in itself it's it's really shitty so it's not like you're gaining much with the interface i do want to in the future do a project where we combine these two to use the interface of the senko and the actual welding from this board using a lipo okay so let's get into this you can get these kits it comes with everything that you see here so you get two power leads to connect to a lipo battery or lead acid battery whatever battery you choose to a high amp output battery we will get to that in a moment but here are some your spot welding leads that you connect as well as some screws and not to allow you to connect them to the board you have some heat shrink to insulate these two leads it also comes with some nickel strip i don't believe it's pure nickel i believe it's nickel plated steel strip i don't know how thick i believe maybe 1.5 or 0.1 of a millimeter so it comes with a couple things as well as obviously the board and two components that you need to install it comes with a 25 volt 2200 microfarad capacitor and as well as a buzzer the buzzer is for auditory signals so you know when it's spot welding so it does say to remove this but i would suggest you leave it unless you want a really really loud beeper i prefer to leave it on just so i can hear the beep i don't need to hear loud just need to hear it clear all right so these two components go on the board you have the buzzer it goes in big one there's a positive indicator on the bottom and on the buzzer in the light there's a positive indicator right there so you match those up and it fits in quite nicely just enough so you have enough on the back where you can solder them in so that is one of the components that you'll have to solder under the board as well as that capacitor that we were talking about earlier the 25 volt 2200 that goes in here with positive and negative on capacitor you will have negative right there marked out like so so you just have to put the negative and the negative and solder it now you can either have it sitting up like so or my plan was to have it like so laying sideways was my intended position for it so depending if you want the capacitor to stand up or lay on its side both of those positions require different lengths of wire so make that decision prior to soldering because you can only make that decision once after you snip off the excess all right so i fired up the soldering iron got it heated up and we're ready to solder on the first components so all i'm gonna do is on the back of the board i'm gonna take some flux and on the two parts where we're going to be soldering to this is very messy i don't currently have liquid flux i ran out so we're using messy soldering paste which makes a bit of a mess but it works great all the same so that's going to be plenty of flocks we're going to put the buzzer through aligning it positive to positive and because we have the gap we can actually put the capacitor in just to hold it up when we set it upside down all right so i've zoomed in so you guys can see this it's very simple get some solder now i haven't trimmed the lead yet i'm soldering first well i will wait for that to dry just because before doing the capacitor i want to make sure that it's aligned correctly so if you can see when we put it in it can either go left or right so we want it to stay fairly straight so if we watch the leads as we're working we can see which direction they're leaning so we want them to be pointing straight up so i will once again support it and move it over until the leads are straight up and we'll do the same being gentle not to bump it i'm currently standing up and this is on the desk down there so it's kind of an awkward reach but we got it nonetheless so give that a second it's probably good though that's on a bit of a lean but it's no big deal all right so we've got both components soldered and complete they look on there just fine so now the excess lines we're going to take some side cutters and trim those flat all right so now that we've got the components soldered on we've got them snipped off and we got the area cleaned below and you can either choose to fortify both the bottom and the top or just the top and the spots that you're connecting i'm actually going to be putting the ring terminals on the bottom terminals terminals on the bottom side of the board so that is the main area where i'm going to be fortifying with solder we're going to be adding solder to these four contact points and that's going to allow more current to flow through these these traces look fairly decent as it is but it looks like um there's a fairly thin layer of solder so it could definitely benefit from more solder and potentially raise the amount of current this board can handle and i will go into that now as we're soldering i did some research on the mosfets they're n-channel mosfets they're good up to 40 volts but you cannot use 40 volts on the system i will explain why after uh due to another component the mosfets on this board are 40 volt mosfets able to handle 300 amps of current so the rated 150 amps for this board is slightly underrated although there are other variables obviously at play such as the size of the wire over there and as well these uh traces on the board they can only handle so much current so that is one of the reasons why i am beefing them up the ic is a regulated 5 volts from a voltage regulator that voltage regulator is actually limited to 20 volts as well