Removing cells from Ego 56V battery packs

Hi all,

I have had success with most other battery packs, however I have a batch of Ego 56V battery packs that I seem unable to extract the cells from.

No matter how carefully I pry the spot welding off, it always results in the positive cap being removed at the same time. They seem to be welded extra solidly compared to other brand batteries. I can barely "roll" the pliers across the top of the cell and break away the spot welding, and any more force I either short out the cell, or pull out the positive cap, leaving an exposed thin wire and/or leaking electrolyte.

Has anyone else here on the forums had success extracting the cells from these battery packs? What's the technique with these ones?

After two battery packs destroyed by different methods of trying to remove these cells, I'm starting to wonder if it is just my technique or if these are a known difficult pack to disassemble?

Regards,
Des.

Can You provide a photo of the batteries and the ones damaged? What brand of cells? Twisting instead of rolling/pulling works on A123 LiFePo4 26650 cells. I have never had a positive cap pull off in the thousands of cells I have processed. 18650's or 26650's
I remember a thread a long time ago about EGO batteries but I can't find it EGO is "The search could not be completed because the search keywords were too short, too long, or too common."
Later floyd

just cut the nickle strip and solder to it without seprating from the battery

Here are some pictures:

Cell Layout:

View of the nickel strip that is holding the cells in place:

View of one of the cells, when I have rolled back the spot weld after prying the end up:

The strips seem to be really thick nickel, or maybe nickel coated copper(?) as when I have tried to use the mini grinding disc it seems to end up being a smooth copper ring coating on it, which then doesn't cut anything.

The strips are spot welded on top of the plastic, and cutting the strips is really difficult with small cutters, as the strips are flush with the plastic casing.

The last photo doesn't really show it too well, but maybe on the middle photo you can see the positive cap has gone, and there is liquid coming out of this cell.

The first thing I would do is remove the plastic as much as I could. this will allow you to get under the nickel strip on both sides of the weld with flush cut pliers cut through as much of the weld as you could then see if twisting the weld with the pliers works.

Later floyd

Hi all,

I thought I would update you all on the progress. I tested on an old battery that I knew had almost no charge that was not going to be recovered.

I have been able to separate the cells out of the holder, with cutting it using the mini grinding disc/dremel.

Once I was able to get them all out of the holder, I started to take the nickel off the cells. This was unsuccessful and it still took off the positive cap, and I had several vent from attempting to take the nickel off the positive or negative end.


The spot welds on this appear to be a lot larger than other batteries I have worked on in the past, so for the last few cells I attempted to cut the remaining nickel off as much as I could. This seemed to be the best option after all of this work.

These batteries are standard 18650's, with some sort of plastic like material around the middle. Apparently it is to take away the heat, so when the cells heat up, this stuff melts, then takes away the heat from the battery? (This was based on the marketing that I had found on it.) That doesn't make much sense, as the plastic then would retain the heat and be on the battery. I do like the bms it has, it auto discharges if the pack isn't used for a few days, and monitors each cell individually in this pack which I found odd.

These seem to be really well built batteries made for bashing around and working hard. Not so easy to scavenge the cells from though!

I think with these I will either leave them to last (as I have a lot of other easier batteries that I can take cells out of) or sell them off as they are a lot of trouble and time to get the cells out of. Most of the pile are 56v 2ah battery packs and some of the batteries are reporting they are still at 56v so they can wait

Thanks for the feedback and advice.

I saw a post on another forum about this same pack and how they were extra heavy duty welds. One poster recommended using a flat chisel to get in there and shear the weld. I though this sounded like a good idea so I bought an exacto heavy duty handle and some #18 chisel tips. I've tried it on a few cells and it works like magic (just regular old modem cells) but I've also had it rip one cap off, so I've gone back to rolling and snipping. However, in your case, it might be worth a try with the chisel method.

It looks like these Ego batteries are overbuilt and thus potentially extremely difficult to “service”. I have been considering trying to look for “dead” Ego batteries and dropping my own 18650s into them to revive them. But it seems like that will be really difficult and completely not worthwhile. Oh well, I suppose a big part of their value is that they are built like tanks.

Been quite hard to decide whether I should spring for the battery included leaf blower or not: Could save $130 by purchasing without the battery but the battery is truly worth more than that amount…