The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Repairs

If it used to work, it can work again

Bafang Battery Charge Port: Shell Drills

Continuing to mull the problem of removing a brass nugget fused to the center pin of the Bafang battery’s charge port without the risk of causing further damage suggested a shell drill fitting over the pin and guided by an insulating bushing:

Bafang battery – shell drill test fit

That’s our undamaged battery, now sporting labels inspired by my friend’s mishap.

The first pass was a 3 mm (actually, 1/8 inch) brass tube rammed into a printed handle descending from the Sherline Tommy Bar handles:

Bafang battery – brass shell grinder – grit load

The black stuff is coarse grinding compound held on by a dot of oil, with a pair of notches filed into the tip for a little griptivity.

This worked surprisingly well, at least if you weren’t in much of a hurry, although the grinding compound also erodes the drill:

Bafang battery – brass shell grinder – tip wear

I hadn’t thought this through enough to realize there’s no good way to convince the grit to not work its way up into the acetal bushing and jam the rod. While this might be good for final polishing, it’s not going to work well against the nugget, so it’s time for a harder drill with real teeth.

Drilling a 2.3 mm hole into the end of some non-hardened 3 mm (for real!) ground rod provided enough clearance for the charge port pin and a pair of cross-drilled holes laid the groundwork for a shell drill:

Bafang battery – steel shell drill – raw holes

I filed the end off down to leave about 3/4 of the holes, then applied a Swiss pattern file with a safe edge to cut some relief behind the tips:

Bafang battery – shell drill detail

It would be better to harden the end of the rod, but this is a single-use tool.

Ram the shank into another printed handle:

Bafang battery – shell drill – guide

The new drill is long enough to reach past the wounded end of the pin and short enough to not bottom out inside the connector.

A few minutes of twirling and re-filing the tiny teeth improved the cut enough to produce a convincing result in the simulated connector:

Bafang battery – shell drill – test results

I’m reasonably sure the ID of the acetal bushing won’t fit over the nugget, but that’s easy enough to drill out while leaving an insulating shell.

The charge port’s center pin probably can’t withstand too much torque, so the drill must take small cuts.

Vacuuming out the chips while cutting will be critical, as you don’t want an accumulation of conductive chaff down in the hole!

2021-12-16
Bafang Battery Charge Port: Mechanical Simulator

Rather than poke things into the undamaged charge port of our battery, I built a quick-and-dirty mechanical duplicate:

Bafang battery – charge port simulator

The “center pin” is a snippet of what’s almost certainly 5/64 inch brass tube measuring Close Enough™ to 2.1 mm, with a few millimeters of 3/32 inch tube soldered on the end to simulate the nugget.

The aluminum rod has a 5.5 mm hole matching the coaxial jack’s diameter and depth, with a smaller through hole for the “pin” and a dab of Loctite bushing adhesive.

Then I turned the end of a 3/8 inch acetal rod down to a 5.5 mm bushing that completely fills the jack:

Bafang battery – guide bushing – dummy jack

It has a 3 mm hole down the middle to aim homebrew shell drills directly at the pin, while preventing a short to the side contact.

The first test looked encouraging:

Bafang battery – shell drill – test results

The nugget in the damaged jack is definitely larger than my soldered brass tube, but this was in the nature of exploratory tinkering while mulling the problem.

2021-12-15
Bafang Battery Charge Port: Internal Wiring

Short-circuiting the Bafang battery’s charge port may have done anything from completely destroying the battery management circuit to just welding a brass nugget onto the port’s center pin. The main output to the bike motor remained functional, so my friend used it on rides over the next few days to reduce the charge level.

Meanwhile, I peeked inside the undamaged battery on Mary’s bike:

Bafang battery interior – overview

The battery pack is neatly shrink-wrapped and firmly glued into the plastic shell, with the battery management PCB on the other side of the battery. Some gentle prying suggests it will be difficult to disengage the adhesive, so getting the pack out will likely require cutting the blue wrap, extricating the cells as an unbound set, then cutting the blue wrap to release the wires.

A closer look at the nose of the battery:

Bafang battery interior – front

The large red wire entering on the left comes from the motor connector, loops around the nose of the battery, and probably connects to the battery’s most positive terminal or, perhaps, to the corresponding BMS terminal.

The medium black wire from the side contact of the coaxial jack (atop the pair of red wires) burrows under the battery and likely connects to the most negative battery terminal. This is the charger plug’s outer terminal.

The small red wire from the center contact of the coaxial jack (between the medium black and red wires) goes to the charge indicator PCB in the nose of the battery. This is basically a push-to-test voltmeter with four LEDs indicating the charge state from about 40 V through 54 V. The small black wire from that PCB burrows under the battery on its way to the BMS.

The medium red wire from the center contact goes to the BMS.

There is no way to determine how much damage the short might have done, although the silicone-insulated wires should have survived momentary heating, unlike cheap PVC insulation that slags down at the slightest provocation.

Removing and replacing the coaxial jack requires Cutting Three Wires then rejoining them, a process fraught with peril. You must already have a profound respect for high voltages, high currents, and high power wiring; this is no place for on-the-job learning and definitely not where you can move fast and break things.

With this in mind, the only hope is to remove the nugget and see if the battery charges properly.

The trick will be to do this without any possibility of shorting a metallic tool between the center pin and the side contact.

