[sdiy] several questions

[The Old Crow]

On Tue, 1 May 2001 CHoaglin at aol.com wrote:

> that for a while. While we're on batteries, I've seen an interesting
> technique used by my uncle to give NiCd packs a new lease on life, namely
> using a large cap and and SCR to discharge the cap through the
> battery..Something about "blowing the shorts out of it"...anybody know
> anything about this?

  Ah, good old Ni-Cad zapping.  'Tendrils' of nickel tend to build up
between the cells in a nicad battery, especially if the battery is not
deep-cycled on a regular basis.  A high current pulse is used to "punch
out" the threads and bring the battery back into normal paramaters.

Crow

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