as another diode on the board is also rated at 20 volts so i wouldn't necessarily recommend putting anything more than 20 volts through this board due to that component factor as you can see i'm not sure if you guys look at the same one as i did because all the ones that i've seen on youtube already and the google photos and even the amazon link where i got this did not have these brass bars installed and i'm assuming that's for uh current handling which is a good thing in our case so if you have an uneven solder solder layer due to just improper movements or moving along uh go around kind of in a loop drag back and forth and you will smooth it out all right so here's how the board looks with all the solder on it that we have just put on it looks a lot better a lot beefier than it did before the little bridges we did up to the brass bars there look nice and look like they have good contact the board has cooled down so i will wipe it down with rubbing alcohol now but the next step if you were to leave this board like this like most people will is to decide what type of battery you want to use before you even put your connections on now this is a big thing and this is the reason why many people have had bad luck with these type of pcb spot welders there's a couple of these versions but for the most part they all use this same type of n-channel mosfet some of them just have five some of them have six so that's basically the only difference between them but they have somewhat a bad rep because mainly people improperly using them now to decide battery i wouldn't use anything other than a lithium polymer battery and that is due to the brute amp output from a single battery depending on the c rating which is what we're going to talk about now and how you're going to decide which type of battery you want to use so here i have three batteries all by turnigy now they all have different capacity ratings for one these two down here are three s's 11 volts and this one is a 4s okay so the c rating is basically the current handling capacity now right here on this battery it says 10c discharge so you have a 10 amp hour 10 000 milliamp hour battery 10 amp hour and you have 14 8.8 volts now luckily with the c rating it's actually fairly easy you don't even have to worry about the volts all you need to know is the c rating in the capacity now using the amp hour rating not the milliamp hour rating you can do 10 multiplied by the discharge rating 10 and you will get a hundred and that will be a hundred amps of discharge this one down here you have a five amp hour at five amp hour at 40 c discharge so that is going to be uh 40 times 5 so that will be 200 amps out of this battery so this is able to handle 200 amps this one's able to handle 100 amps i believe i did that right oh sorry for 160 160 amps i thought that said 50 c so at 40 c discharge at 5 amp hours that is 160 amps that this battery can output now this one's fairly crazy the eternity nanotech high discharge you have 3.3 now using a calculator because i'm not that great at math you can do 33 times 65 and get all right so that would be 214 amps at 65c it has the potential to output 130c i'm assuming that's not constant that's probably a burst so at 130c that's roughly 500 and something amps out of this battery so this one's crazy now i'm gonna not use something like this because at max these mosfets can handle 300 amp and there is no current limiting other than these mosfets so it's going to put the full current load of this or the full current potential discharge potential out of this battery all right so now that i've explained that uh hopefully most you guys already knew that but for any of the newbies that are just using the lipo for the spot welder for other 18650s that's how to do it and i wouldn't use any other battery because it cannot pull amps out of nowhere like it can only pull what the battery can potentially provide in that case we are going to put these aside and we are going to work on connecting these up so we are going to be starting with this 3s 5.0 turnigy it is a little bit bloated but it should be able to do the job just fine it does have eight gauge wire on it which is a little bit overkill for this but that's what came with the battery so great as you can see the interface on it can't remember what this is called but i went ahead and found another one that i can use as the opposite like so that i can use to hook up to the board uh now this is 10 gauge which is probably more appropriate for the amps that we're going to be pulling out of it but actually it's kind of not appropriate kind of i'd like to have more but what we're going to be doing is making the most out of this as you can see we got an in positive and in negative so we're going to have the connector basically right here so i'm going to be cutting it there and there the shorter the wires the less resistance in the more current capable capabilities it has so i'm going to be shortening these wires up as much as possible before i put on the ring terminals now i made the decision to not use ring terminals and actually solder it right to the board now you can go ahead and use ring terminals and use the screws and nuts provided that's all up to you i am trying to minimize any resistance in any place i can so i would rather a solid solder joint so that is what i'm going to be doing i will be soldering it onto the bottom so if you decide to go the soldering