2021-12-14
Bafang Battery Charge Port: Whoopsie
The Bafang mid-drive e-bike kits I installed on Mary’s Tour Easy recumbent and a friend’s Terry Symmetry used the “Ultra-Slim Shark” lithium battery, a rectangular lump with a tapered snout:

Bafang BBS02 – Terry Symmetry full assembly

The battery has a key lock on its left side:

Bafang battery – lock

The lock might deter casual thievery, but really prevents the battery from bouncing out of its mounting plate while riding.

The right side has a charge port closed with a rubber plug:

Bafang battery – charge port – closed

The cover protects a coaxial jack with a 5.5 mm OD and a 2.1 mm center pin:

Bafang battery – charge port

My friend in Raleigh generally removes the battery before hoisting the bike into the back of her car to haul it to a friend’s house for their companionable rides: not lifting an additional seven pounds is a Good Idea™.

A momentary distraction in the middle of that process caused her to insert the brass key into the charging port, rather than the lock. The key put a very short circuit between the coaxial jack’s side contact and the center pin, melting the key tip and welding a brass nugget onto the side of the pin:

Bafang battery – damaged charge port

The charger plug normally sits almost flush to the port’s surface:

Bafang battery – charge plug

The nugget keeps the plug out the damaged port, preventing the plug from making electrical contact:

Bafang battery – damaged port – plug

She owned the problem and immediately bought another battery, which tells you the value she places on riding her e-bike.

Verily it is written: let someone who is without whoopsie cast the first shade.

Any takers? Yeah, the way I see it, someone who says they’ve never done anything quite like that is either not doing anything or not telling the complete truth. For sure, I’ve done plenty of inadvertent damage!

Here’s the problem:
- The damaged battery is the better part of 600 miles away from my shop
- Civilians cannot ship 560 W·hr lithium batteries through any parcel delivery service
- Civilians cannot fly or take the train with such a battery, either
- Driving 1200 miles twice is out of the question for either of us
How would you proceed?

More to come …

For reference:
- USPS – Hazardous Material Info – section 349.222
- UPS – Lithium Battery Pack & Ship – PDF page 9
- FedEx – How to Ship Batteries – PDF page 3
Basically, it is possible to ship lithium batteries up to 100 W·h.
2021-12-13
Dirt Devil Vacuum: Stuck Adapter

My tool adapters for the Dirt Devil stick vacuum cleaner worked fine when inserted into the power unit, but got stuck in the floor brush extension tube:

Dirt Devil Floor Tube – stuck adapter

The adapter rotated freely inside the socket, so its diameter was correct and it wasn’t jammed, but pushing the latch button (at the depression on the right) didn’t release the adapter.

Popping the latch out of the tube let the adapter slide easily out of the socket and exposed the innards:

Dirt Devil Floor Tube – latch internals

The two bosses inside the latch originally captured a nice conical spring:

Dirt Devil Floor Tube – conical latch spring

The tab on the left side of the latch button engages a slot in the OEM brush head and the recessed ring around my adapters:

Dirt Devil Nozzle Bushing – solid model

It turns out the molded tab was slightly too long, so pushing the latch button all the way down didn’t retract the tab out of the bore, so it remained engaged in the adapter’s ring.

The conical spring also didn’t seem to collapse completely flat, so the bosses inside the latch button couldn’t quite bottom out, leaving the tab protruding even further inside the bore. It also required an inordinate amount of force to push the latch all the way down.

While fiddling with all this, I noticed that the OEM floor brush would sometimes hang up on the tab, so the operation wasn’t all that smooth even with the original equipment.

So I trimmed maybe half a millimeter off the tab, just enough to release the adapter with the button fully pressed and without the conical spring, then replaced the conical spring with a tiny spring (from the Big Box o’ Random Springs) trimmed to allow the full range of travel. This not only released the adapter, it also let the OEM floor brush pop out more easily.

A zero-dollar repair, although with considerable annoyance.

2021-12-09
Incandescent Bulb Lifetime: Also Better Than Average

This bulb spent the last seven-plus years of its life lighting the front bathroom:

Dead incandescent bulb – 7 years

The green corrosion around the tip seems strange, given that we don’t use the tub or shower in that bathroom, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the cause of the failure.

My stock of incandescent bulbs will eventually run out; I must figure out how to light the deaders in an attractive manner.

2021-11-30
CFL Lifetime: Better Than Average

Although compact fluorescent lamps have fallen out of favor, I’m burning through a box of the things donated by a friend who upgraded to LEDs and figured I could put them to good use. In general, complex electronic doodads (like CFL or even LED lamps) used in hostile situations (like an ordinary downlight fixture) seem to fail too quickly to justify the power savings; searching for “cfl fail” will produce some evidence from around here.

One of the downlights in the Basement Office just killed this specimen:

Dead CFL – detail

Much to my surprise, however, it survived for more than five years:

Dead CFL – over 5 years

The previous CFL bulb in that fixture lasted only two years, so their average lifetime is entirely too short.

A taller bulb does a better job of lighting up that corner, although it started with enough power-on hours to suggest it won’t survive for another five years:

Dead CFL – replacement

The ghostly humps above the overexposed glare are the long CFL tubes reflected inside the Pixel’s camera optics.

I didn’t see much point in nailing a ceiling to too-low floor joists.

2021-11-18