Today's video is sponsored by PCB Way. Let's make an old project even better. This right here is a very old project. It's very popular.

We've made hundreds of these bus bars already for the headways. Headways are very popular among the audio. Community Because they're cheap and they can put a ton of power. I Once I Once shorted out a cell a single cell generally above 300 amps, they're sagging down to 2.91 volts.

Oh my. God And so if you do like a battery pack like this, for example, 64 amp hours, eight cells in, uh, parallel, Well do you get the idea. you can get thousands of amps in here obviously. Um, you know they they do sag And so what they're trying to do in the audio world is trying to make a very stiff pack a very stiff battery pack so that the SAG is minimal And that way they can put out a ton of power, right? So we started with this design and, uh, a work really well.

except that it had one drawback at that time. I Was talking to a few of these guys from the audio world. A lot of them, they don't know what they're doing right and so they couldn't really explain it to me what it is that they needed. And so now I am starting to understand what they need.

That whole thing about creating a stiff pack. You know, none of these guys could articulate that to me. And so this design is not the best one when you're trying to do that right. And the reason is because even though these can carry quite a bit of amps like I did some tests this this bus bar can carry 500 amps.

This is not the best way. So let me explain to you, there's eight cells here and they're all in parallel. Now those eight cells go and transfer to the next eight cells and then to the next eight and then to the next eight. So all the current is trying to go from this point to that point and then from this point to that point from this point to that point.

So what happens is that it creates a hot spot right here. right? Because the electrons are not going to go around like this and then come back, it's going to go straight right here. So really, what's seeing the brunt of all the the uh transfer of electrons is this right here? These four little spots. and when you look at the thermal camera uh, you will see that the this section right here gets hot and it's because of these eight, right? So because you're trying to make at the stiffest pack possible, then you need to be able to most efficiently uh, transfer those electrons from cell to cell.

And this design here is gonna do that. And I'll show you. Um, because the way this is a the this is designed, Then there's four little connections here that connect the entire pack. But when you do it this way this way now the cells are a range slightly different.

They're in parallel sets like this the long way, right? So there's one set, two sets, three sets, four sets. and so now the connection doubles in area, right? Because now the connection is not four little Pathways to connect to the cells. Now it's eight because this cell will connect to this cell, Then this cell will connect to that cell and this cell will connect to that cell. So the current essentially goes from here and then it transfers down here.

and then it transfers here there right? And it does that eight times. And so now by rearranging the cells in this configuration, now you've just increased the pathways. You doubled your Pathways overlay electron uh of that uh of current transmission, right? And so that is why this design here. it's going to be a lot better than this one.

And so what I've done is I've updated my design to allow for this. Also, I added the ability to put these little blocks in here because then what people do is they put their cables in there and uh, they just sync them up right here and they just use an Allen wrench to, uh, put them in here and then that way. it's a lot easier than making ring terminals that require you to have a uh, you know, like a crimping tool and those stuff and you know it's just so this way it's a little bit easier. Some people are using these and that's way, but you don't have to.

You can directly. Put a Ring terminal on here. here Here you can put it up to eight cables and that's what these a lot of these guys are doing right because they need the less amount of sag in their system right? So let's go to the drawing board and let's show you what I did to design this board. That will make it a lot of easier.

All right. So here is our drawing here. and uh, what you see here is that we've put both of these together as the top lead and the bottom plate. The reason for doing this is that it's a lot easier to order one file and one print.

Uh, instead of doing two right and so this you know one and you just break it in half and then you use the top portion to the top and the bottom to the bottom. That's what works. So there we go. Uh, let me explain here what's going on.

This is the bottom layer right? and if it's if you get a two ounce copper layer when you print these then it'll do more than enough to do a thousand amps because now it's thicker copper and like I explained before, we have now doubled the amount of Pathways that that the uh, the current has to take through. right? So now this is this is going to be even a way bigger uh stiffer pack. Now it was able to do 500 amps on a one ounce copper way before for a long time. But to get the most, the stiffer pack that this design will allow is to do it this way right.

And of course these little things here are for those blocks that will allow you to use two American wire gauge cable. You stick them in there and then uh, you don't have to do ring terminals. Of course this is just an option. If you want to use this, they're going to be there to use them.

But then you can use ring terminals here. These right here are for people that are are not going to use this battery pack. Uh, for audio equipment for audio use, right? So there's less uh, lower performance applications of this battery pack. And a lot of these guys are going to want to put a VMS which is like a battery management system that is based on a uh, solid state, right? So basically like some transistor base relay switch that will turn on and off the power to this battery and so in order to do that, then we'll use these right here.