room you don't have to do anything to these probes that they gave you uh these are nice copper lugs so what i'm going to be doing is depending where they go this isn't the right place but this one this is the right place i'm going to be soldering the copper lugs directly to that instead of cutting this back and stripping it which is also an option okay so i'm just now going to be soldering the negative probe to the out negative if you are going the nut and bolt route all you have to do is presses up to here and put the nut and bolt on this is the only contact that connects to here so it's as easy as that all right so with a little help and struggle with the heat gun and the soldering iron i did get this one on i just didn't have enough magnets and helping hands in place to really do it properly so i was struggling for an extra hand and when i did i'd put something down and then i'd lose the heat so i eventually got it to the place where i wanted i did not want to be heating up this board that much but it doesn't matter this whole board is put together with heat so it's not that big of a deal it just would have made more sense to put these two components on afterwards but in that case we're going to be moving on to the next one which is going to be the negative and the positive battery lead on the back uh the ring terminal is going to be soldered on the top so this one we will be doing the same thing on the top using the solder so we will first tin this ring terminal and then using the soldering iron and the heat gun we will press it down to here all right so i did go ahead and solder these on using the heat gun and some solder i'm pretty sure some of that went out of the scene because it kind of got pulled over here but uh that's nice and that's done you can go ahead you don't have to use this connector obviously you guys probably went ahead and used your own connector or you probably went ahead and used the bolt-on method like i didn't do probably saved you some time but this is how i ensure it's going to get the best contact all right so at this point you've either soldered on a battery connector you've bolted on a battery connector you've bolted on your battery or something to that effect we're about at that point we're ready to do some spot welding now i'm going to use the heat shrink that they supplied and just quickly insulate these okay folks so here we are i've got the board all finished up i did a couple things off camera such as finally switching off that small puny solder tip to a larger one so i could actually uh put these ring terminal terminal terminals on properly as you see i was struggling earlier i also changed the position of the battery connector to face out the back instead of outside next step is to hook up your battery in this video i'm only going to be showing you guys how to use a 3s battery because in my tests i did off camera that is all you need you can use a 14 a 4s 14.6 or 14.8 volt battery if you would like but just user beware uh there is the potential to blow through the back of these cells and have electrolytes spill out even on low settings so i did a test with a 14.6 volt battery and on the second setting on the spot welder it blew a hole in the battery when i had the leads not pressing hard they were very loose so it created an arc in between the in between the probe and the nickel strip which actually put a hole in the nickel strip and through the battery so i'm only going to be showing you guys a 3s because in my opinion that's all that's necessary assuming you have a 3s that can output at least 150 amps i would go for a 200 amp one to account for the resistance in the lines and any higher amp draw that the board may pull from it okay so you guys may have noticed earlier that these leads were backwards so i went ahead and flipped them on the battery to match these leads that i installed on the board so we can just hook up hook it up like so and that is beautiful all we have to do now we'll lay the battery down put it back there hold the power buttons turn it on so depending which model you got some of them will have five modes and the fifth mode will display a red light and some of them have five modes and the fifth mode will display another green light so when you first turn it on it's in the first mode so if you hold it you'll hear two beeps that's the second mode three beeps for the third time that's the third mode obviously four for four and five for five and you hold it once more and it will shut off once again hold it two seconds mode one mode two mode three mode four and mode 5 and you're ready to go it's all automatic you don't have to press anything so you press the probes to the battery and once you press the last one a little time delay and it will uh fuse the batteries so we're going to start it i will show you guys two examples one on the lowest setting and one on the highest setting just to compare the brute difference between the two so with a piece of the nickel strip that they provided we are going to put a four on each cell and then i'm going to use a third one and see how it works pushing through two layers but that's depending on how well this first mode works so what i would suggest is use one of the probes and press now you don't want to press too hard uh because when you press too hard you actually create a an easy pass an easy pathway for those 150 amps to travel and it won't create enough of a resistance