Hey today. I'm gonna show you how to build a very, very cheap Headway 12 volt battery now unfortunately. I don't sell headways, but the best place to get them is at Batteryhookup.com These guys have a bunch of batteries in here and they have this thing that they called Super Beast 24 volt, 48 amp hour 1.2 kilowatt hour life before Uh 48 Headway cells in this module and they sell this for 250 dollars. So if you do the math here, right, Uh, 250 divided into 48 by 48.

So you're paying about five 520 per cell, right? That is very, very cheap. Now these are used cells, but they are, uh, very good. They still have a lot of life if you know anything about. uh, lithium phosphate.

Super long lasting life, right? And so even though these are used and are now decommissioned, well, they still have a lot of a lot of life in them and they could put quite a bit of power. So let's buy one of these things and then let's build a battery one hour later. All right. So here it is.

This is what it looks like. Now we have to take it apart. First we take out this isolator board here that we have the other side. Let's check the voltage right.

Currently right now it's at 26.1 volts. The cells are a very good voltage so that is good news. Well first things first. If you are looking to build a 24 volt, uh, battery, Well there it is.

you have it. All you have to do is get a mating connector. These are easy to find. like if you're doing like an RV or something.

Yeah, just get a few of these, connect them parallel, connect the BMS in here you're ready to go. But if you're gonna want to run a 12 volt battery then continue the further tear down it is and then so we can rebuild it. So then the next thing is just to take the the plates off all the cells out of here. All right.

So the best way that I can figure how to do this? You you screw that in there. Now you have some leverage to to turn it. Yeah, all right. So here's uh, what you end up with: Hardware bus bars holders and then all the cells.

these I think were air cooled so they're super super Dusty So you got to clean them all right. Now that you have your 48 cells, it is useful to check them. Should be pretty easy. Three two seven three two seven three two seven three two seven three two six three two seven.

So we got lucky. These are all exactly a three two seven. Very very well balanced pack. These are used right? so you might not get as lucky as this when you got.

So there's a little bit of a gamble there. but uh, in this case we got all 48 cells. Perfect voltage. Next step is to go to Jack35.com You go here.

Uh new arrivals? Let's see sure you're gonna get one of these 96 and power bus bar kit. You order it and then you wait for it. one hour later. This is what you will get.

You'll get two, the bottom one and the top one and the top one now has a red layer right here for the positive and a black one for the negative. Just to make it really really easy, these screws The ones that came in that thing that we took apart will only do half. So you'll have to get about 48 of these screws right here which are matching in Spec So we're gonna use both of them. We'll use the hex on the top and we'll use the uh the round ones on the bottom.

You take these positive and the negative, tighten it up. second cell right next. let's do second layers negative so all the black ones go that way. All right.

Now that uh, the top side is done now we flip it on the on its bottom and then you inspect that these are all the right way. So all the black ones should be here and all the positives right? If they're all matching and you're in good shape now, we're going to install the bottom. This is positive, negative, positive, negative. There we go and there you go.

You have your 96 amp hour 12 volt Headway battery. This battery is a beast and I mean a beast. Let me tell you. one each.

one of these strings of four cells could do on a dead short. Right here can do about 300 amps. You multiply that by 12. that's over 3 500 amps.

3500 amps that this can potentially do on a dead short. Now, most people are using these batteries for audio because they can put so much power if you load them up at a dead short. Yeah, the the voltage goes down to like, you know, maybe four volts or something, right? So that's not very usable. So the the usable voltage is less than that.

I'll probably say somewhere around you know, 1500 uh, amps or something like that, right? So you're still talking about, you know, crazy amounts of water. So you can do, you probably could, do you know, 20 000 Watts with this one. Now there's uh, some caveats here. Uh, obviously this is all live.

So do Not set this battery on anything that is, uh, conductive. While it's like this, because you will short the hell out of this thing. It will completely melt, It will completely destroy whatever surface you put it on. That is metallic, right? And the batteries are going to win.