These are made for some uh, these are terminals. screw-on terminals that can handle 180 amps. so two of them, you know up 350 360 amps something like that. Uh, and then there's two on the negative and then there's two on the positive and so what? that allows you to do Uh, it's for a future board that I'm gonna make where then you screw it right on top of these and they'll go into those terminals in there and then it'll hold the the secondary board higher above this whole thing and then that board will have the BMS in there and then it'll have the you know the the the the main terminals to go in and out that the negative will go through the BMS and stuff so that's what those are for here.

but if you're using this just for audio then you can just ignore those uh and then the top layer. Well it's just mirrors the bottom layer because we just add another layer to you know to to carry the current and here is going to be the 3D And of course if you're ordering this from our PCB way sponsor right then you can choose whatever color you want. I This is just blue, but you know Green is usually the fastest easiest but you could do red. um White you can get a white one, white one looks pretty cool, yellow, black black also looks pretty pretty cool.

Um and then I chose purple because I had the green one and uh, just to distinguish the Thousand ounce from the 500 amps, the two ounce copper to you know one ounce copper kind of thing. So these are the ones that we're selling on Jack 35. Uh, you can order this there, but if you want to make a custom color, then you can, just you know go to Pcbway.com and Order yourself through the link on this video. there's a project that you'll be able to download the files to print this yourself and then um, you know along with all the components, the little connectors, and the thing.

and actually this one doesn't have much I guess I should probably put like the links to maybe the screws or maybe actually even right here, the length of screw. You know what? I'm gonna do that. uh in the final version of this I'm going to put the length of screw that I recommend use and the size of screw just for someone that doesn't know uh, what the headways have in there, right? Okay, all right and last thing is to test this guy. I don't have enough equipment to load with a thousand amps, but I'll definitely load it up with a smudge as I can.

I Will have to use two different clamp meters here because this one all top off at a maximum of 400 amps and this one will do a hundred so we will be able to measure up to 500 amps and then after that. yeah we won't know, but we have a turbo camera here and then we have a ton of inverters here to handle the load. We'll see how much current we can throw on this. All right.

So here's all. the load that I can throw is 330 on that one and then over a hundred amps here. So that's about 400, Probably 450 amps that we have loaded onto this battery. Let's take this one over here.

Okay, so 400 and 450? Let's say the only thing that's getting hot in here is that cable. But as far as um, plates, they're not getting hot. All right. So now we're about 500.

There's 393 here. So 400 amps. Uh, and then over 100 amps on this one. So that's 500 amps that is going into the battery.

Let's look at the thermal camera and the voltage is holding at 12.2 12.2 Yeah, 12.2 volts. Foreign look. it's overloading both. So over 500 amps and these inverters are quitting now.

So there we go. Let's we just turned one off. Okay, yeah. 11.5 volts.

So I'd say we're pretty much done. This battery is done. and let's look at the thermal camera. Okay, so that battery got hot right there.

Maybe it's because of that, or there was a couple of these cells that were not the greatest. Like this one right here is hotter than all the other ones. That one right there is hotter than all the other ones. That means it's probably like a weak cell.

But look at the uh. the bus bar. The bus bar is the cold thing here. it's only a hundred degrees.

This is, uh, today is kind of a hot day and um, yeah, it's only a few degrees above ambient. So these bus bars for all those people that say, uh, that don't that they can't do a thousand ants. Look, didn't even get hot at 500 Am continuous. So there you go.

We couldn't get the bus bars to get more than a few degrees, uh, above ambient. So your cells will get hot. But your your bus bars out of 500 amps Here It continues until the battery gave out the battery. Uh, used up all because this energy? Um yeah.

these bars are pretty pretty cool and there are a ton of people that will tell you that these are trash, that you Nobody should be using these. But I've seen no tests to prove their point right? Meanwhile, I'm here doing tests to prove to you that these can handle a thousand amps. No problem. All right as always.

I Want to thank you for watching this video I Want to thank PCB way for sponsoring this video. And if you want some affordable bus bars for your headways, right, don't spend more on bus bars than the cells will cost you, right? Buy these. They will be able to do a thousand amps no problem. without getting hotter than your cells.

Your cells will get hotter than the bus bars right? and so don't fall for the traps where you're spending more money than you have to. There is a way to build cheap, high performance batteries using the very popular headways and using some economical bus bars made out of PCB material with twins copper right? you can get a thousand Amps. Okay, we'll see you guys on the next video. Bye.

.