point to create a spot weld you actually want right in the middle you don't want a loose connection where it's kind of hanging in the air kind of tapping and you don't want a very tight connection because either either of those will end up in a bad spot weld so i'm going to use the one probe to hold it there while i align it get it exactly where i want it now that it's ready i can bring the second probe over and just like that you'll hear a beep and that means it's done so once again i'll move over and do a second one i'll go over this cell once again align it using the first probe and push on the second one okay so this was mode one level one lowest level obviously so i will just pull apart like so and on this two of the oh what the hell was that okay so two of the four contacts punctured right through the nickel strip and on this one all four punctured through the nickel strip but it wasn't a solid weld there is no residual nickel strip on the batteries uh so that's indicating a bad weld but that's kind of to be expected from the lowest setting so what we will do now is just for shifts and giggles we pretty much know how this is going to go down but we are going to see how well level one can go through two strips well we got the two strips together but not to the battery and once again yeah it's not possible so it did weld those two strips together nicely but it cannot get those through those two strips to the battery all right so when complete contrast we're gonna go to mode five so we're now in mode 5 which is the highest mode on the spot welder we are using the 3s battery capable of outputting 200 amps it's charged at 13.8 volts just so you guys know for a reference once again same thing okay so you may have noticed it was just uh you won't be able to notice that much but it was much stronger of a weld and if i go like this yeah it ripped right through and in both cases there was nickel strip on the battery so yeah that ripped the nickel strip right out now that was pretty good but not not that great let me just check the voltage of the battery all right so i'm just gonna quickly show you guys an example of the different ways of contacting when you're using the spot welder and how you can get really bad spot welds from this same setting so i want to show you guys an example if i take one of the probes and this is actually harder than you think and press it directly flat down and then i take the other one and i come next to it and i press directly flat now when i pull off if you notice because like i mentioned earlier there's barely anything and i can actually just make it fall off and that's on the fifth level that's on the highest level that the spot welder can produce and that is because obviously the flat part of this is going to provide a lot more surface area than if we just use the very edge and that is exactly why we're actually allowing we're creating a nice path for that 150 amps to travel when that is what we're using to weld we're actually using the resistance point to weld so we want to create a big resistance point to do that is you can then take it and put the probe on its edge like so now if you see there's a lot of sparks there and we're gonna go right to the edge just like so and that was amazing it ripped right through leaving pieces on there just like so and that was on the same level that i just did that last spot well so let me show you guys once more we'll do another flat one and see how about see how bad of a weld it produces so once again flat it's actually kind of hard to do this and flat well may as well make it fair and do too now i'm just going to twist it well this one kind of held but barely barely okay so once again with the sharp edge we're going to get it to stick real well okay so test on the edge and just for shirts and giggles over here i'm going to show you what happens when you lightly press once more as you can see there was a lot of sparks because the probes actually just melted a hole right through the nickel strip and didn't even weld anything to it due to that it just melted a hole to it through it and that is how you can take the 14.6 volts and actually puncture these cell is in the same way anyways guys this spot welder can definitely take out that sun coat completely and you can definitely get away with welding some batteries with just one 3s battery capable of outputting 200 amps you can also put two of these in parallel and you would actually gain a bit more of a current output but other than that i would suggest just sticking to the 3s but if you want you can go ahead and use some 4s's like i have over here just uh use at your own risk anyways guys thanks for watching if you guys enjoyed please leave a like and subscribe i appreciate it have a good one

Channel: BattTube

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Keywords: BattTube, DIY, DIY Battery, Battery, Battery Repair, Battery Review, Lithium, Lithium Ion, Lithium Phosphate, LiFePo4, Valence, BattleBorn, Solar, Power Supply, Battery Bank, Solar Battery Bank, Solar Panel, Lithium Battery, DIY Lithium Battery, 18650, 18650 Battery Pack, Spot Welder, Sunkko Spot Welder, KWeld, Welder, Battery Spot Welder, Spot, Electronics, hbpowerwall, 18650ed, lipo, ebike, DIY spot welder, Spot welding tips, Best spot welder, cheapest spot welder, Batt Tube, power bank

Id: I-sDn7Ic14I

Length: 28min 54sec (1734 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 03 2022