They're gonna. You're gonna make holes if you set it on a bench that is metallic. Another thing is, when you're running this and you're going to install this, uh, don't try to run a single cable. just a one big fat cable, to get all the power out of here.

Obviously that's not gonna work right? Doesn't matter. You know, the the cell the closest to wherever you're gonna, removing the power, that's going to see the brunt of all the stress and then it's going to get unbalanced. It's going to run hotter. You're going to run into a bunch of problems.

So usually when you have this much power uh, requirements on whatever project you're doing whether it be a car, audio, or whatever, then you have a bunch of amps. So run each individual uh cable right from those amps and then run it to the battery. This essentially is your distribution blocks right here. Don't use external distribution blocks, distribute from the battery.

so you have 10 amps or something or 6 amps or something. Run to six cables in here right? so that it's a more distributed and don't run it all on the one side. Try to run in in the middle and then go from there on right one here, one there. Skip a few of those if you're only running fours.

but I would say a minimum of four cables. uh uh. going in uh and going out of this battery I would say right? depending depending on how much you power you need, but these are we'll accept two. American wire gauge I know.

So I'm the only gonna want some bigger but for right now we don't have. Maybe in the future we will make blocks that will accept you know, one out two odd cables or whatever and then have like a beefier thing you know so that you can distribute the power uh, more efficiently or you know you have more options when it comes to that. But right now this is Huge battery. Very very powerful and you can get it very very cheap.

The Super Beast. From battery hookup it's like 250 bucks. This bus right here. Like a hundred and ten dollars.

You're like 350. under 400 bucks. You have this battery that would cost thousands and thousands of dollars if you had to buy it from someone that made it right. So yeah, you can get creative.

You can make a box you know that isolates this so that it doesn't It's not no longer at risk of, uh, short in here and then you run probably somewhere in the top, maybe with acrylic or something like that. The options are Limitless Also, most people that are running these batteries are not running a BMS because it's such a huge amount of power that they're trying demanding out of them. and so you know there are no Bms's that can handle that kind of current right? Or they're you know, bigger than this this battery. And so what they're doing is, they're simply running them with a balance, right? And you know, even a little tiny little bouncer like this would help because these cells they came out of the same module.

So that means they have the same life, right? and so they have the same degradation. They have the same characteristics so these for the most part are going to remain very very balanced unless something bad happens. And so a little balancer like this that can only do like you know, a few million million milliamps, uh will keep these in check. and if it doesn't, one of these ones is great because uh, well, it'll tell you.

You could just simply go in there and look at things like if Stars group starts drifting or whatever then you can. you can see yeah and then you could then decide to shift cells around or change cells or whatever you want to do right? But uh, something like this will help. There definitely are a bunch of Uh balancers out there in the market that people are using. Uh, this one I like it because again, it has a screen and it tells you.

but all the other ones are. You know they can do way more for batteries that are way more degraded or they need more balancing, right? But these cells should remain pretty good because they came out of the same module. So this is a, uh, a really good way to make one of these. We have a couple of sizes on these.

Sometimes you know, either because of size control constraints or just because you don't need that much power. Uh, and you don't want to spend that much money, Then we have a 64 amp power this is the smallest ones and then we have an 80 amp hour and then the 96 amp hour. Uh, battery sizes, right? So there you go, you can build on a budget. This is the cheapest way that you can build a very powerful Headway battery.

uh, for less than 400 bucks. And now, in case you don't know, all of my projects are open source. What that means is that I designed these things and then I make them available to the public so that they can use them as is or modify them as they're they need, right? So I'm sponsored by PCB way the ones that makes these boards right here and you can go to Pcbway.com Following the link on the description of this video and you can go and if you wanted to build a few of these right and you want to pay the least amount of money, you can buy them straight from them and you don't have to go through me to get these right. And so then that way you can build a few of these, you can make changes to them.

You could do all that stuff. Go to the link on the description of this video to follow it. Now I have the links to all the components that I use to build these in here. right? So there you go.

Thank you PCB way for sponsoring this video and we'll see you guys on the next one where we're going to build another battery. This is going to be awesome! Okay, bye thank you.