Refurbishing a plastic Clansman battery

Peter Nutt G4WLI

Refurbishing a clansman battery using budget cells now available on ebay, to achieve a lightweight,
inexpensive battery.

There seem to be a couple of guides for refurbishing Eventually

metal batteries, my stock are all plastic, so I thought my after much
experiences with a plastic one may be useful. persistence I
I was prompted by the recent availability of batteries managed to
from Chinese sources at reasonable price. Price has get one cell
always been the prohibitor of battery rebuilds. The ones out, this
I choose were 2.2Ah sub C cells, considerably less than made it a
the 4Ah that came out. But well worth doing as the little easier to
resulting battery is a fraction of the weight of the remove the
original and still gives useful service duration. There are others. This is
sellers with 20 cell quite a brutal
packages, with tabs, for procedure, so I gave up any idea of preserving any
around £20 delivered. I internal components. In another 20 mins of so, I had
have more recently seen the remainder of the top cells out.
6000mA variations for sale
for £25 or less, Sub C is The original cells are extremely tough and will take
always likely to be the most popular, therefore cheaper quite a lot of
cell, as they are used in many power tools. abuse. I did
not puncture
My ‘spare’ battery was one purchased as working off any cells
ebay, but on charging on by 14v D.C. std. issue charger during the
the case started to swell alarmingly. I knew I had by procedure, as
rebuild candidate. the contents
may carry
Firstly try and get the
some risk to
battery in a health.
discharged state to
avoid accidents when The removal of the lower cells takes a bit more
chopping into the cell patience, but follow the same procedure with drilling
area. Then cut the and forcing with studding. Then with a little persistance
bottom plate off the you will end up with an empty case as below.
battery by carefully
using a wide bladed
knife and some gentle
levering.

Now scrape the top layer of foam away to reveal the

structure of the cells, I then ran the knife around the
outside of the foamed area to break the seal with the
plastic case (not easy) Then drilled out the spaces
between the cells with an 8mm drill bit. This enabled
me to enter a short length of 8mm studding as a lever
I removed the charging terminals on the side which are
to break up the foam and loosen the top row of cells.
retained with small machine screws, there did not seem
to be any nuts on these, they probably relied on the
foam to retain them. Mine are now secured with nuts
as I have not refilled with foam.

I used similar diameter cable to original which came

from stripped down belden cable, using Colin Guys
(G4DDI) article as a guide, I replace the two charge full
detecting diodes with 1N914 and placed one at the top
of the battery pack and one near the outside.

The batteries were layered into the case secured in a

few places with glue gun, which had plenty of space due
to the sub C size. I used some light plastic packing to fill
the remaining space. The base was then glue gunned
on, I thought I might need a better adhesive, but it
seems fine.

I have charged the new battery and used it once and it

seems fine, the new cells are very ‘light’ and I doubt
they will provide the rated 2.2Ah, or certainly not for
long. I have not been brave enough to run it full cycle
on the 14v DC charger as they are a bit brutal and am in
the process of completing a kinder overnight charger.

With this battery the Clansman is now not such a back

breaker when backpacking. Original battery weight
3.3Kg, refurbished battery 1.1Kg. Also you certainly
can’t beat the economics of the situation. Two days ago
I had a dead battery and now I have a very light working
one for less than £20! Difficult to argue with that..

G4WLI Oct 2013