NiMH Pack Protection?

[BrianG]

I was assembling a side-by-side 14 cell pack tonight (2 rows of 7 cells) and just happened to notice how thin the plastic coating on NiMH cells are. Every once in a while you see/hear of a cell exploding for whatever reason and it got me thinking. Maybe during the course of jumping and going over rough terrain the casing where two cells meet gets worn down enough to short the two cells? The result is too burned up to actually see the cause, so who knows? So, I thought a little extra protection would be in order.

I took some standard thickness letter size paper, folded it in half, cut strips the length and width of a sub-C cell, and stuck one between each cell. This adds about 0.2mm (the thickness of doubled-up paper) of extra insulation between each cell but is not enough to increase the length of a pack by any appreciable amount.

Any thoughts?

[coolhandcountry]

Put some good glue between them and they won't move. You can accually glue the packs before soldering them. Hot glue works ok until the batts get hot and melt it again.

[BrianG]

Yeah, I thought of the hotglue, but discarded it for the reason you mentioned. Besides, each 7 cell pack was already assembled so that wasn't an option, so it would have to be done during original assemby unless you disassembled them again. Shoe-goo would probably work though.

At the very least, the idea of seperating them sound like a good one to me. I think I will do the paper thing to my other existing packs now, but in the future, I will go with the glue idea.

Since I did a single two row pack, I also put a layer of 1/16" thick hobby foam in between the rows to help pad them.

[crazyjr]

I use Zap-a-dapt sticks excellent to the shrink wrap