Capacitive Discharge Battery Tab Welder

Battery Tab Welder Plans

Make or repair your own rechargeable battery packs!

Do you want a battery tab welder but can't justify the expense of a commercial unit?

Finding the parts at reasonable cost can be difficult/time consuming.

I have selected components that are easy to find and my parts list has direct links to the ones that are harder to find. The rest of the parts are from Radio Shack and hardware stores. Besides the schematic there is also a layout of the one PC board that needs to be built.

If you are building or repairing battery packs you already have the skills to build this simple welder based on a single one farad car audio capacitor.

I have been replacing the cells in several types of laptop batteries and reprogramming them for a while now. But there have been some that I didn't attempt because of the extra tight configuration. My solder method added some size to them. The CMOS batteries that I have soldered only work 50% the first time. I also had some RC planes and radios that I needed to replace the batteries in.

I decided to build a capacitive discharge welder from the schematic I found on the web . I started looking for the parts and wasn't having much luck finding all of them so I started over by designing my own circuit using parts that I could find. Price, performance and availability all played a part in the selections. Experimenting with the one farad capacitor's charging and discharging characteristics, I designed a suitable configuration that works well for me. The completed unit was mounted in a toolbox to make a nice neat tool.

After getting caught up on my battery projects and being very pleased with the results I thought that other people might want to build their own welder but without the frustration that I had.