croissantking
Well-known member
A few of you have been asking for more info on my rebuilt iBook battery.
This was a project for my recently acquired 300MHz Blueberry iBook. This won't be a complete guide as I didn't document the process comprehensively enough. I followed The 8-Bit Guy's instructional video here, which contains pretty much all the info you'll need.
The batteries I got were from Cell Supply in the UK, I ordered 8x LG MH1 units which are rated to 3200mAh and seem to be quality parts. The extras seen in the photo below were for another rebuild (for an IBM ThinkPad T23), which was also successful.
I had to fight a bit with the plastics to get the battery open. The old cells were looking fairly worse for wear, but hadn't leaked any corrosive fluids.
A closer shot shows the construction of the battery a bit better, basically as far as I remember 4 pairs of cells are connected in parallel; and then strung together. I unfortunately didn't take photos of this stage of the rebuild. I did use a spot welder and some new metal strips to carefully replicate the existing design, which will be clear enough once you have the unit apart (and is pretty well explained in The 8-Bit Guy's video).
Once you have built your string of batteries with the spot welder, the ends of the metal strips need to be soldered onto the flexible ribbon cable, in I think six separate locations.
I reused all the thermal fuses, spacers and things like that, since they were in good condition.
Unfortunately near the end of the assembly I accidentally blew a Dale R05F resistor – it got too hot while I was soldering the adjacent tab – which meant I had to wait several weeks after I'd found a replacement and added it to my periodic Mouser order. Eventually I received this and swapped out the blown component. No other damage had been done.
They're still manufactured and are available here.
The fully assembled battery, minus top cover, which works perfectly. I get like 4 hours of runtime, which is pretty incredible really.
I have another of these batteries to rebuild, so whenever I get around to that, I'll update this thread with a bit more info on the spot welding part of assembly.
Sorry that this guide isn't more comprehensive – but I thought I'd impart as much knowledge as I'm able to.
Be careful with Li-Ion batteries, as they're fairly dangerous things from what I've read. A spot welder is strongly advised as it is dangerous to solder directly to the cells due to the heat of the soldering iron.
This was a project for my recently acquired 300MHz Blueberry iBook. This won't be a complete guide as I didn't document the process comprehensively enough. I followed The 8-Bit Guy's instructional video here, which contains pretty much all the info you'll need.
The batteries I got were from Cell Supply in the UK, I ordered 8x LG MH1 units which are rated to 3200mAh and seem to be quality parts. The extras seen in the photo below were for another rebuild (for an IBM ThinkPad T23), which was also successful.
I had to fight a bit with the plastics to get the battery open. The old cells were looking fairly worse for wear, but hadn't leaked any corrosive fluids.
A closer shot shows the construction of the battery a bit better, basically as far as I remember 4 pairs of cells are connected in parallel; and then strung together. I unfortunately didn't take photos of this stage of the rebuild. I did use a spot welder and some new metal strips to carefully replicate the existing design, which will be clear enough once you have the unit apart (and is pretty well explained in The 8-Bit Guy's video).
Once you have built your string of batteries with the spot welder, the ends of the metal strips need to be soldered onto the flexible ribbon cable, in I think six separate locations.
I reused all the thermal fuses, spacers and things like that, since they were in good condition.
Unfortunately near the end of the assembly I accidentally blew a Dale R05F resistor – it got too hot while I was soldering the adjacent tab – which meant I had to wait several weeks after I'd found a replacement and added it to my periodic Mouser order. Eventually I received this and swapped out the blown component. No other damage had been done.
They're still manufactured and are available here.
The fully assembled battery, minus top cover, which works perfectly. I get like 4 hours of runtime, which is pretty incredible really.
I have another of these batteries to rebuild, so whenever I get around to that, I'll update this thread with a bit more info on the spot welding part of assembly.
Sorry that this guide isn't more comprehensive – but I thought I'd impart as much knowledge as I'm able to.
Be careful with Li-Ion batteries, as they're fairly dangerous things from what I've read. A spot welder is strongly advised as it is dangerous to solder directly to the cells due to the heat of the soldering iron.
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