Recell iBook G3 Battery

[agg23]

I have a iBook G3 Snow and I would like to know if I could recell it easily and within $40? If not I might as well just buy a new in package battery off eBay for $40.

agg23

[beachycove]

I have a iBook G3 Snow and I would like to know if I could recell it easily and within $40? If not I might as well just buy a new in package battery off eBay for $40.

agg23

No, it can't be easily re-celled, not likely for much less if any less, and even if you could find the cells to buy and match them to the controller in the battery, the controller board itself is probably defunct (I gather that they only allow something like 1000 cycles, no matter whether the cells are good or not).

There are amateurs who do try to re-cell LiIon batteries, but the success rate is poor, and what they risk is real and serious injury. As well as potential explosion, with effects like blindness, there is the danger of starting a chemical fire. It is well to remember with reference to the latter that an insurance policy will likely have an idiot-clause exempting the insurer from paying up should you burn the house down by playing with explosives when you knew better. As in all things, safety should be priority #1, as nobody is immortal.

All in all, spending $40 is both a good deal for a replacement battery and is really the only sane thing to do.

Now if they were NiMh cells, you could go right ahead, as long as you took proper care and, in particular, avoided contact between the like ends of the cells (this will melt some metals within a couple of seconds — so you would not want them, say, jingling around in your pockets). Relatively speaking, however, NiMhs are easier to work with than LiIon cells, in that they aren't so prone to maim you.

Alas, NiMhs were discontinued in notebooks sometime around 1996 — though I have read of a current netbook that uses standard NiMh AA button cells as a power source. More power to them, I say.

LiIons may have unmatched capacity when they work, and they may be what we will power our cars with for a little while (emphasis on little), but they are a pain to deal with in the kind of gear we tend to be talking about around here, in that they are typically short-lived. They work well within the computer industry only because of the ridiculously short redundancy cycle of the products they power.

[Franklinstein]

There are amateurs who do try to re-cell LiIon batteries, but the success rate is poor, and what they risk is real and serious injury. As well as potential explosion, with effects like blindness, there is the danger of starting a chemical fire.

Psssh, haven't you read the news lately? Or within the last 12 years? LiIons are prone to doing that sort of thing WITHOUT being tampered with.

But yeah, I concur, recelling LiIons isn't a good idea for the average hobbyist, because buying a replacement is (usually) 100% guaranteed to work, won't look like someone ran over it with a truck, and they typically have a warranty in case they do decide to explode. If you're lucky, they'll be recalled, too, so you get a free replacement battery in the future. So yeah, it's safer and more cost-effective to just buy a replacement.

[Mike Richardson]

I got brand new chinese iBook G3 batteries for $36 each in bulk.

Just buy a new one off eBay. Pick the absolute cheapest seller who is in the USA and buy that one. No one seller has anything better than anyone else - they all pretty much buy from the same one or two sources.

Do NOT buy directly from Hong Kong, China, etc. on eBay. It will takes ages to arrive - if it does at all, and you may have to pay customs fees.

[Osgeld]

problem with most cheap ebay batteries is that they are half the cells, and 1 chunk of led, with false markings on the outside